Home Christian News ‘Woke’ Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means, Says Benjamin Watson

‘Woke’ Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means, Says Benjamin Watson

Watson notes, as have others, that the word, “woke,” came to the forefront of public awareness in the U.S. within the past decade with the growing public outcry against racial violence following the deaths of Michael Brown and many others. “In 2014 the word became intertwined with the Black Lives Matter movement,” says Watson, “placing it front and center in the public square and a burgeoning national reckoning on race. And for some Americans, that was a bridge too far. ‘Woke’ and its undefinable cousin CRT became the defense mechanism of choice.”

RELATED: Jemar Tisby on Grove City College, CRT, and His Struggles With White Evangelicalism

Since then, for some the word, “woke,” has come to stand for a “smorgasbord of ideals from sexuality to social justice,” says Watson. These are ideals that “prioritized political correctness, undercut American values, and threatened the future of religious freedom.” Watson himself is against some of the values represented by this sense of the word “woke”—but he rejects this definition. 

While some people are open to learning about “woke”’s history, many are not. And those who “abuse the word ‘woke,’” says Watson, take a posture that “discounts and delegitimizes a documented history of unjust, state-sanctioned attacks on black people through policy, programming, and personal prejudice.” He continues, “What’s so confusing about this phenomenon is that many who would readily confirm that such injustice exists and rightly condemn it will hide behind ‘woke’ as a shield preventing engagement on the matter. The cognitive dissonance is alarming.”

More than alarming, Watson finds the situation angering. “Every time I hear such reckless usage, I cringe and get angry,” he says, explaining that behind such carelessness is an implied disregard for the numerous injustices that Black people have faced in U.S. history and even an opposition to racial equality. 

Benjamin Watson concludes his post: “To be ‘woke’ is to desire the justice America promised and to keenly understand where it has miserably fallen short AND valiantly overcome. Some people would rather all of us stay quietly asleep. I’d rather stay ‘woke.’”