I’ve been thinking a lot about sleep lately. If you’re like me, every morning I’ve been woke, by the sun or some internal clock or the pressures of a new day, I’ve never been quite ready to rise to the new day. Call me lazy. Call me unambitious. Call me a night owl. But call me early in the morning, and I have to fight the urge to pull the covers over my head for just a few more winks. Yet I know the longer I stay unwoke, the longer I learn nothing, the longer I remain stuck in my comfortable dreams. Comfortable, but unproductive. Comfortable, but alone. Comfortable, but ignorant.
A lot of people complain about being woke today. I can only assume they like to stay asleep even more than I do. Except most of them seem to deliberately keep their eyes wide open while they’re at it. Lots of people see woke people as those teaching critical race theory to grade school students (even though nobody does that). For a lot of people (I’m guessing the same people), the woke are those marching under Black Lives Matter banners, even though it’s hard for me to understand why anyone would object to that statement. I mean, are they saying “Black Lives Don’t Matter?” Lots use the term as a pejorative for identity politics, even though almost all of them identify as white and straight. Many use it to mean people who are easily offended, even though these same people pass laws to prevent kids from being offended in school. Does that mean their children are woke too?
I’m not really sure what people mean when they complain about wokeness. I’m not sure they know, except that it makes for a good buzz word.
When the Dread Pirate Roberts kept gaining on the ship carrying the kidnapped Princess Bride, her abductor Vizzini found it “inconceivable” that it was happening. He used that word a lot. So much that Inigo Montoya finally said he didn’t think that it meant what Vizzini thought it meant. Ask the people who bandy about the word “woke” these days, folks a lot like Mr. Vizzini, and they will often say it’s inconceivable that systemic racism still exists in our country. After all, the term actually came from Leadbelly’s afterword of his song Scottsboro Boys he wrote about nine Black teenagers accused of raping two white women on an Alabama freight train way back in 1931. No physical evidence. One of the women recanted. Yet four of the Scottsboro Boys were convicted of rape and eventually sentenced to 75 to life in prison. Even George Wallace recognized the injustice of the system when he pardoned the last surviving man in 1976. Posthumously, the other three weren’t pardoned until 2013.
Still, it’s inconceivable that racism still exists today, especially among our leaders.
Leaders like Alabama Senator Tuberville who’s been speaking a lot about racism lately. For months, he’s defended white nationalists as “Americans,” or saying “I look at a white nationalist as a Trump Republican… a MAGA person.”
Inconceivable. He must have been misunderstood all along because this week he finally admitted that, yeah, maybe they actually don’t want anybody else in the country except them. Maybe they are racist after all.
Whatever your view of Tuberville is, perhaps it’s still a good idea to heed the advice of Leadbelly spoken in 1938.
“I advise everybody be a little careful when they go along through there,” he said. “Best to stay woke. Keep your eyes open.