Yes, I Can Define Woke

2025-09-23

There is an ideology which has become extremely common in the past decade. It has a very annoying expression: people who hold this dogma pretend the ideology doesn't exist at all. One common rhetorical tactic for this is to ask people to define it, implying (or often plainly claiming) they cannot. I can. Here is the defintion, from a February 2017 paper called We Are Woke: A Collaborative Critical Autoethnography of Three "Womxn" of Color Graduate Students in Higher Education:

We define wokeness as critical consciousness to intersecting systems of oppression.

Now, a lot of people don't understand what this means. That's perfectly fine. Frankly, the second half of it isn't necessary. But it's the definition I choose to respond with when people ask because it gets a couple of important things right.

Firstly, the source of the definition. It is published in 2017, which is a year or two, maybe three, before the definition took off in popularity, and then the backlash hit soon after. It's an extremely common occurence for people incapable of imagining they are wrong to tell me that I've been brainwashed by right wingers on this topic, but this publication always predates their supposed behavior. It's also very clearly authored by woke "womxn" and published in the academy. To my mind, appeals to the person are bad reasoning, but the people I am dealing with make claims along those lines very commonly, and indeed base their entire epistemology on it in some cases. There is a lot that could be said about the sensibility of these authors, their work, or academia at large, but they were intellectually honest and competent with regards to such material as it is taught in this opening section of their paper.

The crux of the definition is the concept of critical consciousness. This is as an academic term associated with ideas that unfortunately have incredible purchase in pedagogy. I leave the details of it as an exercise to the reader. All that's really important is the general idea, which is that one who has critical consciousness has a special awareness others do not. Into what? Well, that's where the second half of the definition comes in. Oppression, or broadly speaking, to any social issue.

That's it. That's all wokeness means. It is a claim that one has an elevated perspective, particularly to social issues.

Here's the rub: it's just a claim. A lot of people appear to have trouble with this rhetorical maneuver, or pretend to, but just because I coin some words that definitionally claims I have an elevated persepctive into something, that doesn't mean I actually do. A historical example of the same type of claim is gnosis. A modern one would be the "red pill" in which one metaphorically escapes the Matrix by learning the opposite of the "woke" view, that men are rather oppressed by women (or womxn). Like most critical theory, woke rhetoric just follows along with this, taking its theoretical framework as fact and running with it until the pretense of theory is dropped or even denied and the ideological form appears. But that and other criticisms are something else entirely to be debated.

What's clear is that "woke" refers to people or ideas expressed in this way, of claiming to have a greater awareness, based on unstated premises, ironically often because the person making the claims is familiar only with charged rhetoric and doesn't know the theoretical foundations of their own beliefs.

Why don't they? Because ignorance shields their belief system from criticism. Christians overwhelmingly do not actually read the Bible and many who do become atheists because of it. And so it is with the dogma of wokeness.