Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I am the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs Magazine.

We are honored to be joined for a very special program today by Samuel James, musician, raconteur, columnist, Samuel James. Thank you for joining us. Oh, thank you for having me,

Nathan. It's a pleasure to be here. Well, the reason that I wanted to talk to you is that you

recently wrote a short article, your column, Racisms you wrote an article called the woke dog

whistle. You wrote about

the term

woke, which people hear

a lot, especially because

right-wing politicians

have made a

electoral hay of this.

Ron DeSantis, as you discuss, pushed this thing called the

Stop Woke Act. And you discuss the fact that Woke is a dog whistle. And the interesting

thing about dog whistles, about racist dog whistles, is that, you know, because they're a dog whistle, people can't necessarily hear all of the notes of the dog whistle, right?

They're designed to not be explicitly racist, but implicitly, while preserving plausible deniability. So someone like Ron DeSantis will say,

well, there's nothing to do with racism in my opposition to wokeness. I'm just against,

you know, identity, politics, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, critical race. So, but what you do so beautifully in this column is that by going into history and the

history of music and the music that you know so well and that you play, you are able

to help us hear the notes of the dog whistle by, because you take us back to understand what

the word woke means, where it comes from and what we should hear when we hear the word woke.

So perhaps you could take us back now and tell us more about this word, woke.

Yeah, well, woke is like, it's just constantly been in like the black lexicon of America,

...