“Make sure no predator makes you his prey through some misleading philosophy and empty deception based on traditions fabricated by mere mortals. These are sourced in the elementary principles of this world and not in the Anointed One (so don’t let their talks capture you).”
–Saint Paul to the Church in Colossae
“Brothers and Sisters, we strongly advise you to scold the rebels who devote their lives to wreaking havoc…”
–Saint Paul to the Church in Thessalonica
Introduction
I haven’t seen the movie The Princess Bride in a while, but the line, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means” resonates regarding this topic. Wikipedia defines woke as “an adjective derived from African-American vernacular originally meaning alertness to racial prejudice and discrimination.” However, that is no longer what the word primarily means. Since 2010 woke has evolved into a hard to define umbrella term that describes a certain ideology (what falls under this umbrella will be discussed in later posts but prime examples would be Critical Race Theory (CRT), the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM), Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI), Social Justice, and the LBGTQ+ movement).
It’s been designed to be a slippery term, easy to observe yet hard to grasp. Professor Eric Kaufmann defines woke as the, “sacralization of historically disadvantaged race, gender and sexual identity groups.” James Lindsay adds his own definition of woke as simply developing a “critical conciseness.” Lindsay writes that to be woke is “to have taken on a worldview that sees society in terms of systems of power, privilege, dominance, oppression, and marginalization, and that has taken up an intention to become an activist against these problematics.” Woke is a set of ideas that seeks to make sense of the world and sort out perceived injustices, but where did it originate from?
An Origin Story
To understand where woke came from we first must take a trip back in time to Frankfurt, Germany in 1923. The Frankfurt School was founded by a Marxist law professor named Carl Grünber. Grünber’s goal was to infuse German society with Marxism and critical philosophy. In 1935 the school moved to Columbia University in New York City to escape Nazi anti-intellectual persecution. Noelle Mering adds that the Frankfurt School brought with it to America, “Marxist philosophy, Freudian psychology, rank perversion, and all manner of lurid ideas and practices introduced for the destruction and dismantling of Western culture by way of the destruction and dismantling of the family.” Douglas Murray adds, “At its outset this new ideology was not taken especially seriously by its opponents. Some of its claims seemed so laughable, and its inherent contradictions so clear, that coherent criticism was almost absent. This was a mistake. It is an ideology with very clear ideological precursors, but still an ideology that – whatever else may be said for it – provides a lens for understanding the world and a purpose for an individual’s actions and life within the world.”