Taking back words: Woke

It is very often important to use correct words in arguing/debating with political opponents. However, it is also very important to protect the words we do use from co-optation by our opponents who would attempt to render them meaningless.

Take the word, Woke, as an example. Woke, in its terminology, when used by Black activists was used as a shorthand for knowing about Institutionalized Racism. That government service agencies were often built with anti-Blackness right into their foundation. That someone was woke meant they knew things were wrong at a foundational level for Black people and other minorities.

Extreme right-wingers though have been working to co-opt this term, wanting to render it meaningless, using it to describe some "woke" army of people who'd tear apart the whole of society with "wokeness" to appease some special interest groups that are themselves anti-society. To be honest, it is laughable how far these extremists are going to use this form of the term to neuter its meaning and effectiveness as they have begun using it to describe government agency's policies, as though somehow these government agencies, which are often founded with institutional racism in their very core can somehow be woke. This is literally impossible: a contradiction. If government agencies could be aware of their own racialized policies, they could then excise these policies by replacing them with equitable policy immediately.

However, it not just extremist right-wingers misusing this term. Liberals have also worked to co-opt the term but instead for themselves, draping themselves in it to appear equitable, as though they themselves have never contributed to social welfare defunding, sky-high rents and housing prices, skyrocketing student loan debts, skyrocketing medical debts, red lining, police militarization, overcrowded prisons that have transformed into slave factories, and so on. Liberals have often contributed to these problems by often pushing through the laws, rules, regulations, and policies that have intensified these problems such as via the 1994 prison bill back by the current president Joe Biden.