Though many are doing it, the anti-woke campaign has become most associated with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who clearly hopes it can be a vehicle he rides into the presidency.
“Florida is where woke goes to die,” DeSantis proclaimed in November as he celebrated his 1.5 million-vote reelection triumph.
It’s a term he uses against liberal or even mainstream policies with little restraint. DeSantis says his efforts to curb teaching about injustice and racial inequality in schools is an effort to rid them of “woke ideology.”
More recently, DeSantis has started to take his anti-woke crusade national, preparatory to announcing his presidential candidacy later this year.
But DeSantis is hardly the only GOP hopeful using the new conservative code word.
“The antidote to woke America is freedom,” former Vice President Mike Pence told an audience last year at the University of Virginia, declaring “wokeism is running amok in universities and schools.”
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a West Point graduate, said in an article for Fox News, “we must do everything we can to stop the spread of wokeness throughout our armed forces.”
Confusion about the use of the word “woke” is understandable, since it has been used by both advocates and critics of the “diversity, equality and inclusion” policies it’s designed to champion.
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines “woke” as being “aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice).”
In a 1938 song, African American singer Huddie Ledbetter (“Lead Belly”), in a song about the nine Black “Scottsboro Boys” accused of raping two white women, advised everyone “best stay woke, keep their eyes open.”
Over the past decade, however, opponents have given negative connotations to a word designed to illustrate the positive breadth of American diversity, often racial or sexual.
Targets include the Black Lives Matter movement, designed to spotlight police abuses mainly against Black Americans; critical race theory programs that explore the role of racism in American life; the more open discussion of issues of gender diversity; and even the impact of environmentalism on economic decision-making.
The anti-woke counterattack has been spurred to some extent by the aggressive advocacy of some of its more outspoken left-wing concepts like the “1619 Project” stressing slavery’s impact on American history and the aggressive inclusion in school curricula of sex education and awareness of racial inequities.
In a broader sense, its critics are signaling to the more conservative elements within the country’s shrinking white majority that they want to roll back the clock to an era where these issues were neither openly discussed nor accepted as valid influences.
