Don Amend

Recently, it seems a controversy has arisen over a single word in the English language.  Some Americans appear to have made an enemy of the word “woke,” and they are actively trying to make sure nobody becomes “woke” in any of our classrooms.

Well, I was a little confused about this. I have no bone to pick with this one four-letter word, because unlike certain other four-letter words, “woke” isn’t vulgar, profane or obscene. Such words are unfit for use in places like church or in conversations with your grandma, although these days I know a few grandmas who like to use them, even though it makes them sound like the crew of a pirate ship when they get together. Compared to that, “woke” is pretty innocuous.

But just what does it mean to the folks who are using it now? That’s rather difficult to determine because nobody seems to know. A conservative writer who said she had explained the concept in two chapters of a book she has written, when asked by an interviewer to define it, stumbled and stammered to come up with a definition before admitting defeat and saying I should read her book. I think she should read it herself before writing a whole chapter explaining it.

I’m not much of a linguist, but as far as I can tell “woke” apparently began as a slang term used by African-Americans to refer to a person they saw as sympathetic to the troubles that racism causes for them. To me, that means ‘woke’ is used by — the governor of Florida, for example —  to define a person who spends time looking at both sides of an issue. When that governor says “Florida is where “woke” goes to die,” he means that people in Florida don’t need to know anything he doesn’t think they need to know.

Please note that I mean no insult to Florida, because regardless of what the governor thinks, I’m pretty sure being “woke” isn’t the goal of everyone in the Sunshine State. If you don’t believe being “woke” is a bad thing to be, you should vote for a governor of a different party.

This sort of thinking is of special concern to me as a former teacher of literature, government and history. Florida’s governor and others are currently working on a “parents’s bill of rights,” that would give parents the power to control what teachers can teach and sources they can use. That way, they can make sure their children are zero percent “woke” about what their kids are reading. I’m a liberal guy, though, so I never told either of my descendants what to read, and I learned early on that both of them were their own censors, occasionally deciding at some point that a book they were reading clashed with their moral judgement.

As for other people’s kids, I received very few objections to books I assigned. No warmongers objected to the anti-war message in “All Quiet on the Western Front” or the hints in “A Separate Peace” that told my students that one of the boys was gay. 

When it comes to history and government, though, things are different, and this is where the worry about being “woke” arises. Some Americans are riled up if they hear any criticism of our nation’s actions. In their opinion, our nation’s history should not be presented in such a distorted way. 

In Florida and other places, that criticism centers on the year 1619, an analysis of the impact of slavery on our nation’s history. Learning about slavery is exactly what Florida’s governor calls “woke,” and many people in Florida and elsewhere oppose it. They prefer a curriculum developed at a small conservative Michigan college whose developer proudly says the curriculum includes nothing but positive information about 1619, even to the point of never mentioning the year 1619 at all.

Well, that’s a problem, because 1619 is an important year in our history. In 1619, representatives from the 12 English settlements gathered in Jamestown and created a general assembly to govern the colony. It was the first such assembly in the Americas and the first step toward our tradition as a representative democracy. 

The year also marked the arrival of 90 women from England. They joined 100 women who had arrived earlier as the colony’s focus turned to establishing families. It was that focus that separated the English settlers from those of France and Spain, and resulted in population growth that made the English colonies stronger than their French and Spanish counterparts.

Finally, 1619 was the year 30 or more enslaved Africans were brought to Virginia. They arrived on two different ships which had captured them from a Spanish slave ship, and were traded to the Virginia settlers for supplies. That happened just over 400 years ago and it was the beginning of an institution that has vexed is ever since. It dominated the first century of our republic before nearly tearing it apart. 

Resolving those problems won’t be possible until more of us take all of our history more seriously. We can’t do that by forgetting part of our history. That means we will all have to become “woke.”