How Woke Are You?

It takes courage, compassion, wide-open eyes, and an equally open heart—but if you can heed the call of your conscience, if you can look bravely and honestly within, you can help nudge the world toward a better place. Join a few fellow travelers as they find their way forward.

LET’S START WITH THIS PREMISE: You want the world to be safe and fair for all. You feel that difference should be celebrated, not feared. You believe humans owe one another respect, access, a chance. If this sounds like you, great news: You’re a good person.

But for your convictions to matter, you need to know what’s going on beyond your corner of the world. How are other people living? What keeps them from living better? If you’re white, are you—by virtue of your skin’s inherent privilege— part of what keeps them from living better? If you’re a person of color, are you aware of the mechanisms that deny you similar privilege? To engage with such matters—regularly, vigilantly—is to be, in a word, woke.

In 2017, Merriam-Webster defined the term: “aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice).” Back then, woke was everywhere—in songs, speeches, think pieces. Then it became passé, slang divorced from its activist origins. But the work of wokeness can’t stop simply because the word lost its cred.

Ours is an age in which progress is under siege, but also one in which social justice and social media have melded into a force strong enough to topple villains (be gone, #MeToo perps) and lift up heroes (go, Parkland kids, go!). In the ‘60s, we marched; now we hashtag (and march: an estimated five million strong at the 2017 Women’s Marches). Of course, a wealth of public forums means more opportunities to misstep. For some this breeds crippling anxiety, causing them to clam up before those who treat wokeness as a contest—a chance to prove they get it best and to shame those who get it less.