It’s good you’re Woke. Now check your history.

There’s a lot of discussion about “Woke” these days, particularly from the Right. They say it’s just a bad thing. I like to be sure of the meaning of words like this that come from current events or maybe even from pop culture. The meanings can be unexpected. I started with the Internet dictionary meanings of “woke”. It said that the meaning was “aware”. It did not seem an adequate meaning. Currently, it seems largely to refer to unawareness of the degree of racism in American society. That seemed more relevant.

The thing is though, that seemed such a limited meaning. It does not seem to capture the picture that Blacks in America have to worry about how a minor legal encounter in traffic or on the street can become fatal. Asians are finding that they can be accused of all kinds of things or simply attacked for no reason. Woke seems like far too passive of a word. More than an awareness is needed. I also think though that a better understanding of what “Woke” means would help. What is this an awareness of? At one point, Martin Luther King thought that it was about racism but he came to believe that was more than that. He thought that it was really about Social Justice and it often applied to whites as well as Blacks and other minorities.

I think that another reference from history should be mentioned. That would be John Locke. A lot of the philosophical and even moral foundations of America came from the teachings of John Locke. A lot of the practical foundations as well. He was the one that supported religious freedom. He did not support it necessarily because he thought religion was such a good thing. He supported religious freedom because he said that without it there would never be social peace. I think that he would say the same thing about Social Justice for the exact same reason. Without Social Justice, we will not have social peace. Without social peace, we cannot build a future for this nation.

Another broader way of looking at this would be to say that America practices Social Darwinism. It is a brutal thing and is dangerous to any modern society or civilization. Civilizations do not exist in nature. They are something that is created by a human strategy. A civilization is based upon cooperation and working together. Social conflict endangers the civilization that we depend on to survive more than you may know. The American Constitution is a statement of law about how we will work together and the Preamble of the Constitution is a moral statement of why.

In practical terms, we are wasting a huge potential resource by socially disenfranchising minorities that offer so much to our society. We are fighting a war of choice within our society. It is being pressed by a group that feels threatened by people that are different from them. They feel threatened by change, but it is a change that they and their ancestors worked for when creating this nation. The thing is that civilization has always been built by the coming together of peoples genetically and culturally. That is how it has been and always will be. Fighting it is to fight the future. Rejecting other peoples from your society leads to the creation of competing cultures. There is more to be gained from peace and cooperation than the strategy of conflict we can trace back from Iron Age warfare to Bronze Age warfare to tribal warfare. For thousands of years, philosophers and religions have tried to offer alternatives to this cycle of violence that is based on our Darwinian drives for dominance. Violent competition may have been a good strategy before civilization, but it is not a good strategy now, not even for warriors. It is why Christianity was embraced and replaced the philosophy of Rome. The Romans had demonstrated all that could be accomplished by violence and murder. Pretty much everyone hated it and knew its moral evil. When offered an alternative, “love one another”, they embraced it and embarked on a new chapter in the development of civilization made possible by greater cooperation. Yes, it took a long time and violence after that, but America was made to be a nation of law and Social Justice rather than just power. Returning to tribalism, will kill off the potential of humanity to be more than tribalists and perhaps even the potential to be more than animals. We cannot survive by embracing the Law of the Jungle to replace the Constitution. Winner takes all must not replace the compromises and cooperation of Democracy or our nation is ended.

So Woke is a nice concept but keep in mind that its meaning is much more than just an awareness of racism in America. Martin Luther King thought at one point that racism was the issue that had to be solved but in his “I Have A Dream” speech he showed that he understood it was more than that. It was a demand for social justice for all people. That was the promise of America when it was founded instead of it being based on the authority of a military based ruling class. Martin Luther King saw that that lack of Social Justice was something that afflicted American society, not just minorities. Racism was just part of it. If American society wants to survive and move forward socially, morally, technically and as a nation on the world stage, then America needs Social Justice. Woke is nice, but you might want to look back to look forward beyond Woke’s awareness of racism to Martin Luther King’s call for Social Justice. It is an ancient aspiration of humanity and it is how we have measured human progress. It is what America needs.