What Exactly Does “Woke” Mean, and How Did It Become so Powerful?

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 27 January 2023

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Many on the right blame “wokeness” for all of America’s ills—everything from deadly mass shootings to lower military recruitment. Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, recently signed a so-called Stop WOKE Act into law, and made the issue the center of his midterm victory speech. In Washington, there has been talk in the House of forming an “anti-woke caucus.” “I think ‘woke’ is a very interesting term right now, because I think it’s an unusable word—although it is used all the time—because it doesn’t actually mean anything,” the linguist and lexicographer Tony Thorne, the author of “Dictionary of Contemporary Slang,” tells David Remnick. Plus, the poet Robin Coste Lewis talks with the staff writer Hilton Als about how suffering a traumatic brian injury led her to a career in poetry. Her most recent book, “To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness,” was published last month.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:09.6	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. For years, many on the right have been lamb-baseding a certain kind of progressive sensibility.
0:19.1	Think about the ubiquity of political correctness in the 1990s,
0:22.6	endless fodder for Rush Limbaugh and talk radio.
0:26.3	But the fewer over PC was nothing compared to the political battle over woke.
0:32.5	You know what woke means? It means you're a loser.
0:35.1	Everything woke.
0:45.4	Everything woke. Everything woke. It's true. Everything woke turns to shit, okay? There's Donald Trump in 2021, and the next year, Ron DeSantis signed into law a controversial Stop Woke Act in the state of Florida.
0:57.4	It was absolutely the centerpiece of his recent re-election victory speech.
1:02.2	We fight the woke in the legislature.
1:05.2	We fight the woke in the schools.
1:07.3	We fight the woke in the corporations.
1:09.4	We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob.
1:12.6	Florida is where woe goes to die.
1:16.6	In Washington, in the House of Representatives, there's talk of forming an anti-woke caucus.
1:22.6	Where do you start on an anti-woke caucus?
1:25.6	Most Republicans are now awakened to this fact that
1:28.3	wokeness is weakness. It's a cancer that's eating America from inside out.
1:33.3	You look at the recruiting numbers in the United States military, way off of its goals.
1:38.3	For conservatives now, wokeness is the root cause of everything negative.
1:43.3	From lower military recruitment to deadly mass shootings,
1:46.1	as one senator insisted after the shooting in Uvalde, Texas.
	...

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