Reject Wokeness

The Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (Stop WOKE) Act proposed by Gov. Ron DeSantis this year empowers citizens to go after “woke indoctrination.” The bill blunts what he has warned is liberal ideology influencing the teaching of history in schools and coursing through corporate diversity training. Stop WOKE prohibits any teaching that could make students feel they bear personal responsibility for historic wrongs because of their race, color, sex or national origin, and blocks businesses from using diversity practices or training that could make employees feel guilty for similar reasons.

“We’re going to teach honest history,” said Sen. Kelli Stargel, R-Lakeland. “But we’re not going to influence it with personal opinion.” Democratic critics called it a way to whitewash history and diminish the abuse and inequities faced by minorities in the country, as well as a way for Republicans to satisfy their voting base.

“This is the red meat they want,” Sen. Annette Taddeo, D-Miami said. “But this is not what our state needs.”

Stop WOKE Act:New limits on talk of race in schools and work sent to Florida Gov. DeSantis More:COVID-19 crusader Gov. DeSantis gets new title: Chief of ‘woke’ police.

Recently, after Bob Chapek, the CEO of Disney World criticized Gov. DeSantis over the "Parental Rights in Education" legislation critics dubbed the "Don't Say Gay" bill, the governor lashed out against the company's wokeness while accusing Disney of interfering with parents' rights and taking money from China. "In Florida our policy's going to be based on the best interest of Florida citizens, not on the musing of woke corporations," DeSantis said. Are we all talking about the same thing? For a long time "woke" just meant "not sleeping."But recognizing its changing common usage, Meriam-Webster added a new meaning in 2017:

U.S. slang meaning "aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)." They took their time. "Woke" has been around for much, much longer than that in Black communities.

Where did 'woke' come from?

"It can be hard to trace slang back to its origins since slang’s origins are usually spoken," Merriam-Webster's update says, "and it can be particularly difficult to trace a slang word that has its origins in a dialect." The earliest recorded usage of wokeness that can be interpreted to mean stay aware, rather than wake up, is in a collection by Jamaican philosopher and Harlem activist leader Marcus Garvey in 1923 which included the call, "Wake up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa" in a plea for Black people across the world to open their eyes to racial subjugation and get involved in politics.

'Fight for your own liberation':From Jamaica's Marcus Garvey came an African vision of freedom

A few years later, in a recorded spoken afterword to the 1938 song "Scottsboro Boys" by blues musician Lead Belly (Huddie Ledbetter) about nine Black teenagers accused of raping two white women, he says, "I advise everybody, be a little careful when they go along through there – best stay woke, keep their eyes open."

In Black communities in the early to mid-20th Century as the Ku Klux Klan re-emerged, mob justice and lynchings were not uncommon, and segregation and Jim Crow laws were often harshly — or fatally — enforced, "stay woke" came to mean to stay vigilant in a world stacked against you.

The word eventually spread outside the Black community along with other African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) slang. In 1962 Black novelist William Melon Kelley wrote about white beatniks appropriating African American slang in an article for the New York Times Magazine titled, "If You're Woke You Dig It."

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. touched on the feeling in 1965 during a commencement address at Oberlin College: “There is nothing more tragic than to sleep through a revolution. … The great challenge facing every individual graduating today is to remain awake.” In a 1972 play "Garvey Lives!" playwright Barry Beckham wrote: “I been sleeping all my life. And now that Mr. Garvey done woke me up, I’m gon’ stay woke.”

The word reached a wider audience in 2008 when Grammy-award-winning singer Erykah Badu covered Georgia Anne Muldrow's song "Master Teacher" for her album New Amerykah Part One (4th World War), changing the chorus from "I stay awake" to "I'd stay woke." In 2012 Badu used "stay woke" in a tweet supporting the imprisoned Russian feminist rock group Pussy Riot.

Black social media users began using "stay woke" more often to point out racial issues, but it also was still used to mean "watch out for a cheating partner," to not fall asleep or to jump on a rising hashtag bandwagon to get attention. Also in 2012, neighborhood watch coordinator George Zimmerman shot and killed an unarmed 17-year-old student, Trayvon Martin. The hashtag #staywoke was used to spread awareness of the shooting, and of the outrage of Zimmerman's acquittal the next year. With the public outcry, #blacklivesmatter became a hashtag and a movement that only increased as more reports and videos of the shootings of unarmed Black people spread rapidly across social media. #staywoke once again became an urgent warning.

Then, a police shooting brought wokeness into the mainstream. Less diversity:DeSantis' 'Stop WOKE' Act could force Florida businesses to rethink diversity training.

Read more at: https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/lifestyle/2022/04/14/wokeness-how-meaning-woke-evolved-and-where-its-going-next/7287343001/

Document Courtesy of https://www.palmbeachpost.com/
Personally I disagree in some points, but I let you decide.

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