Wake Up and Stay Woke!

Diversity, equity and inclusion words matter.

When did the word “woke” become a political lighting rod and when did the use of the word WOKE begin?  According to Domenico Montanaro, the word woke was used in Black protest songs dating back to the early 20th century.

One of those songs was by Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Lead Belly, the singer of the 1938 song “Scottsboro Boys.”  It was a ballad (based on a true story) about four Black youths who were falsely accused of raping a white woman in Scottsboro Alabama. They were convicted by an all-white jury, and were later released after several appeals and trials.

Go to Alabama and you better watch out.

 The landlord’ll get you,

going to jump and shout.

Scottsboro, Scottsboro boys,

tell you what it’s all about.

 I’m going to tell all you colored people…

So I advise everybody,

be a little careful when they go along through Alabama –

stay woke, keep their eyes open.

When you look at the long arc of history, there is frequently a word or a term that starts out meaning one thing, and then  flips to mean another thing. Woke went from a warning to Black people, to term used during the Black Lives Matter movement, to a term used to indicate that you are progressive and in favor of diversity,  equity, inclusion, empathy and belonging. Woke is now a pejorative word and is in legislation passed in Florida under the Stop W.O.K.E. law. “Even  the stories of American icons like Martin Luther King Jr. are allegedly being banned from Florida K-12 classrooms under this law.”

Sometimes a word can be reclaimed, as was the word “gay” which originally meant happy and lighthearted, and then transitioned to a description of homosexuality, which then became more widely used during the Gay Liberation movement in the early 1970s. It is now a word said with pride.

CRT (Critical Race Theory) became a buzzword which some mistakenly believed was being taught in K-12 classrooms.  The term emerged out of a framework for legal analysis in the late 1970s and early 1980s created by legal scholars Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw and Richard Delgado, among others. It dealt with legal matters such as redlining and racial covenants and puts a spotlight on structural racism in the U.S.

What is taught in K-12 classrooms is not CRT, but more properly history and rightly includes slavery and the Civil War, The Trail of Tears, Jim Crow laws and other dark periods of our shared history.

Sticks and Stones

‘Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me’ is an untrue slogan. Words can be harmful, triggering or simply incorrect. Here are a few examples of words and their origins which Spectra Diversity uses as part of a game activity in our training materials.

• Blacklist: A directory of specific elements, such as email addresses, IP addresses or URLs, that are blocked.
• Blue bloods: A literal translation of the Spanish ‘sangre azul,’ attributed to some of the oldest and proudest families of Castile, Spain, who claimed never to have intermarried with Moors, Jews or other races. Their skin was pale and the blueness of their veins could be seen.
• Bulldoze: An iteration of the phrase first appeared in 1876 and it meant to beat someone in an extremely cruel and brutal way, or to give a “dose” of lashing and whipping like one would whip a bull. The term was quickly appropriated for racists who violently terrorized African-Americans after the Civil War in the South, particularly to intimidate black voters. An iteration of the phrase first appeared in 1876. By 1880, it was being used as a verb.
• Grandfather clause: In order to curtail black voting, several southern states in the U.S. passed constitutional clauses that permitted the descendants of those who voted before 1867 (white people with grandfathers who voted) to vote without having to meet stringent conditions.
• Peanut gallery: The term dates to the vaudeville era of the late 19th century and referred to the sections of the theater where Black people sat separately.
• Rule of thumb: The 17th century English Judge, Sir Francis Buller, ruled it was permissible for a husband to beat his wife with a stick, given that the stick was no wider than his thumb.

DEI is not a dirty word: It’s woke.

When described to people without using the DEI acronym, people are generally in favor of diversity, equity and inclusion. These are the definitions used by Paolo Gaudiano in his book “Measuring Inclusion”:

Inclusion is what you do.

Equity is what you want.

Diversity is what you get.

As you read the above short, understandable definitions, it is possible to see how DEI did not cause the container ship to run into the Francis Scott Key Bridge causing it to collapse. A person of color is not a “DEI hire” and somehow less qualified to do a job. Silicon Valley Bank did not collapse because of DEI. And DEI was not the cause of the door plug blowing off the Alaska Airlines Being 737 Max 9 aircraft.

Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) is about being woke. Someone who is woke is alert to and concerned about social injustice and discrimination. Wake up and be woke!