What Does "Woke" Really Mean?

What does “woke” really mean? The Oxford dictionary defines it as being “alert to injustice in society, especially racism”.

Doesn’t being woke just mean being kind? If being 'woke' can make us more sensitive to the plight of others who are different from ourselves, then surely it can be good. Yet woke culture harms our society instead. Let's look at some ways in which wokeness has been unhelpful.

Cancel culture is one of the biggest outgrowths of wokeness. If you say anything that could be remotely construed as racist or sexist, including basic, colloquial expressions someone may construe as racist, you could be “cancelled”.

Another way to be “woke” is to say things like “defund the police” or “cops are racist." However, those who echo these slogans often forget to consider who they hurt: low-income, honest and hard-working people of color who live in high crime neighborhoods. Defunding the police harms the very groups they claim to be vouching for. 

How about the “woke” idea of letting black criminals serve minimal sentences because there are “too many black people in prison"? A friend of mine, who is a black cop, spends his time finding and arresting those guilty of assault and other serious crimes. With policies that reflect this woke mindset, his community suffers. The people he has worked so hard to take off of the street are let out of jail in extremely short periods of time to recommit the same crimes. Wokeness has little to say about the law abiding citizens living in the neighborhoods where these crimes will be committed time and time again. 

It is also “woke” to say that the United States is, always has been, and always will be a racist nation. In fact it is now “woke” to be “anti-racist” which actually means being racist against white people. It is okay to discriminate against white people today because there is a chance their ancestors discriminated against black people 200 years ago. 

Today, it is once again okay to treat people differently based on something as superficial as the color of their skin. Everything that Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement stood for is being turned on its head under the cloak of “wokeness”.

So I conclude that, no, being woke does not just mean treating others with kindness or being sensitive to struggles that individuals face. Far too many times it means the exact opposite– being unkind to people who do not fall into the preferred minority group or who do not reinforce the correct dogma.

I am concerned that much of what is labeled as woke is actually just racism. Through the influence of Black Lives Matter (which is an openly Marxist organization), Critical Race Theory, “anti-racism”, and calls for supposed “equity” our government is institutionalizing this new form of racism.

What can we do to stop this? We need to reign in our out-of-control federal government which is pushing this racist agenda. How can we do this? By calling for an Article V Convention of States as described in the U.S. Constitution. We need to limit the spending and power of the federal government and impose term limits on elected officials and bureaucrats in Washington D.C. Otherwise, the “woke” racist and Marxist agenda will continue unabated. Please join us by signing the Convention of States petition at conventionofstates.com.