That Which We Call Woke
Demystifying a Word
For most of the two-hundred years of the history of the United States, the long shadow of slavery drove the laws of this nation. The 1619 project is investigative journalism (and now a book) that shows that slavery was part of our nation since well before its founding. A notable (among many) direct impact of slavery was the editing of our founding documents. Does anyone remember this from the Declaration of Independence?
He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. -Thomas Jefferson
That was an argument against King George’s injustice, but didn’t survive the first draft of editing by Franklin and Adams. Why? Because slavery was an economic foundation for the United States. A simple thought experiment demonstrates this. Imagine you want to build a road. Imagine you want to hire a bunch of people to build that road for you. Now imagine paying them a fair wage to build the road, versus not paying them at all. Exactly. A business that pays well can’t compete with a business that doesn’t pay at all, and so anyone who competed in industry had to touch the slave trade. Since the United States was so inundated with slaveholders, this single issue was enough to bristle if not offend many of the allies that the founders had to pull in to form a united front. Therefore, edit it out.
Further, there’s the three-fifth’s compromise — and this one is a doozie. The Three-fifths Compromise indicated that slaves would be counted as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of tax collection and representation. This compromise gave a boon to slave states in providing them with outsized representation in Congress. And the compromise and its effects lasted from the founding in 1787 through the Civil War. Few things are more impactful to the United States than the fact that for almost a hundred years, slave states had a constitutional advantage in Congress.
Isn’t this ancient history?
Well, not quite. Just like the Three-fifths Compromise, there are other actions that had lasting impacts. Taken alone, each one is a shining example of the evil that people do to each other. And this is what we are taught in school. Each individual example (if mentioned) is analyzed, but what we don’t do in our schools even to the college level in many cases is show how these events all work together. For example, without the Three-fifths Compromise, would the configuration of the Supreme Court still have been slave-owner-controlled enough ruled against Dred Scott?
There’s this other problem too. In school, we’re often taught that slavery was outlawed after the Civil War. Technically true, but how many of us know that it wasn’t a magic bullet. Many enslaved people weren’t freed until well after the Civil War had ended. Further, are we ever encouraged to consider implications of freeing 3.9 million people. Where was the plan for how those people might provide for themselves? Oh, wait. There was a plan. Have you ever heard of Forty Acres and a Mule? 400,000 acres of land were allotted for black people to occupy, without a single white person involved in it. This is all written down, so feel free to look it up. Then along came Andrew Johnson, and suddenly those 400,000 acres disappeared and were returned to — wait for it — those planter families who had held the land and enslaved people upon it.
Fast-forward to the Jim Crow era (1865 - 1960), and you get another 100 years of oppression of black people. I was born in 1976. That should tell you something about how recent this history actually is. Getting past that though, you start getting into the Southern Strategy — because Jim Crow was only a symptom. Laws like that don’t evolve from nowhere, and those laws were devised in the minds of white people with enough power to make the laws in the first place. So those people were still there, and politicians realized that there were enough such people to tip the balance of power in Washington D.C. So year after year you’ve got the Southern Strategy playing out from Nixon, and in a very real way, all the way to today (Donald Trump).
So what does all this have to do with “woke”?
That’s where the term woke started. Once people, mainly black people, began threading together the events in history, notably including in the 1619 project and recent novels that examine the past in the context of the present, it became clear how we as a nation managed to disenfranchise an entire community for hundreds of years, and yet still have no good plan on how to make it right. Wokeness is nothing more than taking a systemic perspective of the impact of the the laws and injustices directed toward a minority community. But not in an academic way. Wokeness means also feeling that impact, and trying to understand it, and then next, doing something about it.
And that isn’t a problem. We should strive to get people more engaged in fixing some of our nations more troubling problems. How do you show love for your family if not by helping to make it better? Just like anything else, wokeness can be taken to an extreme. Although, one might argue, that boycotts are not extreme, protesting is not extreme, and trying to understand and control ones interactions with others to create a more inclusive society — also not extreme. Read our blog on Cancel Culture to understand how that fits into this conversation — but also not extreme.
Those who label the actions that people typically use to communicate and spread the ideas about the continuing impact of slavery and racism in our nation as extreme are misunderstanding the context. When held up against a troubled past and countless unfulfilled lives, how extreme is it really to not buy something from someone? Or to hold a sign and yell? Or to challenge institutional norms to prune out those which may help perpetuate injustice?
Wokeness isn’t a problem. Our reaction to wokeness is quite revealing about our ability to perceive the suffering of others, though. If our perspective on history is academic and dry, then wokeness is at best an inconvenience. If, however, we understand — truly understand — the long-reaching impacts of a white-washed history and entrenched slavery, then wokeness makes sense. Humans suffer because of laws, enforcement practices, skewed perspectives that plague our United States. Connecting those dots makes us able to see those injustices, and correct them in a way that non-woke ‘everything is fine’ thinking doesn’t allow.
References:
Encyclopædia Britannica, inc. (n.d.). Three-Fifths compromise. Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved January 17, 2022, from https://www.britannica.com/topic/three-fifths-compromise
Dred scott decision still resonates today. National Constitution Center – constitutioncenter.org. (n.d.). Retrieved January 17, 2022, from https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/dred-scott-decision-still-resonates-today-2#:~:text=On%20March%206%2C%201857%2C%20the,decisions%20in%20the%20court's%20history.
History.com Editors. (2018, February 28). Jim Crow laws. History.com. Retrieved January 17, 2022, from https://www.history.com/topics/early-20th-century-us/jim-crow-laws
Public Broadcasting Service. (2013, September 18). The truth behind '40 acres and a mule'. PBS. Retrieved January 17, 2022, from https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/the-truth-behind-40-acres-and-a-mule/
Brief history of Jim Crow Laws: Online llm degree. Online International LLM Degree Program. (2020, March 19). Retrieved January 17, 2022, from https://onlinellm.usc.edu/a-brief-history-of-jim-crow-laws/
Bunch, W. (2021, November 11). 'anti-woke' university of austin is right that college is 'broken,' but its founders are wrong about everything else: Will bunch. https://www.inquirer.com. Retrieved January 17, 2022, from https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/university-of-austin-wokeness-on-campus-20211111.html
