Open Society

But “woke” and the phrase “stay woke” had already been a part of Black communities for years, long before Black Lives Matter gained prominence. “While renewed (inter)national outcry over anti-Black police violence certainly fueled widespread and mainstream usage of the word in the present, it has a much longer history,” deandre miles-hercules, a doctoral linguistics researcher at the University of California Santa Barbara, told me. 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 back 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 globalBlack 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 women.

Lead Belly says at the end of an archival recording of the song that he’d met with the Scottsboro defendants’ lawyer, who introduced him to the men themselves. “I made this little song about down there,” Lead Belly says. “So I advise everybody, be a little careful when they go along through there — best stay woke, keep their eyes open.”

Lead Belly uses “stay woke” in explicit association with Black Americans’ need to be aware of racially motivated threats and the potential dangers of white America.

Given that this oldest-known introduction of “woke” to the mainstream comes in a 1962 opinion piece about how white Americans are always appropriating the Black vernacular, it’s almost as though the word predicts its own fate.

Kelley argued that because Black Americans know their language is constantly being appropriated, the language itself is constantly changing. “By the time these terms get into the mainstream,” he observed, “new ones have already appeared. [...] A few Negroes guard the idiom so fervently they will consciously invent a new term as soon as they hear the existing one coming from a white’s lips.”

“[Kelley]’s use of ‘woke’ is linked closely to contemporary definitions of the word as he is writing about Black people’s awareness of the racial dynamics at play in the process of linguistic appropriation,” miles-hercules said. “As a linguist and anthropologist, I highlight this piece specifically because it demonstrates both how language, culture, and power are always connected and, crucially, that this is not news to Black people. We been knew ... we stay woke.”

Kelley directly connects “woke” Black culture back to an awareness of systematized white violence against Black people.

“Wokeness is costly,” he continued. “When people claim the label without enduring the difficulties that go along with truly anti-racist actions, then it’s in a vacuum.”

Not to be confused with 20th-century social progressivism, neoliberalism is a political and economic model that "intends to remove the buffer of social welfare as a governmental function in the belief that the market operates most efficiently and effectively without regulation" (Lakes & Carter, 2011, p. 107). On the surface, laissez-faire economic structures have little to do with education. However, its associated values, discourses, and policies have had such an effect on education, especially the humanities, some deem it a full-blown crisis. These effects are summarized in Lakes's and Carter's (2011) "Neoliberalism and Education: An Introduction".In the neoliberal risk society, young people have to "chase credentials" (Jackson and Bisset 2005), 196) to gain security in future education or workplaces. Failure to achieve is deemed one's own fault, and "human beings are made accountable for their predicaments" (Wilson, 2007 p. 97). Anxieties are heightened by the rapid changes in neoliberal policies such as job outsourcing, corporate downsizing, and international trade agreements that benefit only a few. Faced with choices about educating their children in a political environment, parents are often uninformed, misinformed, and fearful--fueled by media speculation about failing schools, incompetent teachers, and school violence. Under pressure, parents are easily attracted to schemes that appear to satisfy multiple objectives, such as discipline, protection, and greater academic achievement.Some critics go even farther, claiming "Neoliberalism encourages... suppressing teaching of critical thought that would challenge the rule of capital and keeping learners compliant while at the same time warranting that educational spaces maintain the ideological and economic reproduction that benefits the ruling class" (Oladi, 2013). The Nation's interview with Noam Chomsky explores the roots of neoliberalism and details why he believes it to be a dehumanizing and anti-democratic form of social and political control—essentially, the antithesis of humanities education.

In addition to the systemic and social issues caused by neoliberalism, it has come to affect our actual relationship with knowledge. Instead of advocating for knowledge for its own sake (Arnold, 2006) or as a means to gain access to the forms of discourse that grow and maintain power (Foucault, 1977), it leads to blunt instrumentalism—or "the belief that makes knowledge merely a means to a practical end, or the satisfaction of practical needs" (Dewey et al, 2007 p. 170). Considering "neoliberalism rejects the very idea of not-for-profit and insists that all values must be measured by the market, the humanities appear valueless" (Shumway, 2017, p. 10) this orientation towards knowledge has been especially damaging to the enrollment in Humanities programs, its social standing within academia, and general societal attitudes towards its pursuits.

Education is seen more as an access route... not so much toward the enhancement of... learning and thinking as towards obtaining through education the best possible credentials for individual socioeconomic advancement. Education is seen not so much as a means of helping society but of helping one obtain the best that society has to offer socially, economically, and culturally. (p. 62) The goals of neoliberal models of education are reflective of and built for the market rationality that created them. It is about competition. It is about ownership. It is about the individual above all else. YouTuber Sophie Dodge's (2016) video "Neoliberalism & Education" provides a general overview of neoliberalism's effects on education explaining how, in addition to reflecting its values, it also played a role in normalizing and promulgating market-driven attitudes.