Hey everybody, we're back with our series on right-wing tropes.

UNFDR!

Now there's more chatter than usual surrounding the term woke because of this viral clip.

Would you mind defining woke?

Because it's come up a couple times and I just want to make sure we're on the same page.

So, I mean, woke is sort of the idea that this is going to be one of those moments that goes viral.

I mean, woke is something that's very hard to define, and we've spent an entire chapter defining it.

It is sort of the understanding that we need to totally reimagine and re-reduce society in order to create hierarchies of oppression.

Obviously, this sucks for Bethany Mandel, who was on the hill to promote her book, Stolen Youth.

Breonna Grace stumps her with a pretty fundamental question.

Now, it's embarrassing because it's fundamental to Mandel's thesis, so she should have been prepared for it.

Now, I haven't read the book, so I'm not here to comment on her particular take,

but it's a good opportunity to talk about the term woke and how it's been weaponized on the right.

Aside from the part that's hard to watch, Mandel does eventually get to somewhat of an answer and saying that woke is a reimagining of society

based upon hierarchies of oppression. This is actually a really good starting point for us

and something for the left to consider when the term is thrown into our faces like an insult.

This framing is core to the debate around critical race theory, affirmative action, welfare,

and other grievances on the right.

In terms of etymology, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund has a great article that I'll link in the notes that examines the origin of the term woke.

There are links all the way back to Marcus Garvey in the 1920s, leadbelly in the 1930s, all the way through Erica Badu in 2008.

The Legal Defense Fund traces the roots of the word to demonstrate how slang and black culture is often co-opted over time and turned into the opposite meaning.

Conservatives are pretty adept at this. When woke entered the lexicon, right-wingers sought as an opportunity to demonize it,

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