I recently read a fantastic thread on Twitter from Dr. Alayo Tripp, aka @phonotactician, discussing changing use of “woke” — a participle that originated in (some) varieties of African American English, but that has been adopted into mainstream, white varieties of English with dramatically changing meanings. Dr. Tripp wrote about the intersection of borrowing, semantic change, and anti-blackness, and did an excellent job of explaining something I had been struggling to articulate.

NonBlack people here’s a thread for you about the word “woke.” Since “no mickey mouse can be expected to follow today’s Negro idiom without a hip assist.” 🧵
— Alayo Tripp, PhD (@phonotactician) September 1, 2020

I thought the thread was great, especially the discussion of superlative morphology (“the wokest”), and have reproduced the thread here, with their permission:

The Thread:

NonBlack people here’s a thread for you about the word “woke.” Since “no mickey mouse can be expected to follow today’s Negro idiom without a hip assist.”

TL;DR: If you are using the word “woke” to denigrate people then you are an agent of antiBlack racism. If you’re not Black and you’re using this word at all you should think carefully about why.

You might already be aware that the word “woke” comes from African American English (AAE). It even has a perfectly literal sense which we can readily translate to standard American English (SAE). SAE: is he asleep or awake? AAE: he sleep or woke?

This usage is demonstrated in the 1962 essay published by William Melvin Kelley publishes in the New York Times entitled “If You’re Woke, You Dig It.” Despite the subject of the piece being extant Negro idiom, he is variously credited with coining the usage.

The application of the asleep/awake concept to specifically social justice gains a lot of traction in the decade to follow. See: Malcom X, 1965

To “stay” in AAE expresses an intensified continuative and habitual aspect of a verb. To “stay tweeting” is to tweet continuously and habitually. Combining the AAE grammar with the social nuance, i will now give a definition of what it means to stay woke:

remain aware of the value of Black people in an antiBlack world which seeks to devalue, exploit and destroy us. Seek solidarity with those who have woken and have compassion for those who are still sleeping.

This phrase is widely used in the protest movement of the 1970s, but because antiBlackness, Erykah Badu is often credited with coining it decades later in 2008. It later reaches new popularity and visibility with the Black Lives Matter movement and the ubiquity of social media.

NonBlack folks begin widely adopting it as a term, using it to define nonBlack identities... unmindful of how use of the *stative verb* connects to Black conceptions of engagement with social issues and invent comparative terms to facilitate competition amongst themselves.

nonBlack people instead adopted woke as an *adjective* and quickly took to discussing the properties of being woker than one another, and what might characterize the wokest among them. (This sounds as ungrammatical to my ear as “awakest.”)

The practice of defining nB identities as either more or less woke of course goes hand in hand with establishing nB ideology regarding the value of “wokeness.” Is it a virtue, or a flaw? How can white people determine which wokeness is authentic and which is “performative?*”

*it’s of course all performance wrt speech act theory but here we will use “performative” in the colloquial sense which means “(inauthentically or inappropriately) signaling a belief in ideological superiority”

White people have been gripped in a heated discussion about whether and how they should aspire to be woke, and what performances of “wokeness” are appropriate and acceptable.

But missing from this conversation is always “why?” It is for white folk somehow a foregone conclusion that discussions of wokeness are important.

Black conversations using the word historically present the state of being woke as an unquestionable good *for the sake of Black people.* Criticisms of the application of the word in this community explicitly center the worth and value of Black people.

So to review, nonBlack people have been gripped in a very heated public discussion about whether and how this label can denote something truly awful. This is because collectively, nonBlack people are antiBlack.

As the term reached widespread recognition particularly among white people, dictionaries begin to add the term, and its history is whitewashed. The year is 2017, 55 years after Kelley’s NYT essay.

(The line in the first tweet is the subtitle of that essay.) Dictionaries broadly redefine “woke” to reference alertness to injustice, with racism sometimes being highlighted as an afterthought in the definition (but not antiBlackness.)

This entire conversation necessarily dislocates the language and the issues it addresses from the people it was unquestionably created to affirm and uplift. It’s not a coincidence that this dislocation admits so much derision to the conversation.

It’s a really consistent cycle where racists on the right adopt Black language and then see white liberals adopt that same language to deride and mock their white political opposition. AntiBlackness is the commonality. Also see: simp, cancel, hater and king

If people in your sphere are using this language pejoratively and you say nothing then you are normalizing antiBlackness. You can do better.

This thread is not about the broad phenomenon of language change or borrowing; it is about antiBlack appropriation. Derails will get summarily blocked.

I accidentally a whole tweet in this thread pivoting from the literal to the figurative interpretation but OH WELL

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(Tweets from @phonotactician are their intellectual property and are reproduced here with their permission).

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