Conservatives hate wokeness. Don’t trigger them by asking what it means

Tired of hearing conservatives go on and on about “wokeness”? Me too. So I have a cunning plan: let’s establish a moratorium on people throwing around the word “woke”, one of the most used and abused terms in recent memory, until we have all agreed on a precise definition of it.

Before the right co-opted the term and used it to describe everything from BlackRock to Disney World, “woke” had an actual meaning. The term comes from African American Vernacular English and, originally, was broadly defined as being “alert to racial prejudice and discrimination”. Americans who aren’t suffering from Fox News-induced brain worms still understand that to be its meaning. According to a recent USA Today/Ipsos Poll, 56% of Americans surveyed say they think that being woke means “to be informed, educated on, and aware of social injustices”. Thirty-nine per cent of people surveyed (and 56% of people who identified as Republican), meanwhile, said it meant “to be overly politically correct and police others’ words”.

Do prominent conservatives – the people bandying around the world nonstop – agree with that definition? Let’s check in with the conservative commentator and proud bastion of anti-wokeness Bethany Mandel, shall we? On Tuesday, Mandel appeared on the Hill’s morning program Rising, where she proceeded to repeat “wokeness” ad nauseam as she asserted that most Americans aren’t liberal and “probably fewer of them consider themselves to be woke”. The program’s co-host Briahna Joy Gray stepped in at that point to ask Mandel to clarify what she meant. “Would you mind defining woke? Because it’s come up a couple of times. I just want to make sure we’re on the same page.”

Being asked to define the words that she was using seemed to come as something of as a shock to Mandel. “So, I mean, woke is sort of the idea that … um …” she replied before trailing off and pausing for an awkwardly long time. “I – this is going to be one of those moments that goes viral.” She was certainly right about that: the clip of her torturously trying to explain wokeness, which she says she devoted an entire chapter of her new book to, has been viewed millions of time and sparked a lot of headlines.

This, by the way, isn’t the first time Mandel has gone viral. At the beginning of the pandemic, she trended on Twitter after declaring that your grandmother dying of coronavirus wasn’t her problem. “You can call me a Grandma killer,” she tweeted. “I’m not sacrificing my home, food on the table, all of our docs and dentists, every form of pleasure (museums, zoos, restaurants), all my kids’ teachers in order to make other people comfortable. If you want to stay locked down, do. I’m not.” Trying not to kill grandmas? Woke!

Eventually Mandel, or “Grandma killer”, did manage to give Gray a definition of sorts. “I mean, woke is something that’s very hard to define,” Mandel said. “… It is sort of the understanding that we need to – totally reimagine and redo society in order to create hierarchies of oppression … um.” She paused. “Sorry. I-it’s hard to explain in a 15-second sound bite.”

Gray, to her credit, pressed Mandel to “take her time” and elaborate further. Her co-host, Robby Soave, came to Mandel’s rescue, however. Soave, an editor at Reason magazine, jumped in to say: “It’s one of those things that, everybody is weighing in … against wokeness. We do some of it on this show as well. It’s definitely something you know what it is when you see it.”

Is it, though? Because Republicans have spent this week shouting about how Silicon Valley Bank collapsed because of wokeness and, I’ve got to say, when I see a bank beloved by venture capitalists with a history of lobbying for deregulation I don’t immediately think “woke”. Gray was similarly unimpressed by Soave’s remark and asked him to have a go at defining the term.

“I would say it’s the tendency to punish people formally or often informally for expressing ideas using language specifically that is very new, that no one would have objected to like five seconds ago,” Soave answered. “It’s easier to come up with examples, like, you know, punishing people for using the wrong pronouns or identifying structures of that kind,” he added. So there you go: I hope that clarified things for you!

The reason that Mandel and Soave seem to have such a hard time defining “woke” is because the right’s use of the word is amorphous by design. It’s not meant to have a precise meaning, it’s meant to be a loaded catch-all for things they don’t like and a stand-in for slurs they can’t say in public. Half the time it’s used, “woke” seems to be a synonym for “black person” or “gay person”. See, for example, the Wall Street Journal columnist Andy Kessler’s recent opinion piece insinuating that Silicon Valley Bank collapsed because they had “‘1 Black’, ‘1 LGBTQ+’ and ‘2 Veterans’” on the board. Kessler wrote: “I’m not saying 12 white men would have avoided this mess, but the company may have been distracted by diversity demands.” I wish someone would ask Kessler to define “woke” for us all because he seems happy saying the quiet part out loud.

The right’s co-opting of the word “woke” and the way it uses it to distort debate and camouflage bigotry is nothing new. Conservatives always been very good at wringing words dry of their meaning and repurposing them strategically. “The elite”, for example, now means anyone with an education and not billionaires like Donald Trump. “Pro-life” means forcing women to give birth. Teaching kids about slavery has been rebranded as “critical race theory”. Far too often liberals don’t push back on these phrases and start using them themselves. Gray’s interaction with Mandel shows that simply asking conservatives to be clear about what on earth they’re talking about can be surprisingly effective.