Republicans are attempting to weaponize being “woke.” They are ridiculing the idea of wokeness and tying it to so-called liberals and progressives. It’s more red meat for their base.

Once again, far right Republicans on Capitol Hill are trying to turn a positive into a negative. They, like their dear leader, the former occupant of the White House, live in a faux reality. There words don’t mean what they mean. Positives are negatives, and good things are bad.

Republicans have used being woke to attack corporations who have openly opposed GOP state legislators’ voter suppression bills.

The Oxford Languages Dictionary defines the informal use of ‘woke,’ as an adjective. Being  “alert to injustice in society, especially racism.”

“Being woke is like opening your eyes; you’re no longer in the dark about things. Your mind is open. You’re well informed and you’re down to spread the knowledge,” Amàndi Rock, my millennial daughter, explained.

Republicans attack on the state of being aware, knowledgeable, aka, woke, is, in reality, a part of their anti-black agenda.  It is a thinly veiled attack on blacks’ voting rights, the Black Lives Matter Movement, black culture, black history, and diversity.  

Some observers say the term wokeness emerged when Michael Brown was murdered by a white cop. “Stay woke” became a warning to watch what the police and politicians were doing or not doing regarding the need for justice in policing.

Being “woke,” comes from black culture. Blacks have been using the term for decades. A 1962 New York Times writer William Melvin Kelley defined being woke in his article, “If You’re Woke You Dig It; No mickey mouse can be expected to follow today’s Negro idiom without a hip assist. If You’re Woke You Dig It.”  “You dig and dig it,” were slang for understanding something, ‘You dig,” and checking out something ‘Dig it.’

In Republicans Are Crusading Against ‘woke,’ NBC News political reporters Allan Smith and Sahil Kapur quote Republicans who have redefined the term as a polemic.

“Why are we still listening to these woke corporate hypocrites on taxes, regulations & anti-trust?” Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., tweeted.  And Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., promoted his coming book on Twitter by saying “the woke mob” — those who called for his original publisher, Simon & Schuster, to drop it in the wake of his efforts to overturn the election — wanted to prevent anyone from reading it.”

Is the Republicans Party Racist

“On the right, the focus on “wokeness” has come hand in hand with an anti-“woke” agenda that GOP state legislatures have moved quickly to approve. They passed bills to limit public schools’ use of The New York Times’ “1619 Project…They have also passed measures to limit the teaching of critical race theory, bar transgender athletes from competing in girls’ and women’s sports and enhance criminal penalties for people arrested at protests,” the writers opined.

Republicans have also passed voter suppression laws aimed at making it more difficult for black and brown people to vote. So, in reality, their anti-woke campaign is really an anti-black campaign.

By all accounts, Republicans should stay in their own lane. What they don’t know about woke folk is this: We’ve been woke. And we’ve are hip to their shenanigans. We are not falling for the okey doke. And they can do all the linguistic gymnastics they want but we will not be moved.

Stay Woke people!