Are we really debating the meaning of 'woke'? What a waste of time

“In that song, ‘Master Teacher,’ the chorus is: ‘I stay woke,’ ” Erykah Badu, speaking on MSNBC last week.

This is one of those times that I want to stand on a table and scream that we’re all focused on the wrong thing.

There’s a debate raging over the origin and definition of the term “woke” – as if we don’t have anything better to worry about.

We’re talking about a slang term that’s intentionally improperly conjugated and used by liberals and conservatives alike to define their positions in the never-ending culture wars.

This is dumb; we’ve got to do better.

Prominent critic can't define 'woke'

The hubbub kicked up a couple of weeks ago when conservative author Bethany S. Mandel froze like water in an ice tray after an interviewer asked her to define the term.

Interviewer: “Would you mind defining ‘woke’? Because it’s come up a couple of times, and just I want to make sure we’re on the same page.”

Mandel: *GULP* … well, errr, ummm …

I wish I was exaggerating.

Her actual response was: “So, I mean, woke is sort of the idea that (long, uncomfortable pause) This is going to be one of those moments that goes viral. I mean, ‘woke’ is something that’s very hard to define, and we’ve spent an entire chapter defining it. It is sort of the understanding that we need to totally reimagine and redo society in order to create hierarchies of oppression. (Another uncomfortable pause.) Sorry, it’s hard to explain in a 15-second sound bite.”

The social media landscape had a seizure so intense that Elon Musk decided to let everyone keep their Twitter verification checks for free.

Mandel's response still doesn't define it

For whatever it’s worth, live interviews are tricky, and I hate them, but if I wrote a book in which I dedicated a chapter to defining a term, I would at least read that chapter before bragging about it.

Mandel, who writes for Deseret News, then put together a defense essay for Newsweek that started with this: “It’s a delicate balancing act, promoting a book with six kids at home full-time.”

In the next sentence, she describes the premise of her book as how she believes “woke ideology is upending American childhood.”

So, yeah. She just blew it like a snotty nose during allergy season. (And she never did define the term in the explanation piece.)

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Now, there’s a scramble across the mainstream media landscape to get linguistics experts and political analysts and anyone else with an opinion and a platform to discuss a word – not the problems that led to the need for such an expression or potential solutions to those problems – but the word, itself.

'Woke' simply means to pay attention

You see what’s happening here? You would if you were “woke.”

Let’s see whether I can settle this.

“Woke” is a colloquial, informal and familiar present-tense of the verb “awake.”

It’s a common person’s way of saying “I’m up, and I see what’s going on,” and it was popularized in Black culture by R&B artists Erykah Badu and Donald “Childish Gambino” Glover.

In the context of political discourse, it’s a simple warning to stay on top of political, social and cultural developments that can have massive negative effects.

For example: “Yo! Pay attention! They want you to see there’s a new shopping center coming to the neighborhood, but what’s that doing to property values in the area? And do you think the company that opened the location has any Black people on its board of directors? You better stay woke.”

There is more to focus on than this word

Frankly, I can’t stand it.

When I hear educated people use this term, I get the feeling that they’re making fun of disenfranchised people who aren’t using an affectation when they make nonstandard grammatical decisions.

Either that or it feels like elites are linguistically slumming it to gain support they haven’t earned.

Aside from that, we have entirely too many other things to focus on, and some of them are even good.

Like, I want to stand on a table and scream about the new moon mission and how NASA has selected a Black pilot as one of the four astronauts for the flight. But we’re talking about this, instead.

Anyway, yo, pay attention. They want to keep you divided, but there’s real progress being made.

Stay woke.

Reach Moore at gmoore@azcentral.com or 602-444-2236. Follow him on Instagram and Twitter @SayingMoore.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: What does 'woke' mean? It's a waste of time to debate the word