Black couple sue for discrimination after appraisal of their house 3:33
(CNN Spanish) -
The word "woke" has been associated in recent decades with different movements against social injustices, and recently it has even generated a crusade against it by broad sectors of politics in Europe, which they fear its impact.
But what exactly is ser ser o estar
woke
?
ANALYSIS |
The crusade against the Woke movement reached Europe.
Its effects could be chilling
Originally in black communities in the United States, "woke" was used to describe people who have awakened (from "wake up") to progressive issues, and are alert to injustices.
What is being or being woke?
Some definitions
The Oxford Dictionary incorporated it in 2016, and offers this definition, located within the umbrella of informal American English: "Alert to injustice in society, especially racism."
The English football team kneels before matches to denounce racism, an example of a woke activity.
Whereas the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines
woke
as "conscientious and attentive to important facts and issues (especially questions of racial and social justice)", and qualifies it as
slang
, jargon, American.
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But the term has also been interpreted differently, depending on where it is used, and this includes outside the borders of the United States as well.
Evan Smith, visiting professor at Australia's Flinders University and author of "No Platform: A History of Anti-Fascism and the Limits of Free Speech," told CNN that in the UK,
woke
is used to "describe everything that before it could be described as 'politically correct' ".
The term "is used to describe a wide range of ideas [and] movements related to social justice," such as anti-racism, intersectional feminism, transgender rights and critical stories of the British Empire, she said.
For Samuel Hayat, a policy researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), woke is seen by many in the traditional sectors of this European country as an atrocious American import of theories about race, postcolonialism and gender, which according to them, they pose a risk to French values and identity.
This woman denounces a case of discrimination in Lima 4:16
Where does the term woke come from?
The first use of the word is believed to have taken place in the 1940s and among black communities in the United States as a call for union activism, as reconstructed by Abas Mirzaei of Macquarie University on The Conversation site.
Since then "stay woke" has been an expression of the black communities, and in 1965 Martin Luther King used it in his speech "Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution" Mirzaei notes.
But the explosion in its use came with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013, following the death of Trayvon Martin in Florida.
Translated as "The lives of black people matter," the Black Lives Matter movement was born in opposition to police violence against blacks in the United States and gained traction on social media.
The expression "stay woke" then began to be used in parallel to the emergence of Black Lives Matter, and later it transcended it: it was also invoked within the framework of #MeToo, against sexual harassment and abuse and in other movements against different injustices.
Hence, the definition of Woke and the scope of "Wokeism" have expanded.
Racialwoke Discrimination
