With the recent rise in social justice activism new slang terms have arisen to fill the gaps where standard English seems to fail. One term in particular got my attention: #Woke. Woke is traditionally defined as the past tense form of woke which means to cause (a person or animal) to be awake after sleeping. However, according to Urban Dictionary, Being Woke means being aware, knowing what’s going on in the community.
The term actually came from a 2008 Erykah Badu song, Master Teacher (listen here). After a few years of little to no usage, woke rose to popularity with the 2013 shooting of Trayvon Martin and #StayWoke became a rallying cry for public outrage at anything from government scandals to institutional racism and was later even used by conspiracy theorists.
The first person to ever articulate what it means to be woke was surprisingly the Ancient Greek philosopher Plato. In Plato’s allegory of the cave (Read it Here) he describes a situation in which a group of men is chained to a cave wall in a position where they can only see the shadows cast on the wall in front of them. Behind them, people walk past while carrying everyday objects like baskets and animals. Plato then explains that these men perceive each shadow as the actual object, so a shadow of a tree would be thought of as an actual tree. The final part of the story is where things get interesting. One of the men gets #woke when his chains break and he goes to explore the outside world. He turns around to a painfully bright light, coming to a realization under the light of the sun that the images on the wall are nothing more than shadows of reality. However, if this suddenly awakened man were to attempt to communicate this to any of the currently chained men he would be ridiculed because the chained men simply have no conception of any other way of life and have structured their society around the shadows. To have these realizations, is, according to Plato, what it means to be a philosopher. Aka #woke.
Although a ridiculous tale, the allegory serves to teach us many things about being #woke ourselves and how we can get others to be #woke. First, the story teaches us that many of our conceptions of the world are taught to us by others, we take what's in front of us and build our conceptions of the world around that. Second, it explains much of the conflict between those who are #woke and those still asleep. Those who are #woke and have a newfound way of viewing the world are obviously resistant to reverting to something they know is wrong and those still sleeping are resistant to being #woke because it essentially requires a complete and utter destruction of the way they view the world. Finally, it teaches us how to fight our battles, whether that be protests in the street or the occasional twitter beef. The best way to get someone to step outside and see the light is through slow acclimation to the light, by planting seeds of knowledge and putting cracks in the foundations of their beliefs.
The biggest thing to take away from all of this is that nobody really likes the process of waking up, but once youve glimpsed the sun theres no going back.
