![]() ![]() The instinct is that something’s going on with you, the rebuker, that you can’t see in yourself all this hectoring and exhorting is compensatory in some way. But I think Maugham was animated by similar instincts as mine when I deploy “wokeness” against contemporaries who I find too full of their own rectitude. The term “woke” wasn’t around in 1921, when Somerset Maugham wrote his short story Rain about the downfall of a professional rebuker – the Christian missionary, Mr Davidson, whose public fulminations against sin masked less-than-upstanding private impulses. ![]() Laura Kipnis: ‘Wokeness is about style, not substance’ Malaika Jabali is the senior news and politics editor at Essence Magazine And others will continue to co-opt and distort. And just as “woke” evolved into a call to action to keep fighting, Black Americans will continue to birth terms that define what we do. ![]() There is no authoritative body of people who get to determine what terms get used and why. Amid police killings in that “post-racial” society, these myths became untenable. Woke was another way to say “conscious”: having awareness of our conditions and history in an America that lulls us with myths of a post-racial, colorblind, meritocratic society. Just as ‘woke’ evolved into a call to action, Black Americans will continue to birth terms that define what we do ![]()
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