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Doing good should be encouraged and celebrated on every level of society, yet we find ourselves in a precarious situation of constantly having to second guess the motives of the do-gooder and the real impact of the good done.
This isn't a completely new conundrum, per se, but it is one that has been exacerbated by the ways in which being woke is now cool and trendy. Woke is a term around which an entire lexicon of activist, academic, and pop culture verbiage has emerged. Simply put, to be woke is to be aware. Getting woke and being woke and staying woke and wokeness generally refer to being aware of social issues and social justice.
While wokeness now covers basically every social issue from race to gender to sexuality to religion to ability, the term originated in the Black activist community in the early 1960s. It wasn't until 2012 or so when the Movement for Black Lives, which is often incorrectly referred to as the Black Lives Matter Movement, rose to national prominence that wokeness entered the national discourse.
Since then, the language of wokeness has exploded, and the context in which that language is used has changed the entire nature of the conversation. StayWoke is an organization and "digital accelerator that engages thousands of learners, builders, and activists in the work of advancing equity and justice in America." #StayWoke can be used as a serious hashtag or one that mocks the conspiratorial folks who use wokeness to call the masses sleeping sheep.
Fundamentally, though, wokeness is rooted in Black activism. Wokeness is not a state of being that is achieved; it is a state of learning in which one is always growing. Wokeness is not an awareness level reached; it is an orientation to the world predicated on prioritizing the experiences of those often ignored and acting on it to do good.
Today, being woke and doing good have become part of the pop culture and have certainly become a bit diluted in the process. Many of the grassroots activists who you might expect to wear their wokeness as a badge of honor now use the various terms less and less to avoid being associated with its satirical and cynical connotations. Specifically, wokeness has...