Jay Ambrose’s last column (“Harm real from woke overreach,” The Columbian, March 23) means he has joined an exclusive club. The “Racial Ignorance Club” has many illustrious members — in Congress, media propagandists, authoritarian governors and other political partisans.
These members have borrowed a Black culture word from the 1960s and, without bothering to check their dictionary, have misused this word for “sound bites” to make political points. This creates profit for themselves or their media companies, or to fund their political ambitions/campaigns.
The word “woke” is about the awareness of injustice in our society. Mr. Ambrose failed to convince us of the harm it does by telling a story about Disney — a discontinued ride, a movie and song/lyrics from 1946 — and even made a gruesome comparison to cutting off Mickey Mouse’s ears. In political points he gets a zero, the exact score needed to get him into the club.
I would offer a different story from 1946. It’s about a soldier who came home from the war and was beaten, blinded and imprisoned. The song lyrics to “The Blinding of Isaac Woodard” are too long to include here. Does Mr. Ambrose believe that justice, a cornerstone of our nation’s Constitution, is no longer important to Americans?
