How Britain ‘woke’ up in 2019 – and what we saw wasn’t nice
by Iain Macwhirter, Herald Scotland:
At the start of 2019, few but the politically committed used the term “woke”. If they’d heard it at all, most people would have assumed it had something to do with insomnia.
“Woke” only entered the Oxford English Dictionary last year as meaning “alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice”. Like its parent “politically correct”, woke is a passion of the urban left. It is PC for the age of LGBTQIA+.
The Guardian suggested “woke” as word of the year, which arguably it should be, though not for the reason it thinks. For woke has changed meaning in the last 12 months, and become a term of derision, referring to a style of self-righteous, right-on thinking favoured by, well, Guardian columnists. It is now used to denote the metropolitan identity politics that contributed to Labour’s greatest defeat since the 1930s.
No-one is sure where the word “woke” came from, except that it emerged from African-American vernacular for “staying alert”, as in “stay woke, brother”. In recent years it was adopted by the BlackLivesMatter movement with their hashtag #staywoke – meaning keeping black issues uppermost on social media.
It was soon adopted by white millennials to emblemise not just racial awareness but a whole identitarian outlook on life. Woke expresses the ultra-feminist, multi-ethnic, gender non-conforming culture fashionable in American and UK campuses.
Woke people love people of colour and loathe “straight white males”, “gammon” and “boomers”. They adore so-called “non-binary” people who claim not to identify with any gender. No-one is quite sure what non-binary means. Do they swing both ways? No, that’s bisexual. Are they transgender? Definitely not, and nor are they intersex. It’s one of life’s mysteries to many folk who are less woke.
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