One of the things that we are really trying to get across is that black people are not a monolith.

We are LGBT, we are urban and rural, we are liberal and conservative,

and the candidate and the campaign that is going to energize us the most

is going to act like they know something about us, and it's going to go beyond fried chicken and hot sauce.

Hello and welcome to Why is this happening with me, your host, Chris Hayes.

So there's this term that I started seeing online that people have been writing about the error word in.

And it's a tongue in cheek term that I think is basically sort of derisive but kind of in a comical way.

And it's the great awokening.

You've maybe heard this term, the great awokening.

And it's a reference to the great awakening, which were at least two different periods of incredible religious fervor

that spread through the United States in both the 18th and 19th centuries.

And really shaped a lot about American spirituality, religion, and politics.

It led to the creation of different Christian traditions and new religions.

And it changed public opinion.

It also provided the seeds for what would become the abolition movement.

So this real transformation, people's consciousness, the way they thought about their relationship to each other and to God.

And then that became a social force that ended up in abolition.

The great awokening, which is again, a kind of like tongue in cheek term,

is about a sort of social justice, consciousness, explosion that's happened in this country, I would say in the last four or five years.

And I think particularly among a certain segment or sector of white people.

And that's why I think the kind of like awokening teasingness is embedded in that term, right?

That certain kind of person, white person who is sort of finding a kind of racial consciousness about the nature of white supremacy, the nature of racial hierarchy, the national of racial exclusion for people of color, the history of the country in that respect.

...