Waking Up to the “Wokewashing” of the Anti-Woke Whiner

First, let’s cut through the whitewashing. Whenever you hear anyone say they are <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/may/24/florida-governor-ron-desantis-history" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">“anti-woke”</a> in the news or on social media, they are actually railing against whole other sets of circumstances that they do not welcome. It’s apparently good to stay asleep. Yet to misappropriate the term “woke” and mistranslate it mean something other than it actually means is like misappropriating the term “wake up” and telling us it means “nightmare.” I’ve invented an apt term for this obvious, in-your-face attempt to conceal what actually frightens certain folks. <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/bethany-mandel-woke-interview_n_6411e69fe4b00c3e60714d09" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Let’s call it “wokewashing.”</a> In actuality, the anti-woke, anti-CRT, anti-1619 Project, anti-diversity, anti-inclusion mob rants we hear in the news, on political campaigns, and at school board meetings these days began as the yank-the-covers-back-over-my-head response of the traditional power structure in the United States waking up to their own nightmare of the Obama family getting voted into their White House. TWICE. God knows, you hate what you fear. Remember the recent history. The entire “Tea Party” movement began following Barack Obama’s first presidential inauguration (in January 2009). That is a FACT and it was NOT an accident of circumstance. What it was, was cause and effect. It was a direct response to a Black man and his Brown family unexpectedly being elected as the resident of what was only ever supposed to be a White House…and thus becoming the titular leader of the free world. Majority America wasn’t ready. Was. Not. Ready. To be led by a man who would not have been allowed to vote a generation ago? A man it openly ridiculed and refused to accept as a full-blooded American citizen? NOPE. So, all the latent bigoted and socially phobic groups that exist within White America, fueled by Fox News fever dreams of impending existential catastrophe, were propelled and absorbed into the “Tea Party” movement, and ultimately melted down and amalgamated into the mainstream of conservative politics. As in the days when President Obama was labeled and visually branded as everything from a “witch doctor,” to a “sub-human mongrel,” to a “chimpanzee,” that same fear and bigotry has coalesced and congealed into a differently flavored but no less toxic brew. The present-day “anti-woke” script, co-opted most recently by some of the most unoriginal minds ever, are… <a href="https://medium.com/simple-word-publications/waking-up-to-the-wokewashing-of-the-anti-woke-whiner-3d426a0e8adf">Website</a>