Awake

Not Woke

Reading a piece in the New Yorker about brave schoolgirls in Iran making their objection to the regime’s policies known by removing their hijab, their hair covering set me thinking about the noise on social media about “woke.”

I take the negative meaning attached to the term as meaning trendy, or politically correct.

What seems to be lost in the noise is that woke is the past tense of awake.

And what some object to is our finally wakening to the reality that:

women, who have long been relegated to lower places in cultures around the world, not only have decided they are no longer going to play passive roles, but have forced us to embrace the reality that they are a huge resource that has been squandered by male anxiety about losing our exclusive claim to the highest places in hierarchy.

What’s more, women seem more collegial than men, less inclined to exercise their authority by seeking to dominate, more willing to welcome the gifts of everyone, rather than merely those in privileged places.

As for other issues to which woke has been attached as a pejorative: gay rights, LBGT, pickleball, racial diversity, animal rights, these, too, are people, creatures, and movements to which we’re finally coming awake, not only as issues of fairness, justice, but as welcoming gifts that differences bring to our efforts to lend to a richer world that can seem on the brink of no longer sustaining our complex and fragile species.

If issues of political and social hierarchy keep us from welcoming, valuing, the wide variety of gifts different people have to offer the well-being of all of us, then our chances of a long tenure here are severely diminished.

We still have a lot to learn. And there is no lack of wise teachers to help us wake up.