Ah-Hah!!! I’ve found another term to hang around the neck of some candidate, along with “bleeding heart liberal” (neutered to “Progressive”) or demagogue (trimmed to “Populist”). It sums up an entire load of loathing held deep down for decades. You don’t have to describe what a candidate stands for or believes. You just have to use one word to paint them as unacceptable to the “masses”: just call them “woke”!!!
School Desegregation
It all started with the second phase of educational desegregation in the 1970’s. Phase one was in the late 1950’s and early 60’s. It required school districts to integrate, allowing black students to attend “white” schools, and white students to attend “black” schools. That was the product of the two Brown v Topeka Board of Education cases, and most Americans, once they got past inherent racism, realized it made sense. The black kid who lived down the street from a public school, shouldn’t have to walk past that school to attend another one far away, simply because of the color of their skin.
But it soon became clear that the “neighborhood school”, so deeply in-bred into an American culture like a Norman Rockwell’s painting; was synonymous with racially segregated schools. Letting black students into Little Rock Central High School; outlawing “white” schools and “black” schools, didn’t change the racial makeup of most public schools. If the attendance area was almost all one race of the other, then the school remained segregated. The result was that Brown wasn’t altering most American education. And so a new term entered the American racial lexicon: bussing.
White Flight
In the late 1960’s and early 70’s, students were bussed across school districts to reach some racial balance. The goal was to have black and white students going to schools together; bussing was the only way to desegregate our educational systems. But the division it created was huge: taking away “the school” that generations of locals attended, forcing them to “the other” side of town, and making them go to school with “them”. It really made folks angry.
The next “move” was called “white flight”. If you didn’t want your kid in an integrated school across town, then move out of town, out of the district, out of the county. There were rural schools, technically desegregated but practically “all white”, just across the county line. If you were willing to move out in the country and commute into town, your kid could go to a neighborhood school, usually of all one race. And that’s what many did, here in Columbus, and in most large cities in the nation.
Or there were private schools, where practical segregation was still “available”. If only the government could help pay for that private, segregated education. That’s when the movement for public funding of private schools began. We have a special term “educational” term for that – vouchers.
Awake or Aggrieved
Folks who wanted truly desegregated schools, not just on paper but in fact, were “awake” to the realities of America. They saw past the law, Brown v Board of Education, and saw that the “neighborhood Black school” was still getting less. “Equality” was more than just equality in law, it had to be equality in opportunity, in access, and in facilities. That wasn’t going to happen until everyone of every race had the same amount of “skin in the game”. Folks who understood that were “awake” to reality – they were “woke”.
Many white parents were “aggrieved”. When desegregation extended to higher education, and then into the work place, they became even more “aggrieved”. And so a new political polarity developed: “white grievance” versus “woke”. And in the past couple of decades, when equal opportunities were extended to women and to LGBTQ persons, the “grievance versus woke” divide became a even more potent political force. Grievance came to represent the lost “advantages” of White men over women and minorities. “Grievance” drove the Tea Party movement (especially when the first black President was elected). And tapping into “grievance” was Donald Trump’s “superpower”. With all his immense failings, it still is.
Shorthand
So when DeSantis or other Republicans use the shorthand term “woke”, they are simply trying to tap the power of grievance that many white, and particularly white male Americans still feel. They won’t define what they really mean by “woke”. After all, who wants to say that they are losing their advantages because of race, or gender. That sounds like whining, like white men can’t compete on a level field, and need “help” to make it. And no one wants to admit that.
So they harbor their yearning for the “good old days”; when minorities, women, LGBTQ folks, weren’t allowed to compete. They hold close to their grievance, their “hurt”, their lost “rights”. And for those whose eyes are wide open, and see what’s fair, what fits into the American story of greater equality and inclusion: why those folks are just “woke”.
