It’s been a very long time since I watched breakfast television, apart from instances like this morning when I visited my barber and can’t avoid the screen above the mirrors. But thanks to social media, and X (formerly known as twitter) in particular, I have a fair idea of what I am missing. Today, among other shows, I am missing Kay Burley’s morning show on Sky News and given the chosen topic of the morning I am very happy to be missing it. The caption on the screen is this: “Are police too woke?”
The term ‘woke‘ has been hijacked by the 57 varieties of the political right and its meaning twisted to something it doesn’t mean. An example today was, “Should police take the knee?” I would say that, in general terms, they shouldn’t because by their very nature the police should be neutral, although I could foresee circumstances whereby they might. It is not something that moves me one way or the other, although I would be concerned if they performed a Nazi salute.
Hate TV stations like GB News and, to only a slightly lesser degree Rupert Murdoch’s Talk TV use the term woke as a pejorative term. An excellent interpretation of what the term woke means to the political right comes from America and it goes like this:
“Wokeness is an ideology that seeks to destroy all of our shared norms, language and understanding while replacing it with new norms (example: opening doors is sexist), language (ex: Latinx) and understandings (ex: men can get pregnant). Wokeness spreads like a virus largely from far left universities with full support from the Democratic Party.” But this isn’t what being woke means.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) describes it thus:
“Well-informed, up-to-date. Now chiefly: alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice.”
Wokeness is not an ideology. There may be a few people who regard opening doors as sexist, but – and I am sorry if I need to explain this to the hard of thinking – men cannot get pregnant and only an idiot would suggest they could. Wokeness doesn’t spread from anywhere, let alone universities. It belongs in the imagination of the heads of those who are not well-informed and up-to-date and are not alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice. It really is as simple as that.
I am proud to be woke. I support equality, including the equality of opportunity, I oppose racism, xenophobia, homophobia and all forms of injustice. I don’t know if that’s an ideology or not but my beliefs and philosophy define the person I am and if some half-witted right-wing anti-woke crusader uses my wokeness as a weapon with which to beat me, then more fool them.
The real question Burley should be asking is this: “Are police aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)?” And most coppers I’ve ever come across have been both, so where’s the problem?
So-called wokeness is part of the right-wing culture wars, designed to divide and break us. I’d say that being “well-informed, up-to-date. Now chiefly: alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice” is where I want to be. Ill-informed and out-of-date, not so much.
