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McKesson’s influencer status on the platform is bolstered by his alignment with brand endorsements to the benefit of Twitter, too. This section will necessarily also involve a discussion of the concept of wokeness, given that the text on the T-shirt refers to this notion through the hashtag #StayWoke. In contrast to our analysis of the publication of the photograph of McKesson’s arrest in the mainstream press, this latter mode of analysis does not involve a formal method; rather, this approach involves treating it like a historical document to suggest connections between it and other contemporary social conditions and practices.

Speaking Politics word of the week: woke

https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/Politics-Voices/2016/0725/Speaking-Politics-word-of-the-week-woke

The most popular entry in the Urban Dictionary defines it as “being aware” and “knowing what’s going on in the community.”

But such a definition is “not quite that simple,” said Charles Pulliam-Moore, writing in Fusion earlier this year. He noted it was popularized as a call to action associated with the Black Lives Matter movement, but that it “has taken on a different, more complex meaning” over time.

“Like most slang, the meaning of ‘woke’ changes depending on who’s saying it, and to whom,” he said. “Among black people talking about Ferguson [Missouri], ‘stay woke’ might mean something like: ‘stay conscious of the apparatus of white supremacy, don’t automatically accept the official explanations for police violence, keep safe.’ ”

Now that its popularity has spread, he added, the word “has slowly morphed into something that occasionally comes across as a derogatory jab at the very idea of staying ‘woke.’”

... ... ...

Bustle’s Maddy Foley pointed out that singer/activist Erykah Badu first used “stay woke” in her 2008 song “Master Teacher,” and that within a few years, “the phrase had begun to gain popularity as a way of describing an informed, questioning, self-educating individual, which is essentially how we use it today.”

How 'woke' went from black activist watchword to teen internet slang

https://splinternews.com/how-woke-went-from-black-activist-watchword-to-teen-int-1793853989

What does being "woke" actually mean, though? A quick search through Urban Dictionary turns up this result:

"Being Woke means being aware. Knowing whats going on in the community"

But it's not quite that simple. Like most slang, the meaning of "woke" changes depending on who's saying it, and to whom. Among black people talking about Ferguson, "stay woke" might mean something like: "stay conscious of the apparatus of white supremacy, don't automatically accept the official explanations for police violence, keep safe."

In this usage, "woke" indicates healthy paranoia, especially about issues of racial and political justice. Staying woke about the horrific shooting of Laquan McDonald, for example, is what ultimately led the people of Chicago to learn that Rahm Emanuel, their mayor, attempted to cover the whole thing up to save his political career.

"Woke" can also refer, mockingly, to (white) people whose perspectives on race change suddenly after learning about historical injustice. (e.g. "You talked to Brad recently? He read some Ta-Nehesi Coates and now he thinks he's woke.")

Though it was popularized as a call to action that went hand in hand with the #BlackLivesMatter movement, the idea of getting (and staying) "woke" has taken on a different, more complex meaning in the years since it first began to spread across the internet.

Understanding that evolution is easiest when we look back at just where "woke" came from.

... ... ...

2011: "Stay Woke" Awakens By 2011, Badu's song Master Teacher was still most peoples' first exposure to "stay woke," but the phrase's non-literal meaning had started to spread. Yahoo Answers about the phrase were much more mature and closer in meaning to the current meaning.

"The 'I Stay Woke' line from Master Teacher can be interpreted in different ways," Yahoo user Nick P. reasoned. "New Amerykah Part One: 4th World War is a very political album, so it could mean to stay aware of what's going on in the world around you, and don't let the government keep you unaware of their scandals, conspiracies, the racism that still exists, etc."

2012-2013: Trayvon Martin, #BlackLivesMatter, and Pussy Riot On February 26, 2012, George Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin, and in the following months, Zimmerman was charged with second-degree murder and subsequently found not guilty.

That same year, Erykah Badu came out in solidarity with the Russian rock group Pussy Riot. At the time, the band was being threatened with jailtime for staging a queer, sexually charged protest-performance. Badu took to Twitter expressing her support for the women and urging her followers to stay woke. It's around this time that other Twitter users began to use the #StayWoke hashtag in reference to remaining vigilant about social issues.

The court's decision not to convict George Zimmerman sparked a wave of public outrage that resulted in protests across the country and the creation of the Black Lives Matter movement. Social media played a key role in the way that Black Lives Matter transformed from a collection of disaffected activists into an organized phenomenon.

By 2013, Black Lives Matter had become a powerful, real-world force and an iconic hashtag used by thousands of Twitters users to organize and shed light on the stories of even more black lives that had been lost too soon.

Calling someone "woke," in these years, was a signal that they understood these systemic injustices, and were determined to do something about them.

2014: Memeification Around 2014, something interesting began to happen. While #BlackLivesMatter continued to thrive as a rallying cry for the modern Civil Rights movement, #StayWoke began to drift off into meme territory, and it was quickly co-opted in a way that #BlackLivesMatter never really was.

AllLivesMatter, the racist response many people held up as the answer to #BlackLivesMatter, sought to dismiss and demean the importance of its Black-centric counterpart. That wasn't the case with #StayWoke. Neither #StayWoke's spelling nor its literal meaning changed, but its focus did.

The core idea—staying cognizant of large, adversarial forces—remained intact, but #StayWoke's new meaning allowed it to be attached to mundane, ridiculous things.

2015-2016: Irony Today, "woke," a phrase that was meant to encourage critical thinking about social issues and injustices, has slowly morphed into something that occasionally comes across as a derogatory jab at the very idea of staying "woke." #StayWokeTwitter, a loosely-connected Twitter subculture, is filled with people deemed to be too woke for their own good and the people who get kicks out of their over-the-top conspiracy theories.

None of this is earnest. When Jezebel writes about a "Woke Hungarian Who Did 7 Types of Blackface to Save Africa From Going Extinct," they're mocking a white woman who acted a damned fool in her self-righteous quest, not praising her for racial awareness.

Like "bae," "on fleek," and "bruh," it was only a matter of time before "woke" was co-opted by the mainstream (read: white) internet, but there's a certain tragedy to its loss that's different and more painful. Like #SayHerName or #IfIDieWhileInPoliceCustody, #StayWoke was, for a time, a legitimately useful word for black people reminding each other to be conscious of black struggles during a time of systematic injustice.

Now, though, for some, it's just an internet signifier, used for joking about how you should stay woke to about idling UPS trucks or bragging about how you have the same initials as Anakin Skywalker.

#StayWoke: The Language and Literacies of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement

Richardson, Elaine; Ragland, Alice (Spring 2018). "#StayWoke: The Language and Literacies of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement". Community Literacy Journal. 12 (2): 42–44.

Use of Black language and communication style is a pivotal aspect of Black performance culture and movement discourse. Arguably, one of the most significant phrases (also expressed as a hashtag) is “stay woke.” It has become a common phrase among young, Black, conscious people. The phrase means to remain aware of what is going on around you and in society, more specifically, to remain politically aware, or conscious. Also, it doesn’t just mean now or today; it means “stay woke” all the time. Woke is an African American Language word, related to the awake occurring in many types of English. Awake can be defined as “to come out of the state of sleep; to cease to sleep; awaken to arise or spring into existence or rouse from sleep; and wake to be or remain awake; to keep oneself, or be kept, awake” (“Awake”). “I’m awake,” the predicate adjective, means to be out of the state of sleep. The Black word woke, in referring specifically to a political consciousness type of being awake, is an excellent example of how Black people develop African American Language by imbuing it with concepts needing to be expressed efficiently—in one word. As a matter of fact, stay is also a word first developed by AAL speakers and that is now spreading beyond the Black community. The stay in “stay woke” has the meaning of all the time. It’s a different word from stay, as in “She stay [reside] at grandma’s house [sometimes]” (Spears, 168). It’s the same stay as that in “stay awake” in other English varieties. Standardized varieties of English use awake instead of woke as the predicate adjective form (or part) of the verb, as in the following:

(be) awake e.g. “I’m awake.”

(vernacular) AAL/Black (Lives Matter) “woke”

(be) woke e.g. “I’m woke.”

It should be noted that there is a lot of variation with the verb awake and related verbs such as wake, wake up, etc. AAL speakers have taken the form woke and given it a special twist in meaning, bringing in the idea of political consciousness. Over time, woke has become its own word, so to speak: people who use awake, as in “stay awake,” also use woke in the political sense of the word. The words have diverged in meaning.

The Hip Hop soul artist Erykah Badu’s usage of “stay woke” is cited, on the Know Your Meme website, as one of the first public attestations (see below). It is well known that Erykah Badu was a practitioner of Five Percenter Islam (Miyakawa, Five Percenter Rap 63). Five Percenter Hip Hop artists have a tradition of bringing their teachings of Black nationalist consciousness and solidarity, empowerment through knowledge of self, and awareness of the workings of social inequality and racism to the masses through their music. For example, Five Percent rappers, Brand Nubian (specifically Grand Puba), in their 1990 song, “Wake Up” warn the eighty-five percent that the “The [white] devil’s a conniver” (Miyakawa “The Duty of the Civilized Is to Civilize the Uncivilized” 175).

According to the website Know Your Meme,

Stay Woke, derived from the phrase ‘stay awake,” is an internet slang term often used to demonstrate the need for awareness of an issue, particularly

those relating to social justice or the Black Lives Matter movement. The term is also used ironically in a similar manner to Wake Up, Sheeple. Origin-The first instance of the use of stay woke is unknown. One of the first instances of public use was in the chorus to Erykah Badu’s 2008 song “Master Teachers” from the album New Amerykah Part 1: The 4th World War.

The phrase was first defined on Urban Dictionary on August 19, 2014, where the defender linked it directly to the 2014 Ferguson Riots.

Deriving from “stay awake,” is to keep informed of the shitstorm going on around you in times of turmoil and conflict, specifically on occasions when the media is being heavily filtered-such as the events in Ferguson Missouri in August 2014. (https://www.urbandictionary.com/defne.php?term=stay%20 woke)

The hashtag #staywoke is in wide use on Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram, where it has more than 128,000 associated posts. In the summer of 2015, programmers Darius Kazemi and Courtney Stanton built a Twitter bot called @StayWokeBot, intended to automate replies to those who might need more education about racism in society. On January 5th, 2016, MTV declared that woke was a new slang term for the new year, but many commenters noted that the term was not new (“Stay Woke”). Charles Pulliam-Moore discusses how #staywoke went from Black activist watchword to internet slang. Actor and activist, Jesse Williams, executive produced a documentary about Black Lives Matter entitled “StayWoke: The Black Lives Matter Movement.” In an interview in the HuffPost written by Lilly Workneh entitled “Jesse Williams Wants You to Stay Woke in New Film on Black Lives Matter,” Workneh uncovers Williams’ passion for social transformation:

One of the first steps to being “woke” is understanding the depth of these dangerous myths and how societal constructs impede on the lives of marginalized people. In one poignant moment in the documentary, Williams says “no matter what we do, we’re late”—it’s a striking comment that stresses the requirement for resolution and represents the urgent need to get woke, stay woke and better the state of black lives.

Elaine Richardson is Professor of Literacy Studies at The Ohio State University, Columbus, where she teaches in the Department of Teaching and Learning. Her books include African American Literacies (Routledge, 2003), focusing on teaching writing from the point of view of African American Language and Literacy traditions, Hiphop Literacies (Routledge, 2006), a study of Hiphop language use as an extension of Black folk traditions, and PHD (Po H# on Dope) to Ph.D.: How Education Saved My Life (New City Community Press, 2013), an urban educational memoir that chronicles her life from drugs and the street life to the university. Richardson has also co-edited two volumes on African American rhetorical theory, Understanding African American Rhetoric: Classical Origins to Contemporary Innovations (Routledge, 2003) and African American Rhetoric(s): Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Southern Illinois UP, 2004), and one volume on Hiphop Feminism—Home Girls Make Some Noise (Parker Publishing, 2007). Her forthcoming book is titled Our Literacies Matters Reading the World with Black Girls.
Alice Ragland is a Ph.D. candidate in the Multicultural and Equity Studies in Education program at The Ohio State University

Phenomenology & Practice, Volume 14 (2020),No. 1,pp. 73-88Being and Becoming Woke in Teacher EducationTimothy BabulskiUniversity of Southern Maine, United States of AmericaEmail:timothy.babulski@maine.edu[1] - In the past several years, however, woke has been appropriated by various individuals, commercial entities, and institutions throughout American society as a generally antiracist or anti-oppressive stance. Within teacher preparation programs, woke has become shorthand for a set of dispositions concerning equity, diversity, and inclusivity, regardless of whether candidates engage in any form of anti-oppressive praxis to address specific inequities, promote diversity, or meaningfully include marginalized individuals and communities

In neoliberal multiculturalism, being woke to racism, ageism, sexism, tokenism, and the politics of representation is perfectly acceptable because it responsibilizes personal awareness and precludes collective action. Being woke to any particular form of Oppression carries a social value that can be associated with candidates as dividuals. Outrage might be considered a scarce commodity in the market place of ideas; possessing and using it establishes a marker of individual value that simultaneously diminishes the amount of outrage available for others and limits the utility of that outrage. Neoliberalism cannot long tolerate becoming woke, however, because in all the manifestations that I have experienced, becoming woke ultimately invokes empathy and impels cooperative and collective action. I have never enjoyed the indignation, disappointment, and despair that characterizes the initial manifestation of becoming woke, but I can no longer abide by the false certainty of being woke. As I have crafted this text I have returned to my experiences and those of my teacher candidates, experiencing anew the shock and turmoil of becoming woke in a world that is not yet as just as it should, and must, become. If I am to keep becoming, I may still be angry from time to time, but I will also be hopeful that there will be those who will become woke with me—and keep becoming.

Steven Mintz: woke, cultural appropriation, implicit bias, intersectionality, microaggressions, sytemic or institutional racism and sexism, and white privilege (..plus might be added: male privilege? social construct? trigger warnings? sensitivity training? Structural abuse? Social inequality?)