Wokeness treats dignity slights and material harms as one spectrum

Evidence

This expansive push for all-encompassing inclusivity became known as wokeness. Originally a term within the Black community to describe political consciousness, woke entered broader usage in 2008 as a lyric from Erykah Badu’s recording of “Master Teacher.” It gained further prominence during the Black Lives Matter movement, evolving by the Trump years into a broader call for the normalization of all marginalized identities within language and culture. The Guardian journalist Julia Carrie Wong, echoing philosopher Judith Butler, described wokeness as operating on the premise that “there is no grand distinction between attacking a group’s material status and legal rights and attacking its members’ dignity by refusing to use forms of address they find tolerable. Both are on a spectrum of disrespect.” — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 458

Categorization

• DEFINE: Traces the etymology and evolving meaning of ‘woke’ from Black political consciousness to all-marginalized-identity normalization.
• SHARE: The Erykah Badu 2008 lyric origin for wide-scale ‘woke’ usage is a shareable piece of trivia.