SOCIAL media has exposed its users to social consciousness.
It isn’t a bad thing because it teaches us to be empathetic and to understand the world we live in. The word that’s been coined for social consciousness is “Woke.”
Erykah Badu is credited to being the artist who bought the word to life on her 2008 song, “Master Teacher,” where she sings the phrase “I stay woke,” and the songstress sings about dreaming of a world with racial equality. It is similar to how Childish Gambino sings it on “Redbone.”
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The word was popularised by the “Black Lives Matter” movement in America and the African-American community influenced it usage on social media.
The word refers to an intangible level of awareness with social justice issues and predictably, conservatives have mocked it and the people who regard themselves as woke by calling them “social justice warriors” and “keyboard warriors”. Most of them cite that woke people’s activism only resides on social media.
The observation is obviously flawed because I believe your state of mind is everything. Being woke is about mentally understanding the issues that you feel society or systems need to change; it’s also about assuring marginalised groups that they’re valid and heard.
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Wokeness is about sensitivity and critical thought and giving a voice to the ignored. The original idea of being woke is good – it teaches progressive thinking!
Now, why would anything that’s meant to be progressive be stagnated? My biggest problem with “wokeness” is people that subscribe to it are increasingly becoming performative.
From what I’ve observed online, some woke users just pick fights online in a hurry to use lame buzzwords and flex their pseudo-intellect.
I’ve also noticed parts of the culture that have a mob-mentality towards anyone that disagrees with them which is ironic considering that’s how conservatives go about their engagement online. A Sunday Times opinion piece by Haji Mohamed Dawjee nailed the current climate of woke culture in his “Woke Choke” piece. He wrote, “Are we woke to the point of suffocating our ability to engage objectively and constructively with subjects that desperately call for nuance.”
Wokeness should not be linear in it’s nature, some “woke” people online fail to take part in critical ongoing discussions without getting upset.
Even though people are triggered by certain things online, and I’m not calling for people to not be upset about horrible things that happen online, but people should ease up on the militant approach in their discussions.
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