Woke

I’m tired of the misuse of the descriptive term “woke.” Woke is now used as an insult by many including some in the media and political parties.  Perhaps even in church its misuse is common through misunderstanding. How did it come to this?  We have a sorely divided nation with so many of us turning against each other through social media and news programs we watch, especially the news we consume with much of it being misleading or downright untruthful.  There are skilled provocateurs scheming to have us buy their goods – and line – as well as follow their crooked paths.  

Many Catholics – and Christians in general – also are guilty of disparaging our neighbors by calling them woke and doing it with meanness and a sneer.  Consider this description of "woke" in Wikipedia [whatever happened to the Encyclopedia Britannica of my youth and middle years?].

While the term woke initially pertained to issues of racial prejudice and discrimination impacting African Americans, it was appropriated by other activist groups with different causes. While there is no single agreed-upon definition of the term, it came to be primarily associated with ideas that involve identity and race and which are promoted by progressives, such as the notion of white privilege or slavery reparations for African Americans. 

Vox's Aja Romano writes that woke evolved into a "single-word summation of leftist political ideology, centered on social justice politics and critical race theory". Columnist David Brooks wrote in 2017 that "to be woke is to be radically aware and justifiably paranoid. It is to be cognizant of the rot pervading the power structures." Sociologist Marcyliena Morgan contrasts woke with cool in the context of maintaining dignity in the face of social injustice: "While coolness is empty of meaning and interpretation and displays no particular consciousness, woke is explicit and direct regarding injustice, racism, sexism, etc." (my emphasis).

Among American conservatives, woke has come to be used primarily as an insult. Members of the Republican Party have been increasingly using the term to criticize members of the Democratic Party, while more centrist Democrats use it against more left-leaning members of their own party; such critics accuse those on their left of using cancel culture to damage the employment prospects of those who are not considered sufficiently woke. Perry Bacon Jr. suggests that this "anti-woke posture" is connected to a long-standing promotion of backlash politics by the Republican Party, wherein it promotes white and conservative fear in response to activism by African Americans as well as changing cultural norms. Such critics often believe that movements such as Black Lives Matter exaggerate the extent of social problems…There is a lot more discussion and description about being woke to be found in Wikipedia and elsewhere.  

My point is that Jesus was woke.  I suppose I am as well.  My reasoning is the Catholic Church’s teaching about social justice clearly stated on the USCCB website:  Catholic social teaching is a central and essential element of our faith. Its roots are in the Hebrew prophets who announced God's special love for the poor and called God's people to a covenant of love and justice. It is a teaching founded on the life and words of Jesus Christ, who came "to bring glad tidings to the poor . . . liberty to captives . . . recovery of sight to the blind"(Lk 4:18-19), and who identified himself with "the least of these," the hungry and the stranger (cf. Mt 25:45). Catholic social teaching is built on a commitment to the poor. This commitment arises from our experiences of Christ in the eucharist.

As the Catechism of the Catholic Church explains, "To receive in truth the Body and Blood of Christ given up for us, we must recognize Christ in the poorest, his brethren" (no. 1397). "Catholic social teaching is a central and essential element of our faith."

Catholic social teaching emerges from the truth of what God has revealed to us about himself. We believe in the triune God whose very nature is communal and social. God the Father sends his only Son Jesus Christ and shares the Holy Spirit as his gift of love. God reveals himself to us as one who is not alone, but rather as one who is relational, one who is Trinity. Therefore, we who are made in God's image share this communal, social nature. We are called to reach out and to build relationships of love and justice.

Catholic social teaching is based on and inseparable from our understanding of human life and human dignity. Every human being is created in the image of God and redeemed by Jesus Christ and therefore is invaluable and worthy of respect as a member of the human family. Every person, from the moment of conception to natural death, has inherent dignity and a right to life consistent with that dignity. Human dignity comes from God, not from any human quality or accomplishment.

Here's a contribution from the New Yorker magazine [What Does "Woke" Mean, and How Did the Term Become So Powerful?]: For years, many on the right have been lambasting a certain kind of progressive sensibility denoted with the term “political correctness”—endless fodder for Rush Limbaugh and others in the nineteen-nineties. But those semi-comic tirades were nothing compared with the serious political fight against “woke.” Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, for example, 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. “The references to ‘woke’ before 2016, 2017, 2018 were kind of straightforward. It means ‘socially aware,’ ‘empathetic,’ ” Thorne says. “Then the right, the conservative right, seizes hold of this word,” to heap blame on it for everything from deadly mass shootings to lower military recruitment.

So, when we hear people or organizations being called woke, let’s not be deceived into thinking that’s bad, and they should be avoided or mocked.  We Catholics – and Christians in general – should embrace them.  We are woke and should be awake to our Church's social teachings.  

Jesus said, "Be awake!"  Perhaps "Be a woke!"  Let's listen to him.

Deacon David Pierce