Curious. The term woke was apparently coined in the early 1900’s by the African American community. It was used to describe an awareness of racial issues and other social injustices. It evolved to include awareness of injustice to any group experiencing oppression. It encouraged people to wake up to these issues.
Rightly so when you consider African american history and current affairs. And not only with Black people but with other people of colour and Indigenous peoples. Women have culturally been severely oppressed for millennia. More recently, there seems to be other target groups in the forefront including those people in the LGBTQ2+ communities, people who struggle in poverty, live rough without housing or shelter and those people who struggle with mental and substance use health issues.
People have been waking up and taking action – and it is working!
We have been in a progressive active movement for decades now. People have been becoming more aware, at least since the mid 1900’s, of the roles of injustice and inequality in our current social and economic structures. And things are being done about it. Policies have changed and more and more people are waking up to see the work that needs to be done to obtain and maintain a more just and equitable society.
But with any change in a system, according to systems theory, the system will try to push back to return to how it was. This is referred to as homeostasis. Homeostasis is the process an organism or a system uses to maintain inner stability while attempting to adapt to change. In a social context, stress can trigger certain responses in the system to either fight off or adapt to the thing causing the stress. It refers to how people try to maintain the quality of their connection within a system.
So it’s not hard to see why those who are experiencing injustice are pushing for change to obtain and maintain meaningful connection in society. And it’s not hard to see why there are those who are pushing back to maintain an already established connection within our social and cultural system, regardless of who that system includes and excludes.
Think of wind chimes. All the pieces are connected with string for instance. When there is no wind the chimes are still and silent. This is the familiarity, the stability of homeostasis. It is indeed static. It is comfortable and unchanging.
Enter the winds of change; let’s say, for instance, the human rights movements in the 1960’s. The pieces of the wind chimes now get blown about. One piece moves the other. It can’t be helped, they are connected. They are no longer static, stable, calm or silent. The natural structure of the chimes are disturbed. The system is disrupted. The pieces seem out of control as they bang about in the wind. A working system will struggle to get back to its stable familiar structure, or it will eventually adapt to the changes that occur as a result of the disruption. This is how homeostasis works.
If the wind is stopped, the structure, the system, can return to how it was
***if the wind is stopped***.
If the wind has created significant changes, the system must reconfigure itself, adapt, to the new changes, or attempt to discard the changes and return to its original form before the winds. As human beings, we have been known to resist unfamiliar, uncomfortable change and attempt to remain in what is familiar and comfortable to us – sometimes, even if that familiarity is painful
Injustice and inequality have pretty much been the cornerstones and foundation of our current global civilization. North America is no exception to that concept. When you read about the Industrial Revolution, you read about rampant injustice and inequality. Literature and Hollywood is famous, or maybe infamous, for portraying monopolies as the big bad guys stomping all over the regular folk. More familiar to us is how our society was built on the backs of slaves: All the while eradicating the Indigenous societies and cultures that were established here long before any colonization.
All of this is not distant history. We still have policies in place that produce forms of displacement and exclusion for certain groups of people that have immediate benefits for other groups.
Our wind chimes, our whole system, has been built on inequality, and injustice in favour of one group. And at least for the last 75 years, groups who have not benefited from the system as it has been built, have been blowing the progressive winds of change, to obtain justice and equal respect with the group that profits from those benefits. They are struggling to adapt, equally, as they should, to a system that must include them in order to survive.
Yet the current system is now fighting back. The term “Woke”, meaning the awareness of injustice, racial and other issues of inequality and oppression, has somehow become a bad word, at least amongst the group that has benefitted the most from the current mobile. The word is being flung back at people struggling for justice and equality like a lump of dog shit. And those who are doing the flinging are those who are desperate to maintain a system that is simply unsustainable and carries a reputation of being deadly to groups who were not included as equal parts of the system.
You see, the groups that have been struggling for their own place on the mobile, for their dignity and respect, have been actually very useful to the other pieces of the mobile. Oppressed groups have always played a role in the creation of a system, a society. The roles, as stated earlier, are the foundation of a system designed to benefit the few. The few thrive off the labour of those who are objectified as less than. It’s easier to mistreat an object than it is a person. So those who are oppressed have been objectified and scapegoated, for millennia. They have been too often targeted as the problem when indeed they are the very result, the symptoms of what is wrong with our current established system.
It is eyes opening, the waking up, that begins to see these things for what they are. And the winds blow.
There is no random coincidence about the “Make America Great Again” rally cry. There is no coincidence that a certain group in Canada seems to be taking on that same rally cry. The rally of Mackenzie King not even 100 years ago to maintain a “white Christian nation” and to assimilate the Indian to eradicate the Indian problem” is all too alive and well today. This is all about a system that has now been disrupted by push back from those who have been systemically oppressed and the reciprocal push back from the oppressors. People are waking up to what lies beneath.
We are all in a place of discomfort and anxiety. Some of us have been there so long that it is actually all too familiar. Others of us have rarely been so uncomfortable and anxious as we are now and so we are fighting back. One way that is being done is by making those who are “woke”, the enemy. Those of us who want to stay where we are don’t want to have any of this revealed. The enemy is a threat. The wind must be stopped.
But really, think about it. This is how some of us are reacting. We have bastardized and demonized a movement that demands justice and equality – despite the fact that these things are things we all value. None of us will lose anything by honouring those of us who are waking up. We don’t lose anything by welcoming all of us into our system. Really, we have nothing but benefits to gain. A healthy society and culture surrounded in respect, equal opportunity, respect for each other, respect for our environments. Please explain to me how that is not profitable!
It’s time to recognize that our world belongs to everyone; or more accurately, we are caretakers of our world and each other. We haven’t done a very good job of that so far. People have “woken” up to this and continue to “wake up”. How is this the horrible thing some of us have made it out to be. It’s time for something new. The very nature of evolution is adaptation. And we won’t get there if our eyes remain closed. We won’t get anywhere while we’re static, unmoving, un-adapting. We won’t evolve while we’re sleeping.
The sun is rising, time to wake up!