Anarchists and the Roots of Wokeism
The 19th century’s anarchists overplayed their hand. Current wokesters may have already won.
by A.J. Caschetta
August 4, 2021, 11:51 PM
Many casual observers of the cultural war were caught by surprise when wokeism seemed to have sprung from nowhere during the annus horribilis that was 2020. Others recognized that it had been percolating on college campuses for years. This has led to some dispute over the origins of the term “woke” and its eponymous movement, with most pundits settling on the fairly recent past. But the spirit and psychology of wokeism, as well as its central metaphor, have been around for well over a century. Wokeism comes from 19th-century anarchism.
The term, if not the idea, is often credited to pop star Erykah Badu who sang “I Stay Woke” in a 2008 song titled “Master Teacher.” Merriam-Webster tells us that “woke’s transformation into a byword of social awareness likely started in 2008, with the release of Erykah Badu’s song.”
Others believe that the Hippies popularized the idea in the 1960s after co-opting it from the Beatniks, who themselves co-opted it from the slang terminology of Black jazz musicians. The Oxford English Dictionary credits the term to William Melvin Kelley’s 1962 article “If You’re Not Woke You Dig It; No mickey mouse can be expected to follow today’s Negro idiom without a hip assist. If You’re Woke You Dig It.” Others still find the origin of woke in 1940s labor union rhetoric, in particular an essay by J. Saunders Redding published in the first volume (1942) of Negro Digest. Nearly everyone agrees that the term stems from the black experience in America.
https://spectator.org/the-anarchists-roots-of-wokeism/
