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How "Woke" Went From "Black" to "Bad"
https://www.naacpldf.org/woke-black-bad/. . .
But don’t just take our word for it. Ask yourself: What exactly is “the woke?” Where did “woke” come from? And how did it become apparently worthy of gag orders instituted by politicians and administered with the might of the government? When did it transform from its roots in Black American vernacular to a supposedly all-encompassing, terrifying force emblazoned across increasingly fear-mongering headlines in the United States and even now in parts of Europe?
Put simpler: How did woke go from meaning “Black” to “Bad?”
“To be woke is to be Black,” is how Okayplayer Senior News and Culture Reporter Elijah Watson defined the Black American colloquialism, now broadly used derisively, when he embarked on a journey in 2017 to plot its origins. Ironically, his research first turned up a 1962 New York Times essay, “If You’re Woke You Dig It,” by the then Harlem-based writer William Melvin Kelley, who was highlighting the phenomenon of Black American slang being appropriated by white people who often missed or altogether distorted the words’ original meanings, until the idioms were taken over, inevitably transformed, and ultimately abandoned by their original Black creators.
Kelley was “prophetic,” Watson tells LDF in a recent conversation. We are six decades and several cultural lifetimes past when Kelley’s essay was published, and as we discuss what’s been done to woke in the 21st century, it’s hard to disagree.
“The language seems to be modified in two ways,” Kelley wrote in the ‘60s. “The first is to give a word, already in use, its opposite meaning. At one time, the connotations of ‘jive’ were all good; now they are bad, or at least questionable.”
But don’t just take our word for it. Ask yourself: What exactly is “the woke?” Where did “woke” come from? And how did it become apparently worthy of gag orders instituted by politicians and administered with the might of the government? When did it transform from its roots in Black American vernacular to a supposedly all-encompassing, terrifying force emblazoned across increasingly fear-mongering headlines in the United States and even now in parts of Europe?
Put simpler: How did woke go from meaning “Black” to “Bad?”
“To be woke is to be Black,” is how Okayplayer Senior News and Culture Reporter Elijah Watson defined the Black American colloquialism, now broadly used derisively, when he embarked on a journey in 2017 to plot its origins. Ironically, his research first turned up a 1962 New York Times essay, “If You’re Woke You Dig It,” by the then Harlem-based writer William Melvin Kelley, who was highlighting the phenomenon of Black American slang being appropriated by white people who often missed or altogether distorted the words’ original meanings, until the idioms were taken over, inevitably transformed, and ultimately abandoned by their original Black creators.
Kelley was “prophetic,” Watson tells LDF in a recent conversation. We are six decades and several cultural lifetimes past when Kelley’s essay was published, and as we discuss what’s been done to woke in the 21st century, it’s hard to disagree.
“The language seems to be modified in two ways,” Kelley wrote in the ‘60s. “The first is to give a word, already in use, its opposite meaning. At one time, the connotations of ‘jive’ were all good; now they are bad, or at least questionable.”
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