What is ‘Woke’? More Than a Joke

Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on Mar 24, 2023

“The Biden administration seems more interested in woke fantasies than the hard reality Americans face every day,” said Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders in her Republican rebuttal to President Biden’s State of the Union address.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a potential presidential candidate, even created the Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (W.O.K.E.) Act to help businesses, employees, children and families “fight back against woke indoctrination” and make sure “Florida is where woke comes to die.”

But I thought the right’s freakout over “wokeness” was stretched beyond belief when House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, a Kentucky Republican, suggested that Silicon Valley Bank had collapsed because it was “one of the most woke banks.”

Comer was chastising SVB’s “ESG-type” policies, a package of environmental, social and corporate governance-driven investing that has been embraced by billion-dollar asset managers, much to the alarm of certain conservatives.

DeSantis, for one, charged that Silicon Valley Bank’s diversity, equity and inclusion requirements “diverted from them focusing on their core mission.”

That’s a heck of a stretch. Whatever you might think of initiatives aimed at leveling the playing field for women or people of color, there’s no evidence they had anything to do with the actual causes of the bank collapse. Try rising interest rates, bank deregulation or over-investment in long-term government bonds, just for starters.

But I do not mean to imply that the “woke” left is exempt from criticism. Both sides of the political fence are infiltrated by a certain number of performative idealists, less interested in improving the lives of those who genuinely need help. In reality, they are more interested in self-congratulatory word policing and other gestures to show how hip they may be to the latest jargon of those whom the right derides as “social justice warriors.”

I think the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., had something like that in mind when he delivered a prophetic commencement address at Oberlin College in June 1965. Entitled “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” he said in part that, “There are all too many people who, in some great period of social change, fail to achieve the new mental outlooks that the new situation demands. There is nothing more tragic than to sleep through a revolution.”

Indeed, whether you believe that “Black Lives Matter” or prefer to declare that “All lives matter,” I believe Dr. King might well say something like this: Actions matter.

For that, it helps to stay awake.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)