Are You Woke?

A couple of days ago, someone tweeted the question “Are you woke?”  Over the years I’ve come to recognize injustices whites have subjected to blacks/people of color.  I bypassed the question, though because I didn’t think it was right for me to answer.  “Woke” is a term that is rooted in the black community, advice to become aware of when and where there are injustices.  I started seeing the word used often after George Floyd was murdered.  However, the word goes way back over 50 years.

Teachers didn’t talk about racial injustice when I was in school.  If a teacher went off topic, it was usually about the Viet Nam war.  At the same time and in the news, there were Civil Rights protests, unrest, and rioting in some of the cities across the country.  There were never any discussions about those important issues.  So, I learned about racial injustice out of school.

On the news, I saw images of police holding snarling dogs threatening peaceful civil rights protesters.  Fire hoses were used full force against people who were just marching in protest of Jim Crow and segregation laws.  The images were cruel and barbaric.  I thought to myself: I thought we were all free to vote.  Wasn’t that in the 14^th or 15^th amendments, passed 100 years ago?

I read To Kill A Mockingbird, identifying strongly with Scout.  I also got a history lesson in what life was like for blacks in the 1930s.  It was shocking.  Could this be true?  Why didn’t we learn this in school?  Like Scout, I devoured books and went to the library to investigate the topics of slavery, Jim Crow laws, and segregation.  Wow! It really was true that there were separate water fountains and bathrooms for blacks and people of color even into the 1960s.  Whoa!  No wonder people were protesting.

We used to go to a private swim club.  After I read Mockingbird, I looked around and noticed that all the members were white.  People of color began picketing the swim club.  They wanted all races to be able to swim in the pools and quarry.  My Deaf parents and friends suffered discriminatory practices from the hearing world so I was surprised that they supported the club’s stance to keep people of color out.  How could they be so bigoted when they, themselves, were excluded from Hearing world most of the time?  The excuses they used to support a segregated pool were so lame, so stereotypical.

Did the Deaf community realize how much the civil rights movement helped advance their own civil rights?  All my growing up years, I saw how the Hearing World treated the Deaf: labeling them “deaf and dumb”; regulating how they were taught in schools for the Deaf where using sign language was forbidden; limiting their job opportunities to machinist, printer, seamstress, keypunch operator.  Deaf people grew weary of being suppressed and began their own civil rights movement.  Other groups of people who’d suffered discrimination began to win their own civil rights.  All of these came about because blacks who’d been suppressed forever rose up and said enough, we want to be treated equally like everyone else.

It's still not happening though.  In most recent years, it’s become very clear to me that many cops are still operating with a white supremacist mindset.  They see people of color as a big threat, just as what happened 400 years ago.  It’s an attitude that persists from parent to child to grandchild and on and on and on.  So, a black person minding his or her own business in a white neighborhood is perceived as a threat.  See what happened to Trayvon Martin or Ahmaud Arbery.  George Floyd was brutally murdered by cop Derek Chauvin, who spent 19 minutes with his knee on Floyd’s throat and choking the life out of him.

I read posts and tweets from black parents of sons, fearing for their futures and cautioning the boys about being confronted by cops.  It’s not just the sons either.  Breonna Taylor was sleeping on a sofa in her apartment.  Cops arrived to serve a warrant and broke into her apartment by mistake.  They began firing and she was hit and killed.  There have been so many cop killings of black people and, most of the time, they aren’t prosecuted.  Derek Chauvin was a rare exception.

Meanwhile, when white mass shooters don’t kill themselves first, they are arrested without much incident.  What is going on here?  A white supremacist with an AR-15 who just mowed down a crowd of people is less of a threat than a black person at a traffic stop?

I am very aware of social injustices and am also very aware of the evil white supremacy plot to remove fundamental rights and return us to the restrictive bad “old days”.  It’s clear that white supremacists want to regain control again and remove the rights gained over the last 80 years.  I wouldn’t say I was woke though.  That word doesn’t belong to me.  It belongs to the people most in danger of losing all their rights.  I am aware of what’s happening and why, and I’m actively trying to help prevent the overturn of our democracy.