Pat’s Polemics

As I’ve written here and elsewhere, I bristle at the words woke, wokeism, and wokeness as used by people who have never had to deal with what we were waking up to. When I was a White kid I knew nothing about woke; I said “Is he awake yet.” Then I married into a Black family and people said,”Is he woke yet.” Both are found in the dictionary as alternatives with ‘woke’ being associated more with the South.
But just as in India where the word was ‘bedari”, awakened, woke came to be used by African-Americans to refer to the state of being aware that second-class citizenship need not be the lot of a person because of skin color. What so many people I listen to miss is how many young Black people and Hispanic I worked with as a social worker/counselor needed to be reminded that they had rights; my team with the Arizona State Employment Service actually had a unit including a film on how ethnic discrimination was now, 1969, against the law. That was news to them.
The propagandists on the Right do not mention that, preferring to highlight the Black Panthers, the Black Muslims and Malcolm X so as to frighten the public and to ask for money and votes. Unfortunately, the public at large has bought into that, pointing to MLK as a “good one.” They forget political cartoonists like our state newspaper’s Reg Manning who depicted MLK as a dangerous radical.
My apology comes from my recognition of just how frightening I must have been to many of the people I was raised among when I discovered that on marrying my Black wife I had consigned myself to living in a very restricted area of South Phoenix (I note that people too young to remember use that toponym as if all of South Phoenix – once a semi-separate part of Phoenix proper – from Wikipedia: “The construction of railroad tracks south of the Salt River, as well as a number of heavy floodings, including one 1891, meant that Caucasian residents of Phoenix moved north, leaving minority residents in South Phoenix.[3]” and “In the decades prior to the 1970s, South Phoenix was the only part of the city in which homes were sold to African American and Mexican American residents, due to restrictive covenants in place on housing in other parts of the city.[12])
The 1968 Fair Housing Act allowed us to move to wherever we could afford though some real estate board of the state required us to lower the price we got by almost 10%. It was only by the actions of civil rights activists like Rev. Brooks of Southminster Prebyterian Church and so many other “woke” Blacks that allowed us to live and raise our kids where we wanted to.
And that is precisely why “woke” has been turned into an epithet by the Right – they lost the privilege of living where they wanted and despising me for lacking their status. They hope Trump will restore that.