The Word That Wouldn’t Die: Awake in the Age of Forgetting

It was a warning — a spoken-word portent of the dangers lurking in plain sight. A call to vigilance. A whispered watchword passed between those who knew the system was not built for them. From churches to courtrooms, ballrooms to drinking fountains, every institution was wired against them.

“Liberty and justice for all” was a hollow mantra, a borrowed line from movie scripts, not a manifest reality. A promise that never crossed the color barrier. A refrain as empty as the bridge of a vapid pop song, sung past the millions it excluded. The very same who weren’t included in the declaration that claimed that all men were created equal and who were barred from the promised unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

“So I advise everybody, be a little careful when they go along through there [Alabama]—best stay woke, keep their eyes open.”

The word is short. It bursts from puckered lips and explodes in a dead-end consonant. It’s a four-letter epithet, one that its user might not even fully comprehend. Its deliberate morphosyntactic rebellion only adds to its iconoclastic aura. It refused to follow the rules and didn’t care whether it was misunderstood and today it challenges those that use it to grapple with its depth and true meaning.

It was in 1938, during the segregated black-and-white days of the American South, that this zeitgeist word was first recorded. Linguistic history was made by a man who carried a thousand songs in his memory from across generations and was himself a product of the nineteenth century. Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Lead Belly, the self-described “musicianer” (to avoid pigeonholing tags like bluesman or folk singer) was first recorded using the word in this context, warning his listeners to be vigilant against a system raised against them. He finishes his song with a warning, a stark reminder to northern blacks that the freedom they believed they possessed was fragile; in the segregationist South, those rights could vanish in an instant. He intones that they best stay ‘woke’.

The song preceding the warning is deceptively cheerful, the kind of tune that might get your foot tapping while your civil rights disappear. It jumps, it swings, it practically begs for a dance floor. You can picture Lead Belly smiling as he plays it, which only adds to its cunning. The genius lies in the bait: rhythm first, truth second. The listener is already halfway to the chorus before the full weight of the message sets in, this charming little ditty is a canary in the coal mine.

“Be careful. Stay woke. Keep your eyes open.” He wasn’t offering travel advice. He was sounding the alarm. The subject of the song? The Scottsboro Boys: nine Black teenagers accused of raping two white women in what was, at the time, not so much a miscarriage of justice as it was standard operating procedure. The evidence was flimsy, the trials a farce, and the outrage, when it came at all, was years too late. But such was the legal pageantry of the Jim Crow South, robes, gavels, and a healthy disdain for anything resembling due process. The case would go on to help ignite the civil rights movement and loosely inspire To Kill A Mockingbird, a work of fiction that, ironically, became more widely taught in American schools than the real event ever was. Until, of course, it too was deemed dangerous and became one of the most banned books in America.

Lead Belly, born around 1888, a mere 23 years after slavery was technically abolished, though its spirit hung around like a houseguest who wouldn’t take the hint, became a voice for the voiceless. His music carried the bruises of a people told they were free while being worked, watched, and whipped by other means. He lived a wandering life, not out of whimsy, but because opportunity had a habit of walking right past Black men with guitars. He learned songs the old way, by ear, by heart, by necessity, preserving the history of a people the country had tried very hard to keep illiterate, and thus, conveniently forgettable, without history.

His oeuvre is a pillar of that noble cry from the depths of the Black experience, of knowing that you have to be conscious of the politics of race, class, systemic racism, and the ways that society is stratified and not equal. It was carved from the lived experience of being on the wrong side of every American promise. It was a clarion call for awareness of the steaming pile of racial injustice that the West has been drowning in since the first slave ship hit their shores.

“Woke” was never meant to be a fashion statement, nor a punchline for late-night pundits. It was forged in fire — a warning against complacency, a code of survival in a hostile world, a whispered truth passed hand to hand in places where speaking too loudly could cost you your job, your freedom, your life. And now? It’s been defanged, ridiculed, and repurposed as a laughable tool for the establishment to twist and use as a weapon against the very people who coined it. A tool turned trap.

But here we are.

That once-powerful symbol of resistance has been seized by the very institutions that have spent centuries systematically grinding Black lives into the dirt. The term’s true meaning – an enlightened awareness of the raw, open wound that is America’s racial nightmare – has been hijacked, rebranded, and bastardized by the media, politicians, and every smarmy corporate entity looking to peddle their brand of faux-progressive vacuousness.

White power structures, always ready to neutralize any threat to their dominion, have managed to take “woke” and turn it into a bad word. What was once a rallying cry for justice has been twisted into a political cudgel used to mock and discredit any real attempt to rip the veil off the charade of equality. It’s not just a matter of words, it’s an all out war on language itself. These are the same tricks they’ve been pulling for centuries, using distorted definitions and reworked narratives to keep the oppressed on the back foot.

The message is clear: If you’re Black and you’ve got the audacity to say, “Enough is enough,” you better brace yourself for a full-throttle media blitz designed to slap you back into line. “Woke” isn’t just a word anymore; it’s a weapon in the arsenal of those who would rather keep things as they are. Keep the system in place. Maintain the lie.

The war on the word is real. One must admire Governor Ron DeSantis, a man of such moral fortitude and delicate constitution that he has taken it upon himself to wage battle not against poverty, corruption, or corporate greed, but against a single four-letter word. With all the thunderous pomp of a preacher chasing demons out of a tent revival, he stood tall, or as tall as his platform shoes would allow, and declared with Churchillian solemnity: “We will fight the woke in the legislature. We will fight the woke in education. We will fight the woke in the businesses. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob.”

One would think he was rallying troops at the Somme, not banning Dr. Seuss in suburban Florida. And then, with the air of a man who had just won a duel at dawn, he announced, “Our state is where woke goes to die.” Which is to say, Florida has bravely volunteered to become the final resting place of empathy, historical accuracy, and critical thought, a noble sacrifice indeed. If only all public servants had such vision, such valor, such tireless commitment to the extermination of adjectives. The republic would be saved in no time.

But perhaps the word isn’t dead. Perhaps it’s only been buried alive, waiting to be reclaimed. Not diluted. Not defanged. Reclaimed.

Woke should still mean what it always did — a refusal to sleep through injustice, a refusal to walk blind through a rigged world. But now, we must open our eyes even wider. Because the danger has spread. The systems of domination are no longer content to whisper their intentions, they’re marching proudly through parliaments and prime-time, saluting strongmen and silencing dissent. Expansion of its meaning doesn’t mean dilution. It means depth. Woke must grow to meet the scale of the threat, but never lose sight of its roots.

The cruelty has gone global. In Hungary, in India, in Israel, in Italy, in Turkey, in Russia, in El Salvador, in Argentina and in the United States authoritarians are in power, while in consolidated democracies like France, Germany and Spain they are waiting in the wings for their chance to dismantle decades of hard-fought freedoms. From refugee camps to pride bans, from book bans and even book burnings to surveillance states, the machinery of control is humming louder than ever. Fascism might be wearing a friendlier face, corporate-backed and algorithm-approved, but its boots are just as heavy. And they still land first on the necks of the most vulnerable who then get sent to concentration camps with merch-friendly, tourist-board names like Alligator Alcatraz, where malice is privatized, sanitized, and sold with a Cruella smile.

To be woke today is not to simply repost a tweet or correct someone’s pronouns at brunch. It is to see — really see — the gears turning beneath the spectacle. To understand how the attacks on feminism are connected to the attacks on teachers. How banning history books is connected to banning abortions. How denying Palestinians their humanity is connected to deporting migrants at sea. How billionaires cosplaying as victims is just a distraction from the suffering they bankroll.

Woke is vigilance. Woke is resistance. Woke is knowing the storm is already here and choosing to stand against it, not just for yourself, but for everyone in its path. Being woke isn’t about performative outrage or headline-chasing culture wars. It’s not about manufactured grievances or moral panic over pronouns, casting choices or Happy Holidays. These distractions are meant to trivialize the real fight: your right to vote, your right to exist in freedom, the survival of the planet itself.

While the right derides “wokeness” as someone putting oat milk in their coffee or casting a Black mermaid, real wokeness is about sounding the alarm when protestors are jailed, dissidents are disappeared, elections are rigged, or laws are passed to ban books and criminalize care.

It’s time to pull “woke” out of the mud it’s been dragged through. To scrub off the satire and the sneers and remind people that it was never a joke. It was a lifeline. A warning label. A survival guide written in code. At its core, staying woke means staying alert to the theft of your rights — the right to protest, to learn your history, to love who you love, to exist without fear.

So let the word expand.
Let it rise.
Let it mean Black. Brown. Queer. Poor. Disabled. Undocumented. Defiant.
Let it mean being vigilant against every form of violence that power cloaks in flags, logos, and prayers.
Let it mean choosing the side of the oppressed, even if you’re not one of them, because freedom is a chain that breaks at its weakest link.

Woke was never supposed to be comfortable. It was supposed to keep you up at night.

Lead Belly wasn’t singing about branding or buzzwords. He was warning us. And in this moment, with democracy gasping and the jackboots echoing louder each day, there’s never been a better time to hear his voice. His warning hasn’t changed. The dangers still lurk in plain sight. Best stay woke.

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