I'm Woke!!!

Podcast of this article

Woke

            I’m a professor.  I teach at a public university.   Let's do a little experiment: What comes to mind when you hear these terms: Professor.  University.  College

Right now, neurons are connecting up with other neurons.  Neural networks are being activated.  You’re burping up all your background knowledge and experience.  Professor.  University.  College. 

            What comes to mind?  What thoughts?  Feelings?

            Do you have positive thoughts? Do you have negative thoughts?  Based on what?  What has been your experience?  How do you know?  Where did you get this knowledge?  Personal experience? Anecdotal evidence?  Can this be generalized to a larger population?  That is, is your knowledge true of larger groups?  How do you know?

Now I’m going to give you another term: Woke – (as it relates to systemic racism)

            What comes to mind?  What do you see?  Who do you see?  What do you think that term means?  What do you know?  How do you know?  Where did you get this knowledge?  How do you know it’s accurate?

Full Disclosure

Full disclosure -- I’m an over-caffeinated bald, white professor, working at a public university, in teacher education.  I’m woke. 

I’m really woke.  I’m so woke it hurts sometimes.  I’m uber work.  I’m mega-woke.  I am super-duper, extra-special woke.  That’s how woke I am.  Every day that I wake up I’m woke. And I’m teaching at a public university preparing future teachers.  How’s that?

Do you have a sudden urge to write to your state legislator?  Do you want to see my syllabi?  Do you want to email our University President (email included by the way).  Do you want me to be quiet?  Do you want to prevent me from saying stuff?  Do you think I’m engaging in propaganda?  Do you think I’m trying to brainwash students?

Don Quixote

            Governor Ron DeSantis down in Florida, is so afraid of woke that he even made a law.  Gov DeSantis introduced the Stop WOKE Act. 

            “We don’t want any of that ‘woke’ crap,” they say.

            What do you mean by “woke” crap? 

            “You know,” they say.

            Yes, I do know, I say.  But you don’t.  And that’s a bit of a problem.

The anti-wokers are bit like Don Quixote fighting windmills.  Even when they come face-to-face with facts, they are unwilling to accept that they could be wrong.  Anti-wokers like Gov DeSantis are data-resistant you see.  They don’t let something as trivial as knowledge and facts get in the way of their coming to conclusions about things. 

They’ve been knowledge vaccinated.

Know What You Are Against

        I teach students in all my classes at my publicly funded university that If you’re against something, it’s always best to know something about that which you are against. Or else you could be against the wrong thing … or against nothing at all.

            I teach this in my classes.  Is this wrong?  Is this a bad thing?  Does that mean I’m woke?  Can I come to Florida and teach, Gov DeSantis?

What is Woke?

            So, what is this very horrible thing that is so very horrible that Gov DeSantis passed a law against it?  What is ‘woke’ in terms of systemic racism?

            Woke. 

There is a point, after much reflection, reading, studying, listening, and conversation, where you begin to have another perspective.   You see things differently than you once did, and you think a bit differently about things.  Then you wonder, why you didn’t see those things all along.  That’s woke.  It’s a deeper understanding of things that you didn’t have before.

            But one of the problems with the term ‘woke’ is that it may give the impression that you just wake up one morning and you’re woke (in a non-sleepy sense). In other words, it is the misconception that you could listen to a bald professor at a University and get all woked up and have a different understanding of things.  I wish that I was that powerful. 

The Road to Damascus

             ‘Wokeness” or a change of thinking doesn’t happen all of a sudden.  There are very few road-to-Damascus experiences in life.  Understanding and changes in understanding come over time usually as a result of a lot of thinking and experiencing.

            Every year here at MSU we have an evangelist that comes to campus.  He holds up a sign and shouts things at students as they walk by.  What he shouts is not always very pleasant.  Some students stop and try to argue with him.  He shouts back.  Students shout back … he shouts back … and there’s a whole lot of shouting back and forth – as each tries to ‘win’ the argument.  There’s no wokeness going on here. At the end of the day, nobody has changed anybody’s mind about anything.  There’s just a lot of shouting going back and forth.  Each then go back and tells their people how good they were at saying pithy things to counter the argument – There’s no ‘woke’ going to happen here. 

            The evangelist is never going to say, “You know, that’s a really good point.  I think I’ll go home.”

            No student is ever going to say, “Hmmm, I never thought about that before.  I guess I am going to burn in hell.  I think I’ll go to church instead of going to class.”

            Do I think anybody will become ‘woke’ by this article?  In my dreams.  Nobody is going to fundamentally change their views on things based on this single article.  At best, I’ll give shape to what people are already thinking or solidify their views on things.  Nobody will read this and be convinced of anything … other than perhaps that I am a mouthy little no-nothing weasel.

            The term ‘woke’ has become a pejorative term used by some. 

            “All that ‘woke’ crap,” they say.

            I used to wish that a term other than ‘woke’ would have been used to denote this new perspective point.  Then I realized that no matter what term was used, it would have been turned into a pejorative term and used to diminish and discredit others without any real understanding of the term.  It’s used to silence those who may have a perspective other than that of Gov. DeSantis. 

            “We’re not going to have any of that woke crap in our classroom,” he says.

The Stop WOKE Act

A press release from a group touting the Stop WOKE Act in Florida:

'The Stop WOKE Act banned instruction in schools or mandatory training in workplaces that “suggest a person is privileged or oppressed because of their race, sex or national origin.'”

The term ‘woke’ has obviously been abducted and repurposed for political purposes here.  What is described here is not anything like how the term has been used to address an awareness of systematic racism within our various systems.  And the sentence above is nothing but a word salad filled with emotional buzzwords.

Un-pack-O-rating.

" … instruction in schools or mandatory training in workplaces that “suggest a person is privileged or oppressed because of their race, sex or national origin.”

Mandatory training.  This sounds like a re-education camp.  Mandatory.  Nobody likes being forced to do anything, and by the way, you train animals.  You educate humans.  But we have “mandatory training” in LETRS and other professional development.  Is this different?

Privileged.  Notice how the word ‘privileged’ is smuggled in there.  Nobody likes the thought of some people being privileged.  Nobody should be privileged.   That’s not fair. 

Oppressed.  Oppressed is another negative buzzword.  Nobody likes the thought that some might be oppressed.  After all, this is America.  Nobody gets oppressed in America.  That only happens in foreign countries.  Not in God-bless-America.  Nobody likes the thought that others might be oppressed.

Race, sex, or national origin.

Sex.  Would you disagree that women’s wages are below that of men’s for doing the same job?  Go ask a group of professional women.  Ask them if they might have faced a hurdle or two based on their sex.   According to Forbs:

(a) Women earn an average of 16% less than men.

(b) For every dollar earned by men, women earned 84 cents.

Race.  This is the tough one isn’t it.  And this is at the heart of the anti-woke hysteria. 

My Woke

            Before the public murder of George Floyd, I thought I was good on the race thing.  I had a black roommate in college.  I had lots of black friends.  I never used inappropriate words.  I thought I was good.  I didn’t know what critical race theory was, but I certainly didn't think it was needed. 

            The George Floyd murder happened just 70 miles from where I live.  It prompted changes in a lot of people.  I wasn’t ‘woke’ after this incident, I was ‘alerted’ that perhaps I needed to know more.

            I’m in education, so I decided to stay in my own lane.  For months, I read every academic book or article related to systemic racism in education and critical race theory.  That’s what scholars do, you see.  We study the world through scholarly books and articles.  But I also engaged in conversations and a lot of listening and experiencing. 

            I used to think I had a handle on it all.  But then I realized the world was a bit different than I had thought.

            I think differently now. 

            My paradigm has been shifted.

I'm woke.

Is that a bad thing?