Fox Host Finally Admits It: ‘Woke’ Is Whatever You Want It to Be

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https://www.yahoo.com/news/fox-host-finally-admits-woke-025933750.html
Fox Host Finally Admits It: ‘Woke’ Is Whatever You Want It to Be
William Vaillancourt
Mon, March 20, 2023 at 10:59 PM EDT·1 min read

What it means to be “woke” is in the eye of the right-wing beholder, Fox News host Dana Perino admitted Monday, just one week after a conservative author’s struggle to define the term on live TV went viral.

Perino was reacting to commentary from MSNBC host Jen Psaki on Sunday in which the former Biden White House press secretary said that the term — which conservatives on Fox News have hurled at topics as disparate as Xbox and Legos — is “simply not the boogeyman [Republicans] would have you believe.”

 

[RayGravesGhost]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/meaning-woke-gop-driving-politics-100015817.html
What is the meaning of 'woke'? Once a term used by Black Americans, it's now a rallying cry for GOP

But Black Americans have used the term "woke" since at least the early-to-mid 20th century to mean being alert to racial and social injustice.

A version of the term was first used by Pan-African activist Marcus Garvey as early as 1923. It was later popularized by Blues artists such as Lead Belly, who used it when singing about the Scottsboro Boys, a group of nine Black teenagers who were falsely accused of raping two white women on a train in northeast Alabama in 1931.

As the Black Lives Matter movement began after the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, "woke" expanded outside of Black communities into the larger public lexicon.

Black artists and entertainers continued to insert the phrase in their music, including Grammy-award-winning artists Erykah Badu and Childish Gambino — a.k.a. Donald Glover—for political causes.

Yet "woke" has now been hijacked by the political right to mean something far from its original definition.

"The reason we have to 'stay woke' is because of exactly what these people are doing right now, which is finding very insidious ways to undercut our rights," said Terri Givens, a political science professor at McGill University.

Givens called the attacks on the term "a full-on dog whistle" and pointed to attempts to limit the right to vote, curtail reproductive and abortion rights and ban inclusive education in schools as examples of the backlash against Black and brown civil rights.

"Learning history is not about woke-ism," Given said.

The 'woke' backlash​

Political experts said the backlash to woke-ism greatly increased after the 2020 worldwide protests against the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor's killing.

Conservatives now use the term as a political retort to combat what they perceive as political correctness gone haywire.

But progressive commentators note that the response also comes in the context of a changing America, which is becoming more diverse racially and ethically and along sexual orientation and gender identity lines.

"What they're trying to do is make the term a pejorative," said Kendra Cotton, chief operating officer of New Georgia Project, a progressive-leaning voting rights group.

As more marginalized groups are elected into office and exercising their voting power during elections, it can make some Americans afraid, said Cotton.