What's tofu got to do with it?

There's a great deal too much talk about 'woke' these days, but what does it mean anyway?

It's clearly the new dividing line in the 'culture wars' emanating from the USA so it's hardly surprising that the concept of woke started there. But it is surprising to learn that the word was first recorded in its current usage in 1938, almost the late Middle Ages in American terms but remarkably modern to us in the UK, where it has only crept into mainstream usage in the past couple of years. In fact, as if to prove how rapidly and firmly it has embedded itself in the culture here there's even been an Oxford Union debate about it!

BBC Radio 4 began a mini-series today entitled Woke: The journey of a Word presented by Matthew Syed. It's broadcast for fifteen minutes daily until Friday (24th February) at 1.45pm and is well worth tuning in to. In today's first episode Syed told the story of the Scottsboro Boys, a cause celebre in the States in 1931 when nine young black men in Alabama (the youngest aged only thirteen) were accused of gang-raping two white women while hobo-ing - illicitly riding - a railway car. The whole sorry episode was a travesty but, given that the notoriously discriminatory 'Jim Crow' laws and mob lynching were still a common feature of white supremacy in the Deep South, the 'boys' were perhaps lucky to survive judicial or extra-judicial execution. However. despite an unprecedented legal attempt to get them acquited, eight of them still spent a total of one hundred years in jail for a crime they didn't commit.

In 1938 a song by the popular black folk and blues singer,  Huddie William Ledbetter, known as 'Lead Belly', immortalised the injustice in his song, The Scottsboro Boys, warning his black audience, in Southern black argot, against potentially lethal white prejudice with the words "must stay woke, you die though" (effectively, you must stay alert or they'll kill you). So how has this first recorded use of the word woke, an entirely appropriate injunction to black people to beware of deadly white hatred, transitioned through a wider meaning of political and social awareness, to become synonymous with political correctness and leftwing pedantry?

The neo-liberal press and media, supported by their running dog politicians, is how. The likes of US President, Donald Trump, fulminating against American Soccer players taking the knee and British Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, mocking "Guardian-reading, tofu-eating, wokerati", while being urged on by salivating rightwing commentators like Piers Morgan, have led us to the place we are now. The Me Too and Black Lives Matter movements have not emerged as a result of eating too much tofu. Trump and Braverman might have used 'woke' as a way of seeking to trivialise women being routinely raped in the film and music industry or black men being savagely killed by the police forces supposed to protect them, but they called it wrong. That is precisely and unapologetically what woke is about. Rather than explore the obvious truth of this detractors choose instead to blame the victims. And why? Because they know they can get away with it.

This is all part-and-parcel of the neo-liberal divide-and-rule agenda, and right now it seems to be working. Rightwing organs like the Daily Mail, the Express, the Sun, Talk TV and GB News gleefully peddle their hate-filled bile while rightwing politicians like Rishi Sunak,  Suella Braverman, Nigel Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg give them aid and succour. I mention Sunak because he likes to present himself as Mr Reasonable. His alacrity in triggering Section 35 of the Scotland Act 1998, for the first time, in order to block the Scottish Parliament's new Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill gives the lie to that. It shows that he is only too willing to play the anti-woke game too.

But for how much longer? His joy at seeing off the Scottish First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, who has just resigned, partly as a result of the barrage of abuse she's been subjected to about this piece of legislation, may be short-lived. As the longest-serving SNP Leader and First Minister she had effectively become the SNP. With her gone, and the SNP consequently weakened, Labour looks set to regain some of its former seats in Scotland, which makes the likelihood of its wiping out the Tories at the next UK General Election all the more assured. The tide is turning, populism is in retreat, and the manifest social injustices enabled and encouraged by the Republicans in the US and the Conservatives in the UK may soon be a thing of the past. Of course, as with a wounded animal, it might be most lethal in its death throes but die it will, and good riddance.

Try dismissing that as woke, Mr Sunak.

Woke: The Journey of a Word is broadcast live on BBC Radio 4 at 1.45pm this week and is available on BBC Sounds.


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