We live, it seems, in the “Age of Disrespect”—an era in which not only institutions but the very language itself is vandalized in broad daylight. Words once carrying moral clarity are gutted, stuffed, and paraded around as scarecrows in the culture wars. None has been so manhandled as the word woke.
Originally a modest fragment of African American vernacular, woke meant little more than “socially awake”—alive to injustice, unwilling to let prejudice pass as the natural order. It was neither manifesto nor revolution, but a reminder: keep your eyes open, cruelty thrives in the dark. Yet today the word has been wrenched from its context, hijacked by the conservative right, stripped of substance, and weaponized as a jeer. To be called woke in their argot is not to be praised for vigilance but ridiculed for decency. It has become the eye-roll in syllabic form: an exasperated sneer at anyone refusing to baptize barbarism as “tradition.”
But what does being woke actually mean, once propaganda is scraped away? According to The Conversation, the criteria are almost laughably simple: (1) a practice offends the group it targets, (2) it perpetuates lies or stereotypes about them, and (3) it reinforces attitudes that make discrimination easier. This is not Bolshevism in disguise—it is moral arithmetic at the level of kindergarten ethics: don’t bully, don’t lie, don’t be cruel. If you shout a racial slur and are told it is unacceptable, you are not being “censored”—you are being reminded that society refuses to subsidize your savagery. The right, however, charges in with their trump card, crying “Woke!”—as if the real obscenity were not the insult, but the temerity of objecting to it.
History, however, is littered with precisely this maneuver: the powerful insisting that resistance, not oppression, is the true scandal. When abolitionists denounced slavery, they were smeared as fanatics destabilizing the “natural order.” When suffragettes demanded the vote, they were accused of destroying the family. When civil rights activists marched in Birmingham, they were called communists and anarchists. The label changes with the decade, but the tactic remains constant: vilify the critic, never the cruelty. Woke is simply the latest placeholder in this ancient rhetorical shell game.
Consider Confederate statues. These are not monuments to “heritage” but granite apologies for treason. They squat in our squares, hulking tributes to men who wagered the republic’s life in defense of slavery. Heritage of what, precisely? The Confederacy not only lost but lost in defense of a cause as indefensible as human bondage. Germany, at least, has the dignity not to cast Hitler in bronze; no Bavarian schoolchild waits for the bus under a swastika pedestal. Yet Americans are told to revere Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee as though they were tragic heroes rather than failed warlords of a slave republic. Removing their likenesses is not “erasing history”—it is history unpickled, history without the embalming fluid of nostalgia. By the same logic, renaming streets and schools is not iconoclasm but sanity: we would never christen an airport after Benedict Arnold, so why honor the president of secession?
Predictably, every such effort is met with the monotonous chorus: “That’s wokeness!” But what is really at stake is not freedom—it is impunity. The right wants the prerogative to sneer without rebuttal, to distort without correction, to demean without consequence. They seek a world where insult is cost-free and history is lacquered into a postcard of their choosing.
Witness their tribune, the current President, who opened his political career by descending a gilded escalator to inform us that Mexican immigrants were “rapists and murderers.” To call such vulgarity indecent is not “wokeness”—it is decency. To object when Republicans ban books is not “woke tyranny”—it is fidelity to the Enlightenment principle that citizens have the right to read. To refuse a stage to a racist crank on a university campus is not Stalinism—it is an institution declining to squander its microphone on lunacy. When this same President deflects a difficult question by sneering “stupid” or “mean,” it is not strength but cowardice—evasions dressed up as bravado. Yet we are told that to object to such behavior is the real scandal.
The pattern extends. Critical Race Theory—taught mainly in law schools—has been recast as a Marxist bedtime story whispered into kindergarten ears. Its real crime is simpler: it asks America to look into a mirror. And what gazes back—the reality that the republic was built on broken backs as well as noble ideals—is intolerable to those who prefer history sanitized. Likewise, when athletes kneel to protest racial injustice, they are branded as traitors; when rioters storm the Capitol to strangle democracy in its crib, they are hailed as patriots.
This hypocrisy is not a glitch in the system—it is the system. For centuries, the right has practiced the very cancel culture it pretends to despise: blacklisting gay actors, banning books, burning Beatles records, and silencing dissenters during the Red Scares. The machine of censorship in America has rarely been progressive. Only when the marginalized stand up for themselves does the right collapse into theatrical fainting fits, clutching pearls like Victorian heiresses scandalized by an exposed ankle.
Indeed, it is they who behave as the true “woke police”—rabidly censoring, banning, and silencing anything that unsettles their fragile orthodoxies. They are not defenders of free speech but monopolists of it, eager to patrol the boundaries of discourse and keep the gates locked tight.
So let us embrace the charge. If woke means refusing to cheer barbarism, refusing to venerate traitors in bronze, refusing to let cruelty masquerade as candor—then yes, let us be wide awake. The alternative is moral sleepwalking, which has delivered us slavery, Jim Crow, witch trials, internment camps, McCarthyism, and all the other disgraces the right prefers to file under “heritage.”
History shows us what happens when societies close their eyes: atrocities flourish in the dark. To be awake, then, is not radicalism. It is the bare minimum of citizenship.
To be awake is the least we can do.
“If woke means refusing to cheer barbarism, then let us be wide awake.”
Why it Matters
The attack on “woke” is not about language—it’s about power. When awareness of injustice is ridiculed, cruelty becomes the status quo. To stay awake is not radical; it is survival for democracy itself.
Key Takeaways
- The right has hijacked “woke,” turning vigilance into a slur.
- History repeats: critics of injustice are always smeared as the problem.
- Confederate statues, CRT, and book bans are framed as “woke tyranny” to defend cruelty.
- The real cancel culture in America has long been conservative censorship.
- Being awake to injustice is not radicalism—it is the minimum of citizenship.
Further Reading
- White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity – Robert P. Jones
Explores how religion and politics intersect to defend injustice under the guise of tradition. https://civilheresy.com/white too long - How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them – Jason Stanley
A guide to the rhetoric and tactics used to vilify dissent and entrench cruelty. https://civilheresy.com/How Fascism Works - Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America – John McWhorter
A critique of how language and identity politics are distorted in the modern culture wars. https://civilheresy.com/woke racism
