Why It's Time We Stop Trying To 'Be' Woke
If there’s one thing humanity sucks at and has always historically sucked at, it’s understanding nuance.
Nuance is a subtle distinction in meaning or expression. It’s being able to pick up on how a slight change in context, like who is speaking or who is being spoken to, can drastically change how words and situations are interpreted.
Nuance is the difference, for example, between being woke and getting woke.
Case in point, Obama spoke out about ‘cancel culture’ the other week. Since then, the video of his talk has been shared thousands of times, both applauded and dumped on in equal measure.
“This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re always politically ‘woke’ and all that stuff. You should get over that quickly,” Obama says.
“The world is messy. There are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws.”
As expected, the world then went about misconstruing his vague words in the worst way possible.
His video was shared by people like Shopify’s CEO Tobias Lütke, who is more than happy to share Obama’s words about not casting stones online. His eagerness isn’t that surprising, considering Shopify has been called out numerous times for allowing racist, alt-right companies like Breitbart to sell products through their platform.
The video was also shared by people on the other side of the spectrum, who criticized Obama for lecturing the younger generation and interpreted his words as “finger wagging”, a sign that Obama was showing his age and simply telling ‘the youths’ to calm the eff down.
A lot of people have already picked apart Obama’s words and tried to interpret what he meant, so we won’t do that here.
Instead, I want to move away from arguments about whether social media is toxic (it can be) and whether we should stop calling people out (we shouldn’t).
In its place, let’s talk about something less ephemeral and more nuanced:
What’s the difference between ‘being woke’ and ‘getting woke’?
Putting In The Work To Get Woke
The reality is, none of us are born into the world as perfectly ‘woke’ beings.
Some of us who are born black, indigenous, gay, or gender nonconforming, are forced to reckon at an early age with the realities of racism, poverty, gender and systemic discrimination - often all at the same time.
But there’s still a process of learning and growth involved. Some of us simply have the choice to learn, while others don’t have the option. That’s what privilege is.
I recently listened to an episode of The Sporkful, one of my favourite podcasts about food, culture, and history. On this episode, they were discussing the word plantation and just how this word became so embedded into food marketing and mainstream use.
The host Dan Pashman proceeds to have several, very uncomfortable conversations with white business owners who are currently using the word plantation in their marketing.
He asks them whether they knew about the historical roots of this word and how it has negative connotations for many African Americans in the USA. Some of the people he spoke to responded along a spectrum of anger, defensiveness, and surprise.
The episode began and ended with a conversation with Osayi Endolyn, a James Beard award-winning food writer and a black woman.
Osayi wrote the article that inspired this Sporkful episode in the first place, after she was introduced to a glass of Stiggins’ Fancy Plantation Pineapple Rum and began to question the term.
She talks about how many people expect the black community to educate them on issues; the unfair and unequal burden on black people to be the teacher and to explain, even though others are perfectly capable of learning on their own.
“I have to read shit,” she says. “I have to research, I have to think, I have to unpack, I have to talk to relatives. I have to read between the lines, I have to watch movies that make me really uncomfortable. Because I want to know the context in which they were created and disseminated and popularized. I'm doing, that's what doing the work means.
I did not come out of my mother's womb just with this, like a PopTart, with this information.”
Osayi put in the work to learn what she knows now.
My knowledge and understanding are nowhere near that of Osayi, but I feel her words so hard.
Many people in the community know me as an ambassador for Filipino culture and heritage because of our business Cambio & Co. Amongst my friends group, I’ve been sent articles about race and culture, and asked for my opinions.
But how did I learn all this stuff?
I didn’t even grow up with close ties to the Filipino community and didn’t have many Filipno friends until I was in my twenties. I’m relearning how to speak Tagalog as an adult. And I’ve dedicated the last four years of my life unravelling my family’s history, dealing with uncomfortable truths, travelling back and forth to Philippines to understand the country, our craftsmanship, and our indigenous traditions. This work is literally my livelihood.
When we began our business four years ago, I was wholly ignorant. I didn’t understand how deep colonialism extended into everything that exists today, and am still trying to understand. I didn’t know what the terms Filipinx or Pinxy meant. I’ve had to learn all this through reading about issues, meeting people in the community, constantly challenging my perspectives, and reading books about Philippine history and indigenous culture.
In short, I’ve had to put in A LOT of work to know what I know now.
And that learning is lifelong and ongoing.
The Constant Pursuit Of Better
A recent example of the need to constantly learn and grow is demonstrated by my good friend, Justine Abigail Yu.
Justine is a writer and the founder and editor of Living Hyphen, an independent publication centering voices of individuals with hyphenated identities; people who call Canada home but have roots in other places.
Before Living Hyphen, Justine had written extensively about decolonization and privilege, as well as increasing representation for diverse voices in the media.
She had been interviewed on Dual Citizen Series documentary over a year ago, even before the inaugural issue of Living Hyphen had launched. Her interview was just released the other week, and included a line that was small, but poked at Justine in an unsettling way.
In response to a question Dual Citizen asked about the most surprising story in the magazine, Justine spoke about a submission from a man of Plains Cree and Métis descent.
The man described his experience of living in between cultures despite being Indigenous to this land.
In the interview, Justine had said, “For him, being an Indigenous person here in Canada has almost felt like a diasporic experience because of the displacement that [the Indigenous community] has felt.”
Justine then released an Instagram post of ‘Present Justine correcting Past Justine’.
She says, “I cringe at this segment of the episode because I feel that my words downplay the experiences of Indigenous nations against violent colonial forces…
In all honesty, it has only been since launching Living Hyphen that I’ve taken a deep dive into learning and understanding our colonial history here in Canada… that I’ve really recognized and reckoned with my own role and responsibility as an immigrant settler on stolen land.”
Justine admits that she was too early in her journey at the time of filming to speak to this issue.
Since the interview took place over a year ago, Living Hyphen released its first issue, announced its second call to submissions, and has also released a list of Indigenous Allyship Resources, a compilation of resources Justine put together as she herself began to research and learn more.
But that’s the thing about woke culture.
When we look at wokeness as a state of being rather than an ongoing process of learning, it shuts the conversation down.
Can we look at someone like Justine, for example, and say, “you’re woke now, but you weren’t then?”
The truth is, she was woke in certain areas. And in others, she had some learning to do.
In my own journey, I acknowledge there’s SO. MUCH. I didn’t know then that I know now.
Since creating our company in 2015, we’ve made a lot of mistakes. If, for example, we were launching our company today, would we still choose a Spanish word like Cambio to be the name of our Filipino heritage company? Definitely not.
I’ll be the first to admit that yes, I do understand more than most people in my circle. But I still make occasional missteps, and the thought of them make me cringe.
I can look at these errors though as a source of shame, or I can look at them in a positive light. These missteps represent markers of how far I’ve come and how much I’ve grown as a person.
I’m learning how, for example, to talk about privilege within the asian community.
As a cis-hetero, middle-class, asian woman, I acknowledge I have many privileges that others within and outside of the asian community don’t have. I’m learning how to talk about and recognize the ways in which people like me benefit from existing power systems, and how I can be a better ally.
To some of you reading this, you might think, “duh, this stuff is so obvious you dumb sh*t”. While others might think, “I’ve never heard of any of this before!”
The truth is, all of us make mistakes. All of us wear different layers of privilege that allow us to stay ignorant of certain issues. None of us are born perfectly woke. None of us will ever be perfectly woke.
That doesn’t mean it’s okay to be ignorant. But it does mean that growth is a lifelong process, and there’s no shame to admit you’re still learning.
And that’s the beauty of social media, right? Our institutions are led by status quo politicians and gatekeepers who fight to keep marginalized stories exactly where they are - in the margins.
Some of the only ways we can continue to learn is through one another, online with social media.
But there’s a difference between lecturing one another on where we are, and helping one another get to where we need to be.
And the first step to recognize that difference?
Let’s stop thinking about ‘wokeness’ as a state of being.
Instead, let’s think of it as a journey of learning.