Hey, Jason Salas!

As parents and teachers, we hear the term “woke,” and it has a different effect on us, depending on our viewpoint. The term “Woke” is tossed around our culture like a bizarre urban legend – everyone hears it, but no one knows what to believe. To some, woke is good. To others, woke is bad. Which is it? Should it be in or out of kids’ lit? I’ll give you my take and, by all means, chime in if you have something to say.

What is “Woke”?

Are you woke? What does that mean? Depending on who you ask, woke is defined in different ways. The term is also changing and morphing as the culture around it changes. Instead of getting into where woke was up until this point, let’s stick with where it is now. So, where and what is it?

My definition of woke is simple, like defining the sky. Everyone knows the sky, but it’s an expandable and explorable subject. The sky is a shifting, amorphous entity that goes beyond what we see at first glance. With that in mind, here’s my definition of woke:

woke /wōk/ adj. : an idealistic belief that perceived injustices/oppression/unfairness, substantiated or not, can be remedied by activism, protest, and execution (i.e., changing of laws, inserting messages in education and entertainment, etc.)

Simple, but a mouthful. Let’s chew on it for a bit.

Good Woke

For some, all woke is good. For others, all woke is bad. Suppose you’re an all-woke-is-bad kind of person. In that case, you may be furrowing your brow and contemplating leaving this post and heading onto YouTube to listen to conservative commentators lament the state of our debased culture. I get it. But hear me out. Woke can be good. It depends on your perspective.

To you, my conservative and no doubt Christian reader, is it good or bad to have a system set in place to protect your preferred way of life? If you felt that society and the government were oppressively pinning you under their authoritarian thumb, wouldn’t you feel compelled to try to wake people up to that fact, maybe even go as far as to take action? To that society, you may be considered woke, and everything you do may be generalized as bad simply because it didn’t toe the line of that culture (think of Abraham in Sodom).

In this way, woke is good. How one protests, reacts, and shares one’s views can be good or bad, but the underlying principle is sound. Oppression is evil, and recognizing it and taking action against it is a good thing. It’s beneficial for kids to learn about it. Yet, that’s not the whole story. Let’s take a journey into the badlands of woke.

Bad Woke

Do you consider yourself a left-wing, liberal, dyed-in-the-wool Democrat blue kind of person? I get it. And, as such, woke may be a positive and just force in our culture. The concept of bad woke might seem odd or even oppressive in its energetic frequency (yes, I believe words have an energy to their frequency). Perhaps the above section about conservatives makes you throw up in your mouth. Conservative wokism??? Blech!

Yet, if I were a betting man, to be true blue, you may turn a blind eye when woke isn’t helping as much as it’s hurting – like that guy at work who gives shoulder massages to help, but it starts getting weird. For example, you may be OK with people changing their pronouns but find it a bridge too far when it comes to pronouns like bun/bunself (based on bunnies) or 🌸/🌸 (which is impossible to articulate). You may be all for color blindness when it comes to race, but find it impossible to ignore the overwhelming practice of advertisers making couples in their ads bi-racial. There are more egregious examples, but I’ll leave it there. Woke becomes problematic when it descends into absurdity and/or taboo, to the point where people can no longer relate to the message or take it seriously, thus making it a mockery of itself, its own enemy. Furthermore, wokeness for the sake of wokeness becomes a cudgel to bash over innocent people’s heads. It pushes people away rather than drawing them into a conversation or inspiring consideration. Nobody likes a street preacher who condemns passersby, regardless of the message.

Awakening to Wokeness

If you’re on the right of the political divide, the idea of any wokeness is too much. I encourage you to look beyond that which is considered woke. Where is the concern? Is it valid? What makes that person in front of you care so much about the issue? You don’t have to agree, but trying to understand costs you nothing. It may grind your gears, but remember, you’re not encouraging anything by simply trying to understand.

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” – Aristotle

If you’re on the left side of the divide, it doesn’t make a person evil simply for disagreeing with your perspective. No one has absolute truth. There are flaws in every system, and there are ways to work on them without burning it all down and starting from scratch. Traditional values and practices may be right or wrong. Upending everything in the hopes of building a perfect world is a human yearning, yet it rarely ends well because not everyone shares the same utopian ideals, nor does everyone act ethically.

“I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.” – Baruch Spinoza

Woke or No Woke?

Ultimately, there’s nothing new about the concept of an awakening. It’s as old as time across various religions and cultures. Anyone with a heart and a brain is aware of fissures in our society. We’re all human and therefore we’re all flawed. No perfection comes from imperfection. But we grow in our own awareness and act accordingly.

Let’s not see woke as being right or wrong, regardless of whether it is or is not. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater, yet let’s not keep the dirty water simply because it’s what we have now. At best, we’re all in a state of awakening, yet none of us has arrived at being fully awake. Whether right or left, conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat, or anything in between, let’s wake up to understanding ourselves and others. Only then will our eyes start to open.