The Rembis Report and Other Fascinating Topics - Volume XLIV

The Woke Edition.

April 27, 2022

The Woke Edition.

Where do we begin to explore being Woke? Ask yourself, do I have it? Where do I get it? Do I need it? What exactly is it?

Is Mike Rembis even qualified to discuss it?

Hey! I heard that! The answer is - maybe.

If you are not sure of the answers to any of these questions, I promise, you are not alone. While on the surface it may seem simple, being woke has more layers of complexity than you may imagine.

Let's start with a bit of history. The earliest example of the concept has been traced to the Jamaican philosopher and activist Marcus Garvey, who in 1923, called on black people to "Wake up" to racial discrimination and become more socially and politically conscious. His legacy endured a long time, and his concept was adopted by many over the next century. Lots of people strove for equality, using their personal agency to make a difference in the world, and help others to also become woke. Where, when, and how often the term woke was being used is unclear.

The first person known to use woke in a sentence and define it was novelist William Melvin Kelley, who in 1962, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times entitled "If You're Woke, You Dig It." The article is an entertaining look at white people adopting Negro slang, particularly the beatnik subculture, who seemed to be attempting to mimic cool black jazz musicians, while failing in their style of dress. Cool black jazz cats vined sharp suits and ties and shined their shoes. Beatniks did quite the opposite, paving the way for the hippies of the 70's, the grunge of the 90's, and whoever dresses sloppily today.

The article subtitle, No mickey mouse can be expected to follow today's Negro idiom without a hip assist. If You're Woke You Dig It, can be confusing for anyone unfamiliar with this particular vernacular of the early 1960's. Translated to 2022-speak, this says Simple wannabes' must be forgiven for trying to speak like a black rapper when they do not understand the subtext of the slang. If you're woke, you dig it, remains self-explanatory.

Kelley explores the bounty of Negro slang and those who use it to identify with certain groups by offering examples of his observations in New York City and explaining the evolution of this language as a code. He says "The changes go on even as I write. By some mysterious route . . . that cannot be defined or explained, the Negro knows that part of his code is being broken."

The article is accompanied by a 'Saying Something' Lexicon offering words and their definitions, including woke (adj.): well-informed, up-to-date ("Man, I'm woke").

But there is so much more to it than that. While woke was finally introduced with this definition 60 years ago, it was not added to the Oxford English Dictionary until 2017, as woke, adjective: Originally: well-informed, up-to-date. Now chiefly: alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice; frequently (spoken as in) stay woke.

Nice to see that Mr. Kelley's original definition survives, but once again, boiling the concept down to a simple definition only scratches the surface.

It is difficult for anyone to be completely woke, and if you are not black, you are unable to experience the world as a black person does. One person who tried was John Howard Griffin. He was a white man who, in 1959, shaved his head and took tanning to an extreme level to travel the deep south as a black man and penned the nonfiction tome Black Like Me. He lived among the black community and experienced racial segregation first-hand. He got a taste of what it meant to be a black man in America. But was he woke? Maybe he was, just a bit.

His book was an eye opener, no doubt. I read it and have discussed it on several occasions. Some black people have told me they doubt the full truth of the work, calling it biased and assuming. Other black activists have noted that while his voice was indeed rich, it is not the authentic voice of a black man, it is the voice of a white man wearing black shoes. So, once again, this only scratches the surface of wokeness.

You can attend rallies and you can put a sticker on your car and you can like whatever you like online to show your support for any cause or movement in the name of justice and understanding, but none of that will make you woke.

You have to live it, and you have to get it, to really get it. And that is hard for anyone to do, if they have not truly come from a place of oppression. The closest some people can come to being woke is to live vicariously through actors they see on screen. TV and movie writers find extraordinary ways to build empathetic characters that we can relate to. Every time you identify with the plight of somebody and wish you could help or offer advice, you get a little closer.

The FX show Atlanta follows a rapper, his cousin, and their friend on a journey from anonymity to fame. Show creator and executive producer Donald Glover acts in the cousin role and carefully crafts a world where we get to see through the eyes of black men and women. If you have not caught any of Atlanta yet, you may know Glover from the NBC show Community or from his stint as the rapper Childish Gambino.

Funny side note, I found out that Glover procured the moniker Childish Gambino from the Wu-Tang Name Generator. I gave it a whirl and henceforth, I have been dubbed Mighty Demon.

Anyway, back to Donald Glover. If you want to get a real taste of wokeness, please look at his work, and start with his music video This is America. It is a mesmerizing display of shock and awe with dancing. If you have not seen it, you will probably watch it a few times in a row to catch everything you missed the first couple times around. His artistic expression is a roadmap from the roots of the early African American experience to present day. Will it help you to get woke? Not all by itself, but its a great stop on your journey. After you watch, visit this insightful blog by Marjolijn Winten to enjoy a delicately crafted analysis of the video, and really absorb it. What I love about this work of art is that it is minimally edited. A ton of work went into it to get every shot the way it is, but there are only six cuts between scenes. The choreography to make this happen is tremendous.

But don't stop there. Now is the time to head on down to Atlanta, where Glover can really blow your mind. I recommend the whole series, as usual, but if you just want to get a taste of wokevity (That's my word. I just invented it, but I think it works), there are two episodes that may get you there. In Season 3, Episode 4, The Big Payback offers an alternate reality where reparations for black folks have come due for white people. Then, in Season 3, Episode 6, White Fashion gives our heroes some tough pills to swallow when they find that what they thought were great ideas to share are misappropriated for profit.

I don't want to get too deep into the episodes, but as a viewer, I could really feel everyone's pain. Just a tinge of it might get you a little closer to being woke.

One person who may be woke is Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. He is of black and Samoan heritage. His new show Young Rock, is set in the year 2032, with Johnson playing himself, as a presidential candidate sharing memories of his life and the lessons he learned about family, honor, and commitment with actor Randall Park, who also plays himself. Besides being really funny, the show also makes a point to show us that no matter how successful his father, champion wrestler Rocky Johnson was, he was a human with flaws, and a black man who had to keep his head down, literally, as he was driven through a white neighborhood in Tennessee in 1987. Young Rock also kept his head down, because he had to at the time, but he learned a valuable lesson from that, and shares it with us.

The lesson is that no man, or woman, or child, should have to hide for any reason, and especially because of the color of their skin.

We are fortunate that there are laws that protect us from discrimination, like when we apply for a job, or for a driver's license. You have to qualify to be able to do some things, like be able to drive or actually do the job you apply for, sure, but nobody should be disqualified for their race. So, corporations who hire tons of people become nameless and faceless, and set their policies based on fairness to all, because big corporations need lots of people, and besides that, it's the law. Not so long ago, there was unfair advantage/disadvantage to be sure, but as a society, we seem to be far beyond that, and corporations are in general, pretty fair. But are they woke?

I don't know. Can a corporation, an entity helmed by a board of directors, a CEO, a CFO, a President, and a bunch of VPs be collectively woke? You would think so, but the concept is both so personal and elusive, how can it be defined in a company's mission statement elegantly enough to be completely understood? How can any business entity claim to be woke?

I do not know of any that do make that claim.

I am not sure whether they can or not. But Florida Governor Ron DeSantis seems to know what woke is, that it is entirely possible for corporations to be woke, and he doesn't like it. And he is not alone. Now there are money managers for financial funds touting anti-woke investment strategies. Does that even sound like it makes sense?

What is so bad about being woke?

Nothing at all, if we could all completely understand the concept. But, as pitchman Billy Mays used to say, "There's more."

The problem is that woke has become a moving target. You can see this in Governor DeSantis using woke like silly putty to warp anything he dislikes. He has put himself out there as the poster child for the anti-woke movement and now the definition we had in 2017 has been warped beyond recognition. He has been deeming woke as a blight on the progress of infrastructure and the main issue when dealing with Chinese corporations. He claims that corporate wokeness is "a form of cultural Marxism" and that "The Woke are anti-Semitic."

That just doesn't make sense.

He recently signed the Stop Woke Act and helped usher in the Don't Say Gay bill which was vehemently rejected by Disney executives. When he heard about that, he rushed another bill to dissolve Disney's self-governance and special tax status, which Disney says the state of Florida is unable to legally do. Attacking the state's largest private employer, which brings in billions upon billions of dollars in revenue as the main economic driver in Florida, because somebody spoke up and made it clear that they disagreed with him, makes perfectly good sense, right?

It does to Governor DeSantis.

DeSantis’ war on woke is laughable because he has no clear concept of what woke is, and it seems that, a lot of others do not either. Sure enough, he is a real mickey mouse who is definitely not woke. As a result, we end up with ever shifting goalposts, so nobody can win. The elegant concept that Marcus Garvey brought forth a century ago, which was better understood fifty years later, and recently defined by one of the worlds most respected dictionaries, is now becoming a muddled and difficult to explain notion that may soon be lost to history.

What is truly sad is that Woke, a term made by and for the black community to help describe their struggles and efforts, to convey understanding of their travails, has been hijacked and misappropriated by white people to make it something bad, when it is not.

So, is that it, Mike? Is that all there is to being woke?

Not even close.

There's always more.