Why I (sort of) stopped using the word "woke"

I can’t explain why I’m beginning to feel a pang of embarrassment when I call something “woke,” just like I can’t always put into words why Sean Hannity’s self-presentation makes me viscerally cringe. It’s just something about the effect of the Baby Boomer media sphere; once Bill O’Reilly started calling things “woke,” it was game over for the rest of us.

To be clear, I mean no offense here. I may be an avocado-toast-snarfing 23-year-old yuppie, but I’m also a conservative, which means I’m bound by a certain amount of political gratitude for the Baby Boomers. Whatever their faults, the continued existence of the Boomer voting bloc is the only reason that Florida isn’t governed by a drug-addled sexual deviant. But simply by virtue of their distance from the sources of wokeness — i.e., college campuses and youth-dominated digital spaces — Boomers often don’t fully grasp the phenomenon.

As a result, Boomer-friendly media presents wokeness in “will-you-get-a-load-of-this-shit” segments — can you believe that they’re making Spongebob a gender-queer black woman?! — rather than bothering to explain or try to understand the deeper sociopolitical forces at play. More often than not, this results in shallow, silly, fundamentally unserious commentary that is distracted by the more trivial manifestations of wokeness rather than focusing on the genuinely insidious ways it is corroding the American tradition of republican self-government. That changes the way the rest of us hear and think about the word.