Word: Woke - Believer Magazine 🔗 📖 ✊🏽 ⏰

After the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, ‘Stay woke’ became a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement. But with its mass adoption, the word’s black activist history has faded, and its urgency has dulled. Now it functions merely as a nod to the speaker’s mainstream lefty positions, a smug confirmation that the speaker holds the expected progressive beliefs. What’s been left out is any reference to the structural and political systems that caused black leftists to adopt progressivism—or any understanding that maintaining woke views requires continuous work.