By Denise M. Krenski
Imagine it’s Monday, 5:30 a.m. The alarm you set last night just buzzed. As your brain starts to process the reality that you can no longer be sound asleep and happily horizontal, a headline lights up your smartphone reminding you that the world is as scary as you remembered it being the night before. You are now awake; but, are you WOKE?
I’m amazed at how often I hear someone I grew up with vehemently declare: “I do not subscribe to Woke Culture!” Thanks for sharing, I always think. Followed by, why not? What about Woke Culture is so infuriating to those who swear by its wrongness and vocally declare that it is just not for them? If you agree with the tenets of Woke Culture, does that make you a less capable member of society?
Contemporary media are negatively proliferating Woke Culture and by doing so, just adding flames to an already burning fire within our social climate. It is ruining the chances for members of civilized society, that’s you and me, to engage with each other in unencumbered ways. But, I think it’s important to reclaim the definition of this word and ask why and how it’s being used to create opportunities for those who have, since the infancy of our country, been marginalized.
The word Woke, in its simplest definition, means aware and wide-eyed. To understand this word is to be cognizant of the social climate within which we live and have been living. It is an understanding that there are the haves (and for the sake of absolute clarity, they are the straight, white, Christian, (wo)men) and the have nots (any variation of non-white, non-binary, non-Christian, non-privileged members of our free society) and they live in different realities.
The way in which a straight white person is viewed and the way in which a non-white, not-straight person is viewed is very different. We did not just get to 2024 and have the disastrous social climate that we do because we live in a fair and just world. This is the product of hundreds of years of oppression starting officially when our forefathers created the tenets of our free society by putting forth the idea of our nation being a meritocracy. They created the ladder of social power, with them – white, straight, Christian men at the top, and all others below them. While this may seem like a criticism, it’s not. Rather, it’s this history of the country’s birth.
To be a member of this great nation, we have to abide by that hierarchy set forth by straight, white, Christian men with anything else being a form of socialism. If you dare look under a microscope at life in the United States, (alternatively, “Being woke”) and understand what life looks like for those of other races, genders and sexual orientations, you are deemed crazy and too liberal to be listened to.
Being Woke does not take away from an individual’s race, gender or sexual orientation. It’s about looking at the disparate ways in which laws and systems of social order that were created hundreds of years ago impact the Have Nots. (Think about the birth of policing in our nation.)
According to our forefathers, enslaved black people were valued at less than a human hundreds of years ago, 2/3rds of a person to be exact. So it is not “just because” that black people live in the poorest and worst conditions that our country can offer.
We need to capitalize on our emotional strengths and pursue a greater understanding of what it means to empathize, specifically in light of the Woke Movement. As humans, we are all getting up in the morning and dealing with our own fears of life and the intensity of it all. It is very true that some of us have it better by the nature of our skin color, access to food, education and health care, and our more readily accepted sexual orientations/gender identities. This, however, should not devalue the need to take a deep dive into Woke Culture. We need to put ourselves in another’s’ shoes in order to empower those who continue to be marginalized. Let’s change the paradigm. ••
Denise M. Krenski is a native Philadelphian who resides in the Lehigh Valley with her wife and five children. She’s an alumna of St. Hubert, ’91, Temple, ’95 and NYU, ’07. Prior to being home with her children, Krenski spent her career as an educator and administrator in NYC and a fundraiser in higher education.
