According to the dictionary and Wikipedia, woke or awake is a legitimate, useful word that means: to show signs of life; stir up; activate; stimulate; lift; boost; come alive. A derivative—the term stay woke—was first used in the 1920’s when Marcus Garvey made the call, Wake up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa! in a plea for black people across the world to open their eyes to systemic racism and get in involved in politics.

In 1938, Blues musician Lead Belly, (Huddie Ledbetter) recorded the song “Scottsboro Boys,” a ballad that tells the true story of four black youths falsely accused and later freed for raping a white woman in Scottsboro, Alabama. Lyrics in that ballad, stay woke, were an advisory to blacks to be careful when down south, were used again in 1962 in a New York Times article titled If You’re Woke You Dig It: No Mickey Mouse Can Be Expected to Follow Today’s Negro Idiom Without a Hip Assist. The black author, William Arthur Kelly, wrote the piece pandering to the 1950’s and 60’s beatnik social movement stressing self-expression highlighting Black American slang appropriated by white people who often missed or distorted the original meanings.

I liken the stop-woke movement to living life in hospice care where morphine is used in to promote sleep to numb the pain of death. Ignorance in the stop-woke movement is used to numb the pain of living in the complicated—good, bad, and ugly sphere of humanity. There is no political or moral justification for allowing our young to sleep through learning how to live.