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To Republicans, Decency is “Woke”

The politics of fear is nothing new.
We’ve seen it throughout history.
It’s a well-worn playbook.
When you lack actual ideas, you need an enemy.
When you have nothing redemptive to offer, you have to create a monster to push back against.
When you are devoid of decency, you need to vilify it and somehow turn that decency into a threat.
That’s what we’re seeing right now in America.

Turn on any Fox News show monologue, read any Right-wing hack news outlet, visit any MAGA influencer’s TikTok page, or sample any Republican politician’s social media account and you’ll find their latest ubiquitous boogeyman: the “Woke Mob.”

They shoehorn the words into every televised conversation, every incendiary think piece, every pearl-clutching press conference—usually tethered to other recently-wielded phrases like “the Radical Left” and “cancel culture.” These repetitive, nonsensical word salads are designed to terrify their constituents, leverage fear in the easy-manipulated, and to misdirect them from the reality that they have no actual platform, outside of the opposition to progress, the resistance to diversity, the aversion to equity, and the evasion of justice.

“Woke” is versatile Conservative catch-all epithet:

“Woke” is Republican-speak for those of us who believe every America adult should have a voice in the electoral process of this nation,
for people who don’t believe a human being’s body, gender identity, or sexual orientation are anyone else’s business,
for we who are sickened at the violence against the Asian community: the direct result of the irresponsible rhetoric of a Republican president,
for Americans who are disgusted that a cancer diagnosis now often necessitates a gofundme page, because we are making illness a financial death sentence,
for people who will not abide the assassination of unarmed people of color by members of a police force infected with white supremacy,
for those who grieve the way this nation is ravaged by preventable gun violence because those who profit from it have such a stranglehold on our lawmakers—
for those of us who exhibit the slightest empathy whatsoever toward migrant families or the working poor or people of color, when we see how hostile our nation has been to them and how oppressive it still is.

It’s woke to want fair elections.
It’s woke to be anti-racist.
It’s woke to be anti-fascist.
It’s woke to trust Science.
It’s woke to wear a mask in a pandemic.
It’s woke to be the parent of a bullied child.
It’s woke to want to be addressed with the gender you identify with.
It’s woke to want a less-polluted community.

Anything that brings equity gets this label from the Right because inequity is its only goal.

It turns out that “Woke” is Republican-speak for anyone who gives a damn about other human beings or the planet. It is a dog-whistle slur against expressions of humanity that seek to make a vulnerable community less vulnerable, or to spread resources, opportunity, power, and a voice to more people.

Republicans traffic in words like “woke” because those words require no quantifiable data, no measure objective reality, no definable parameters for their base. They are simply magical incantations that conjure up terror in the minds of a generation of uninformed white people who have lost the ability to think critically and who desperately need someone to ratify their prejudices and give credence to their blind hatred of difference.

Watching Conservative America’s histrionics about the Woke Mob’s swiftly-encroaching threat, I am greatly encouraged because I see how terrified they are. It tells me that they sense the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice, they see the progress on the horizon of history, they feel the demographics here moving toward a place where they will soon be the minority.

Yes, the Woke Mob is coming for them: the disparate, sprawling army of fiercely devoted human beings who know that diversity makes us better, that compassion is the better path, that more voices make a sweeter sound.

And the bigots and the hate-preachers and the supremacists are right to be afraid of us because we in our “wokeness” are going to make sure that they do not have the final word here.

To Republicans, to be woke is to be deeply human, and that humanity will be the foe they cannot defeat.

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