--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram, and I'm standing outside the White House because a lot of people who are running to live in this house in 2024 are obsessed with the word woke.
--:-- [Sound of wind in the background]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So I thought I'd come out here and ask people what exactly that word means.
--:-- [Sound of people passing by]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Being awake? Yeah, woke means like you wake up. Or maybe somebody wants to be attentive. Then you want to convey that message to woke up, buddy. People who are willing to recognize and convey the essential dignity of every human being. To signify like an awareness of racial issues, especially for black Americans. Someone who can see through the facade of others.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's ironic. The people who are woke are the ones who are actually asleep. You've bought into an agenda that's being pushed by liberal extreme leftism. It's all bullshit. It's all bullshit.
--:-- [Sound of people passing by]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Coming up on Today Explained, what woke means to just about everybody.
--:-- [Sound of theme music fading back in]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for Today Explained comes from Saks Fifth Avenue. Fall is here. Might be time to find some nice new pieces you can wear again and again. With Saks Fifth Avenue, it can be a breeze to shop for your personal style.
--:-- [Sound of announcer speaking]
--:-- Announcer: Like maybe a relaxed Prada blazer or Gucci loafers that are great for both work and the weekend. This is very Sean. This is very Sean-coded. Gucci loafers.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Saks says Saks makes shopping feel totally customized to you. Whether that's from an in-store stylist or a visit to Saks.com, where they can show you just what you want to see. They say they'll even let you know when arrivals from your favorite designers are in or when something you've been eyeing is back in stock.
--:-- [Sound of announcer speaking]
--:-- Announcer: You can find inspiration for your personal style every day at Saks Fifth Avenue.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Having a night out with your friends is awesome. Dealing with hangovers sucks. Meet Senorita, the THC-infused margarita that lets you skip the booze but keep the vibe.
--:-- [Sound of announcer speaking]
--:-- Announcer: Made with real fruit, organic agave, and Himalayan pink salt, every sip is like a mini getaway. No fillers, no hangovers, just full flavor and a better buzz.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Find your flavor at senoritadrinks.com. Use code VOX20 for 20% off. Must be 21 and over. This product may cause intoxication. This product has not been evaluated or approved by the FDA. This product may contain up to 0.3% THC.
--:-- [Sound of theme music fading back in]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Explained. 2024 Explained. When we want to talk to someone about the outsized presence the word woke has in the 2024 Republican primary, we thought of Ested Herndon. He's the host of the Run-Up podcast at The New York Times.
--:-- Ested Herndon: So you've surely noticed that instead of running against Joe Biden, it seems like a lot of Republicans are running against the word woke and the idea of wokeness.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Absolutely. I mean, ever since Biden came into office, they've been trying to find a thing to stick to him. You know, he's not a figure that was as personally enraging as, you know, Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, the villains they had in the past.
--:-- Ested Herndon: And the Republican kind of ideological core has been to really find a way to invalidate the other side in that kind of villainous manner. And so I think you have Republicans searching for what that's going to be in the Joe Biden Democratic Party. And wokeness has become the kind of catch-all term to embody some of that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We hear it over and over on the campaign trail. Wokeness is a virus more dangerous than any pandemic hands down.
--:-- Ested Herndon: Beyond all of those failed policies, maybe one of the most troubling developments of the past two years has been the Biden administration's wholehearted embrace of the woke left's all-encompassing assault on culture and values.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We are going to leave woke ideology in the dustbin of history where it belongs.
--:-- Ested Herndon: It makes it really clear that for the next year and a half, it may not be a campaign against the White House, its policies, or the like, but just the idea that the White House represents a larger progressive ecosystem that is encroaching on the kind of cultural values of everyday Americans.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's the most generous understanding of what this term has come to mean, but it's basically meant everything Republicans don't like.
--:-- Ested Herndon: And I definitely know that Ron DeSantis is like the king of anti-wokeness. He says Florida is where woke goes to die, but it's not just him. It's Nikki Haley. It's Vivek on this show, actually. They're blowing woke smoke to deflect accountability from the questions that they would rather not answer to their customers or to their shareholders or the people who would actually scrutinize those businesses in other ways.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, on our podcast, we talked to Nate Cohn, the Times chief polling expert, who tells us that when you look at the issues across the Republican base, there are very few that cut across each kind of sector. And one of them is this anti-wokeness.
--:-- Ested Herndon: The Manhattan finance person who is a conservative and the evangelical in the South who's a conservative are both angry at this same kind of progressive push as they see it. And so I think that we can name this.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think a lot of this came after 2020, where I think there has been a backlash to what was a rising rhetoric of social justice and racial equity.
--:-- Ested Herndon: And I think they've really capitalized on that feeling that that push that went too far, in quotations.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Does it differ amongst the other candidates who are running for the 2024 Republican nomination, or is it all sort of this DeSantis vein?
--:-- Ested Herndon: It definitely differs. There's candidates like Vivek Ramaswamy, who's made a surprising push in the Republican nomination, going from kind of an unknown to maybe one of the lower tier candidates, mid-tier candidates.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He's really pushed himself as a CEO who represents a push back against kind of wokeness in corporate culture.
--:-- Ested Herndon: When we were at CPAC, this was the overwhelming topic of discussion. Woke culture attacks our values and faith. We'll stay true. Leaders who are driven by cowardly wokeness.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There is a union between big tech, government, big corporate, woke ESG America to silence dissenting views
--:-- Ested Herndon: And they all together in this regime that has really operated in opposition to the American people
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Every diversity equity and inclusion program every ESG rule every woke initiative in our military must be uprooted and completely defunded.
--:-- Ested Herndon: You had people like Nikki Haley there, whose kind of famous moment was taking down the Confederate flag in South Carolina, that would probably be labeled as a semi-woke action today.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That shows you where the energy is on the Republican side right now. It's not to really pitch yourself as someone who is some racial uniter or like cultural midpoint of the left and the right. It's really to push yourself as a champion of bringing what they view as American culture back to their side.
--:-- Ested Herndon: The interesting thing here is that actually Donald Trump is probably the candidate that talks about wokeness the least. He even said that he's sick of it and the words getting overused. He doesn't know what it means anymore.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I don't like the term woke because I hear woke, woke, woke. You know, it's like just a term that used half the people can't even define it. They don't know what it is.
--:-- Ested Herndon: It's a kind of classic Trump honesty moment when he says the thing out loud.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, wokeness is an articulation of Republican grievance that has built up over a long time, but they're using this word as a kind of vague catch-all in this moment.
--:-- Ested Herndon: Donald Trump has no problem naming the grievances that he has. What I think he is doing in terms of acknowledging the kind of vagueness of his opponents is saying that they're tiptoeing around grievances that he's willing to name, that he and his supporters are willing to call out directly.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I think they think that's what's going to win them at the end of the day. It's not to engage in this kind of elite back and forth about the meaning of wokeness, but actually to embody the frustration of the base conservative voter.
--:-- Ested Herndon: Is this motivating and activating voters on the right? I mean, it depends on what voters we're talking about.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If we're looking for the evidence we have as of now, it's not that this has really helped them win. I mean, Republicans were talking a whole bunch about wokeness in the last midterms, and that was one that went really poorly for them, at least relative to their expectations.
--:-- Ested Herndon: We have seen it become a motivating factor, going back to when Nate told me, among the Republican electorate.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So if you're thinking about the primary and the period that we're in now, it makes a lot of sense for them to be talking about this.
--:-- Ested Herndon: The problem is there's no evidence that there's really a mass motivating issue in the general election.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: For as much as they've targeted in the non-presidential level, I'm thinking about states with gerrymandered state legislatures. I'm thinking about Nebraska or Wisconsin or things like that. It's really caused those folks to push anti-trans bills on the state level and really to legislate anti-wokeness into law.
--:-- Ested Herndon: So it's having an impact. But if the question is, is it working on a national level or does it help the Republican nominee win the next presidential election, that is very much unclear.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Do you think, like the former president himself, Republican voters might eventually get tired of hearing about wokeness as the boogeyman?
--:-- Ested Herndon: Totally. I think they could.
--:-- [Sound of theme music fading back in]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today Explained is brought to you by Chime. Nobody likes fees and complicated banking, says Chime. And Chime gets that, says Chime.
--:-- Ested Herndon: Chime is a financial technology company that says they understand that every dollar counts. So when you set up direct deposit through Chime, they say you get access to fee-free features such as free overdraft coverage, getting paid up to two days early with direct deposit, so much more.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Chime says with qualifying direct deposits, you can be eligible for free overdraft up to $200 on debit card purchases and cash withdrawals. Plus, they say you don't need to worry about monthly fees or maintenance fees.
--:-- Ested Herndon: You can work on your financial goals through Chime today. You can open an account in two minutes at Chime.com slash explained. That's Chime.com slash explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And Chime feels like progress. Chime is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services and debit card provided by the Bancor Bank NA or Stride Bank NA. Members FDIC.
--:-- Ested Herndon: Spot me eligibility requirements and overdraft limits apply. Timing depends on submission of payment file. Fees apply at out-of-network ATMs. Bank ranking and number of ATMs according to U.S. News and World Report 2023. Chime checking account required.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Each Apple product, like the iPhone, is thoughtfully designed by skilled designers.
--:-- Ested Herndon: The titanium Apple Card is no different. It laser etched has no numbers and it earns you daily cash on everything you buy including 3 back on everything at Apple
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Apply for Apple Card on your iPhone in minutes. Subject to credit approval. Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City Branch. Terms and more at applecard.com.
--:-- [Sound of theme music fading back in]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The definition of woke according to Merriam-Webster. Woke. Aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues, especially issues of racial and social justice.
--:-- Ested Herndon: Woke. Politically liberal, as in matters of racial and social justice, especially in a way that is considered unreasonable or extreme.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today Explained is back. Woke clearly means a lot of things to a lot of people. To bring some clarity on the etymology of this word, though, we reached out to Kathleen Newman-Bremang, who wrote about woke for Refinery29.
--:-- Kathleen Newman-Bremang: Most historians trace it back to Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey. I'm the founder and first president general of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League, an organization determined to unite all the Black people of the world into one great body to establish a country and government absolutely their own.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In his work in 1923, when he told his followers to wake up Ethiopia, wake up Africa, it was a sentiment aimed to inspire political consciousness and social activism in the wake of colonialism.
--:-- Kathleen Newman-Bremang: Yes. Amazing. Yeah. And then it takes us to 1938 in a protest song by Huddy Ledbetter, a.k.a. Lead Belly. Which included the actual phrase, stay woke.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it's in a spoken word component to the song Scottsboro Boys. And it references the story of nine black boys and men who were falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama in 1931.
--:-- Kathleen Newman-Bremang: So I advise everybody to be a little careful when they go along through that, but stay woke, keep their eyes open.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What is said to be the first official printed definition was published by the New York Times in 1962 by William Melville Kelly.
--:-- Kathleen Newman-Bremang: And he mentions the word in this piece called, if you're woke, you dig it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And in the piece, he's going through the slang terms that the Negro community, as he calls it, uses in Harlem, for example. And the essay talks about Black slang and its evolution and its appropriation by white people, fittingly.
--:-- Kathleen Newman-Bremang: By 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. essentially gave a speech on wokeness at Oberlin College.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In the speech, he said, the great challenge facing every individual graduating today is to remain awake through this social revolution.
--:-- Kathleen Newman-Bremang: We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools. We must see this and believe this and live by it. If we are to remain awake through a great revolution.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How do we go from this historic use of awake to this sort of contemporary use of woke? When exactly does that evolution happen?
--:-- Kathleen Newman-Bremang: It kind of goes away. It exists in academia. But outside of that, it starts to become more prevalent in pop culture in 2008 when Erykah Badu releases her song Master Teacher, which includes the refrain, I stay woke.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that term was included in the song by Georgia Ann Muldrow, who co-wrote the song.
--:-- Kathleen Newman-Bremang: And in an interview to OK Player, she describes what she told Erykah Badu about the word woke.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I really think this kind of encapsulates what the original meaning is and how it kind of is used in culture by Black folks.
--:-- Kathleen Newman-Bremang: So she said woke is if someone put a burlap sack on your head, knocked you out and put you in a new location. And then you come to and understand where you are ain't home and the people around you ain't your neighbors.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They're not acting in a neighborly fashion. They're the ones who conked you on your head. You got kidnapped here, and then you got punked out of your own language, everything.
--:-- Kathleen Newman-Bremang: That's woke, understanding what your ancestors went through.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Wow. Wow. Why isn't that in Merriam-Webster? Merriam-Webster, take note. That is a definition. Right?
--:-- Kathleen Newman-Bremang: So that song, you know, really struck a chord. And then we started to see woke pop up more in music and TV.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Childish Gambino releases Redbone. The TV series Woke comes out on Hulu about a Black cartoonist having an awakening after experiencing police violence.
--:-- Kathleen Newman-Bremang: And I think, you know, around the 2010s leading to 2020, it's used to capture an idea of questioning power and of radical politics, but also it's being taken less seriously, I would say, in Black vernacular.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's also used as a joke.
--:-- Kathleen Newman-Bremang: So wait, so Erykah Badu and potentially Childish Gambino and this series on Hulu, they are sincerely using this term woke. But you're saying in black vernacular, it's a bit of a joke?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, it's a bit of both. So Childish Gambino is referencing like staying woke as far as getting cheated on in that song.
--:-- Kathleen Newman-Bremang: And that, I think, is something in Black vernacular people were saying, like, whoa, whoa, stay woke, stay woke, in reference to, like, making sure your eyes are wide open in your relationship.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In the Hulu show, Woke, they do kind of use it in a comedic sense at times to make fun of people who are always eager to point out all the issues within our society, who are kind of pretentious with their knowledge of social issues.
--:-- Kathleen Newman-Bremang: And there is a critique, I think, to be made of that kind of performative caricature of a woke person.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I first got woke when I seen Terminator, and I realized it wasn't just a movie. It was prophecy. First identified by the 3.5 percenters, but that's another conversation.
--:-- Dr. Hadassah Oleyinka: I'm Dr. Hadassah Oleyinka, Ali Yobin, pre-PhD.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Say good morning, children. Good morning. Good morning. Who's in mourning? See, see, see, the white man will have you speaking death into the top of your day, Try to kill your dreams just like they killed you, P.N.
--:-- Dr. Hadassah Oleyinka: But overall, I think it had a positive connotation, and it was something to strive for.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know the term woke bae was a way that you would describe men in Hollywood or in your life who were politically aware And it was seen as a positive thing in a partner
--:-- Dr. Hadassah Oleyinka: We're going to celebrate a famous dude for being super hot, super smart, and affecting positive change in the world. Hence the name, Woke Bay. It was a trait that you wanted to look for, like somebody who was woke.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then what happens between it being used in Black vernacular as something of a joke and it becoming a political cudgel?
--:-- Kathleen Newman-Bremang: In 2020, after George Floyd's murder, where there was this open conversation about race in a way that I hadn't seen in my lifetime.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I think that the white discomfort that came from that summer is when the word woke was twisted into a political tool and became the buzzword of the push against progressiveness that we see now.
--:-- Kathleen Newman-Bremang: That summer, white people were finally talking out loud about the ways in which structural racism shows up in our everyday lives.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I take responsibility for every unchecked moment. For every time it was easier to ignore than to call it out for what it was. Every not so funny joke. Every unfair stereotype. Every blatant injustice, no matter how big or small.
--:-- Kathleen Newman-Bremang: They were talking about privilege and unconscious bias and microaggressions and things that are real, but frankly make white people very uncomfortable, certain white people.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I think that that shift in culture and the fact that real change looked like it was slowly and incrementally on the way, I think that scared conservatives.
--:-- Kathleen Newman-Bremang: Taking the word woke, which signals progress, and demonizing it was a way of shutting down any progress and any attempts to push social activism and racial equality forward.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so you started hearing politicians refer to the woke mob. The elite media, the woke mob, they don't like these people. And they want the rest of America to dislike them too.
--:-- Kathleen Newman-Bremang: I think that the backlash to the Me Too movement comes into play here as well, because all of a sudden the worst thing you could possibly do was to get canceled.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Another word that comes from Black vernacular that has been twisted and co-opted.
--:-- Kathleen Newman-Bremang: And then the people doing the canceling, according to the right, was the woke mob. We fight the woke in the legislature. We fight the woke in the schools. We fight the woke in the corporations. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Florida is where woke goes to die.
--:-- Kathleen Newman-Bremang: There's polls that back this up, that people do not know what the word woke means.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think this was in USA Today, an Ipsis poll, and it was 56% of Americans said when they could define it, they defined it in the positive sense.
--:-- Kathleen Newman-Bremang: So when people can define it, which I don't think is often, they are not using it in the same really divisive way that I think it has been used now as a political tool to divide and to weaponize this cultural fear of progress.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I also think when you hear the term in regards to there being a Black actress playing the Little Mermaid. The Ariel that my girls and daughters grew up with is now gone because of these woke people over at their entertainment industry.
--:-- Kathleen Newman-Bremang: I just hope that Disney collapses and burns. What a woke, horrible company.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And you hear people saying, oh, I don't like that there are woke bandages now.
--:-- Kathleen Newman-Bremang: This was a tweet that went viral from a woman who was at her local drugstore, and there were different colors of Band-Aids, one of them being brown, and she called them woke bandages.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When you hear that, like, it's really hard to understand what they actually mean when they say the word woke, because in that case, I think it's just a stand-in for Black people or a stand-in for anything that's not white.
--:-- Kathleen Newman-Bremang: In that case, I think it—honestly, it's bent into a slur.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Do you think this is the final chapter of this word or do you think it finds a way to have significant meaning again after this particular experience as the thing that everyone hates?
--:-- Kathleen Newman-Bremang: I mean, it's hard because I think as soon as you see a white politician say any sort of slang word, we've lost it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Kiara M. Bridges, she's a professor of law at UC Berkeley, called it a double violation.
--:-- Kathleen Newman-Bremang: She said slang amongst Black people is a love language and that it's frustrating when that slang becomes appropriated and the meaning morphs into something else.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then what we do, though, is we always create and Black folks always find new language to describe our specific plight and what we're going through.
--:-- Kathleen Newman-Bremang: So I think that, you know, when it comes to whether I'm going to use it anymore, I think the only way I use woke is in this context, Sean. Like, it's in this context of being mad at how it's changed and talking about the frustration over how it's been co-opted.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But in my everyday life and in conversation, I don't really use it anymore.
--:-- Kathleen Newman-Bremang: And when I hear it, it's used in a context that is someone from the far right screaming at me for being too woke in my DMs or in my email.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And in that case, I take it as a compliment.
--:-- [Theme music fades back in]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thanks as well to Dr. Kelly Wright and Dr. Tracy Weldon, two linguists who helped us better understand this word.
--:-- [Sound of theme music fading back in]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Our show today was produced by Siona Petros. We were edited by Amina Alsadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and mixed by Patrick Boyd, who, in his spare time, sings about being woke.
--:-- [Sound of Patrick Boyd singing]
--:-- Patrick Boyd: Walk walk walk walk Jump truck You want cheese with that? That's woke, woke, woke, woke, woke Sacks and sandals? Now that's woke, woke, woke, woke, woke
