Woke (/ˈwoʊk/ WOHK)

Woke is an adjective derived from African American Vernacular English (AAVE) meaning "alert to racial prejudice and discrimination”. is a word which originally referred to awareness about racism and discrimination. It later came to include an awareness of other issues of social inequality, for example regarding gender and sexual orientation. Since the late 2010s it has also been used as a general word for left-wing political movements and viewpoints which emphasis the identity politics of people of color (those who are not white), LGBT people, and women.The phrase "stay woke" began within the everyday language of some African Americans in the 1930s, because in African American Vernacular English (AAVE) woke is instead of woken, the usual past participle form of wake. After the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, the word was used by Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists who wanted to raise awareness about police shootings of African Americans in the US. It became an Internet meme and was increasingly utilized by individuals who were not African American to show that they supported BLM. Popular among millennials, the word spread worldwide and was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2017.The word ended up being used as a catch-all term to describe left-wing ideologies, often centered on the identity politics of minority groups and informed by academic movements like critical race theory, which identified themselves as being devoted to social justice. This included BLM, anti-racism, and campaigns on women's and LGBT issues. By 2020, parts of the political right in some Western countries were ironically using the word "woke" to describe left-wing movements and ideologies they disagreed with. In turn, some left-wing activists came to consider it an offensive term used to belittle those campaigning against discrimination. “Stay woke” began as a watchword for Black AmericansThe first time many people heard “woke” in its current context was likely during the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement. In 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri, Black citizens took to the streets nightly to protest the police shooting death of Michael Brown. As they did so, they urged each other to “stay woke” against police actions and other threats.The earliest known examples of wokeness as a concept revolve around the idea of Black consciousness “waking up” to a new reality or activist framework and dates to the early 20th century. In 1923, a collection of aphorisms and ideas by the Jamaican philosopher and social activist Marcus Garvey included the summons “Wake up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa!” as a call to global Black citizens to become more socially and politically conscious. A few years later, the phrase “stay woke” turned up as part of a spoken afterword in the 1938 song “Scottsboro Boys,” a protest song by Blues musician Huddie Ledbetter, a.k.a. Lead Belly. The song describes the 1931 saga of a group of nine Black teenagers in Scottsboro, Arkansas, who were accused of raping two white womenCritical Race theoryCritical race theory (CRT) is a cross-disciplinary examination – by social and civil-rights scholars and activists – of how laws, social and political movements, and media shape, and are shaped by, social conceptions of race and ethnicity. The word critical in the name is an academic reference to critical thinking, critical theory, and scholarly criticism, rather than criticizing or blaming people. CRT is also used in sociology to explain social, political, and legal structures and power distribution as through a "lens" focusing on the concept of race, and experiences of racism. For example, the CRT conceptual framework examines racial bias in laws and legal institutions, such as highly disparate rates of incarceration among racial groups in the United States. A key CRT concept is intersectionality—the way in which different forms of inequality and identity are affected by interconnections of race, class, gender, and disability. Scholars of CRT view race as a social construct with no biological basis. One tenet of CRT is that racism and disparate racial outcomes are the result of complex, changing, and often subtle social and institutional dynamics, rather than explicit and intentional prejudices of individuals. CRT scholars argue that the social and legal construction of race advances the interests of white people at the expense of people of color, and that the liberal notion of U.S. law as "neutral" plays a significant role in maintaining a racially unjust social order, where formally color-blind laws continue to have racially discriminatory outcomes. CRT began in the United States in the post–civil rights era, as 1960s landmark civil rights laws were being eroded and schools were being re-segregated. With racial inequalities persisting even after civil rights legislation and color-blind laws were enacted, CRT scholars in the 1970s and 1980s began reworking and expanding critical legal studies (CLS) theories on class, economic structure, and the law to examine the role of U.S. law in perpetuating racism. CRT, a framework of analysis grounded in critical theory, originated in the mid-1970s in the writings of several American legal scholars, including Derrick Bell, Alan Freeman, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, Cheryl Harris, Charles R. Lawrence III, Mari Matsuda, and Patricia J. Williams. CRT draws from the work of thinkers such as Antonio Gramsci, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and W. E. B. Du Bois, as well as the Black Power, Chicano, and radical feminist movements from the 1960s and 1970s. Academic critics of CRT argue it is based on storytelling instead of evidence and reason, rejects truth and merit, and opposes liberalism. Since 2020, conservative U.S. lawmakers have sought to ban or restrict the instruction of CRT education in primary and secondary schools, as well as relevant training inside federal agencies. Advocates of such bans argue that CRT is false, anti-American, villainizes white people, promotes radical leftism, and indoctrinates children. Advocates of bans on CRT have been accused of misrepresenting its tenets, and of having the goal to broadly silence discussions of racism, equality, social justice, and the history of race. Final words after this:Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/right-left-and-center--5337363/support.