#BlackBlogsMatter Challenge Week 3: The Tao of Woke
Most of y’all know me as an HR pro but as I said in my intro, I contain multitudes. I’ve been a social media management consultant (and a makeup artist and an image consultant. I’m sure you see the connection to HR. 🙂 ) When the world of social media was the world in which I lived, it seemed every other person was referring to themselves as a social media “guru,” “rockstar,” “ninja” or some other equally self-aggrandizing title. I’ve actually noticed a similar trend in the HR world but I digress. I bring this up because to me, calling yourself ‘woke’ is similar to calling yourself a ‘guru.’ If you have to constantly tell folks you’re it, you probably aren’t it.
So what does it mean to be ‘woke’ anyway?
I’m gonna go with this definition.
The other day a friend of mine referred to me as one of the two wokest people she knows. I took it as the compliment I knew it was intended to be. I knew she said it because she knows me as being quick to point out an injustice and work to fix it. She knows I’m passionate about inclusion, diversity and equality. She knows I’m always down for the cause. She knows I do it for the people. If that makes me ‘woke,’ I’ll take it. Unfortunately, too many folks have started co-opting ‘woke’ the same way they’ve co-opted “Bye, Felicia.” Watering it down and overusing it to the point that it becomes pointless.
A few weeks ago I read the following question in an advice column from a woman who identified herself as white:
“I consider myself to be pretty woke but I’m dating a black guy and I need to know how to deal when we visit his family for the holidays.”
This, my friends, is the problem with self-proclaimed wokeness. Take the racial component out of this question and it’s perfectly innocent. How do I deal with my boyfriend’s family over the holidays? However, the racial component is clearly the crux of the issue, since the writer felt the need to specify that she was white and her boyfriend was black. But she wasn’t just any white woman. Oh no! She was a ‘woke’ white woman. How did she know? Because she told herself so. ‘Woke’ but had to ask a stranger how to interact with a group of black people. Ok. She was probably a rockstar too.
Wokeness is such a complicated and fickle state of being. Can one be born woke? Raised woke? Suddenly woke? If you are woke today does that mean you were previously asleep? At what point does one cross the line from asleep to woke? Are there levels of wokeness? Is there a wokeness registration process? Can your wokeness be lost or revoked? Can you be a woke person of color and be in a relationship with a non-woke white person? Can a woke white person be in a relationship with a non-woke person of color? So. Many. Questions.
I don’t have the answers, people. I told y’all, I’m not a thought leader. I just know that using the above definition of ‘woke,’ I’m proud to be it. I think it’s something every single person should be or strive to be. It’s 2018 and this is not a time to be asleep. We have too many nightmares and monsters under the bed to contend with.
Stay woke.
Black History Month has rolled back around. Gotta love it! It’s the time of year when we learn, or relearn, about great Black luminaries such as Carter G. Woodson, Madame C.J. Walker, Bayard Rustin or Fannie Lou Hamer. Children get to dress up as Malcolm X or Harriet Tubman for school presentations. For a full 28 days we are free to celebrate our greatness and can use hashtags like #BlackExcellence without receiving virtual side-eyes or comments like “but what about white excellence?” from all but the most blatantly racist folks. For the most part, folks can freely celebrate Black people and their contributions to society with minimal disruption. Icing on the cake – we got a Lena Horne postage stamp!
Society places white people at the top of the food (i.e. money, power, respect) chain so, by nature of survival, we tend to not want to upset white people any more than we’d want to upset a lion, tiger or bear. We’ve seen far too many examples of negative, even fatal, outcomes for Black people who didn’t care what white people thought. We’ve seen too many opportunities lost. We’ve seen LIVES lost. Even when we tell ourselves we don’t care, even when we don’t want to care, there’s often this little teeny tiny voice in the back of our minds thinking, “What will be the repercussions if I say what I really want to say or do what I really want to do? If I pop off right now because some white person has said something ignorant or disrespectful or treated me unfairly, what impact will that have on me? My family? My livelihood?” Because we all know at the end of the day, if someone has to go down, 10 times out of 10, it’ll be the individual of a darker hue. I’m actually getting a little heated just thinking about this, so I’m going to take it down a notch.
I’ve seen Black business owners who don’t use photos of Black people in their marketing materials because “white people won’t take us seriously.” I’ve also seen Black business owners make a point of not only hiring Black people, for the same reason. Now, of course I’m not saying they SHOULD only hire Black people, but when’s the last time a white person seriously worried about what non-white folks would think if they only hired white people? Or only had white people in their advertising? Granted there is more focus on diversity in recent years, but overall you could be a successful all white business and no one would blink an eye.
TRUE STORY: I had a Black male colleague who prided himself on the fact that white people (i.e. org leadership) viewed him as “safe.” Safe = not angry or scary. Relatable. One of the “good Negroes.” It worked for him. He received multiple promotions and pay raises. Mission accomplished. However, he also acknowledged that in ensuring they retained that view of him, he had to suppress other aspects of his personality. In the words of Paul Laurence Dunbar, he wore the mask.
I’m not an overachieving blogger. In other areas, yes. In blogging, no. I post sporadically at best. I post when the mood, or a good topic, hits me. Or not. Sometimes a good topic hits me but never makes it from my brain to my fingers to the keyboard. I write what I want to write about and rarely think too much about outcomes and feedback. Which is not to say that I don’t appreciate feedback. I’d be lying if I said a slight smile doesn’t cross my face when my posts are shared or I receive notification of a new follower. I just don’t usually consider my posts having any major impact. Hence, #NotAThoughtLeader. I’m just me doing me saying what I want to say about topics of interest to me. If you like it, I love it. However, I recently realized that sometimes you’re having an impact and don’t even know it. Picture this…
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