The Secretary of State for Youth, Sarah El Haïry, criticized, Monday, September 20, thought “Woke” of the primary ecological candidate Sandrine Rousseau (Europe Ecologie-Les Verts), who aims to “Look for the difference, the wound to go and oppose people”, and who is “The opposite of the history of France”.
At the beginning of September, the socialist mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, candidate for the presidential election of 2022, declared what ” born [ferait] not campaign on wokism ”.
Appeared in the United States in black militant spheres to denounce racism and police violence, the term woke has experienced a meteoric rise in public debates in France for several years. Deviated from its original meaning, the word is mocked today as being an instrument of “Censorship” of anti-racist and intersectional activism.
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Where does the term “woke” come from?
Simple past tense of the English verb to wake, which in French means “to wake up”, the word “woke” has taken on a truly ideological meaning in the African American vernacular to designate the fact of being aware of the injustices suffered by ethnic, sexual, religious minorities, or all forms of discrimination, and mobilized about them.
Before arriving in France, the term spread across the Atlantic in the historical context of the struggle for black rights. “This slang expression has traveled in the African-American world from the 1960s”, explained to World in February the historian Pap Ndiaye. This specialist in the social history of the United States recalled that the great figure of the American civil rights movement, Martin Luther King, had urged young Americans at “Stay awake” and to “To be a committed generation”, during a speech at Oberlin University, Ohio, in June 1965.
This militant consciousness among African Americans has even already appeared in the early 1900s. In 1923, the Jamaican philosopher and activist Marcus Garvey, pioneer of Pan-Africanism, urged: “Wake up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa! “
An article from American site Vox spotted the use in 1938 of the expression “Stay woke” in a song protest by blues musician Lead Belly over the story of a group of black teenagers accused of raping two white women in Scottsboro, Arkansas.
The term would even fit into an even older history of activism, according to some specialists, who report the use of the expression “Wide awake” by the anti-slavers of the XIXe century who were already asserting themselves “Wide awake” under the presidency of Abraham Lincoln.
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How did the word come into modern usage?
The expression made its return in 2008, by the American singer Erykah Badu who sings “I stay woke” (“I stay awake”) in its title Master Teacher, then in 2012 when she tweets her support to Russian feminist rock group Pussy Riots, members of which were sentenced to prison for “Incitement to religious hatred”.
But it is thanks to the Black Lives Matter movement that the term takes on a whole new dimension. The Ferguson Riots (Missouri) in 2014, after the murder of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old black youth killed by police, sparked a wave of protest against police violence. The movement is bringing out a new generation of anti-racist activists, more present on social networks, who denounce systemic racism and call on citizens to be “Awake” against the oppression suffered by the black population in the United States. a documentary released in 2016, Stay Woke: The Black Lives Matter Movement, permanently anchors the term in this movement.
Word woke has subsequently spread throughout the world, and within other militant spheres to denounce all forms of injustice suffered by minorities, whether sexual, ethnic or religious.
We saw it appear on many signs during the “women’s march” in January 2017, a political rally organized in the United States after the election of Donald Trump. It was then a question of denouncing the sexism and misogyny of the new American president.
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What are people defending who say they are “woke”?
In the early 2010s, this concept enabled minorities to unite around a shared perception and experience of discrimination. A person who defines himself as “awake” is aware of social inequalities, as opposed to people “asleep” in the face of the oppression that weighs on women, lesbians, gay, bi and trans, people of foreign origins, etc. .
Regardless of how individual attitudes may have changed, people “woke” believe that societies around the world remain inequitable and sometimes destructive to certain minorities. They recognize that you can be treated differently depending on your social background, skin color, religion, disability, sex or gender. So tackling structural inequalities will make the world a safer and better place, they say.
If the term is historically linked to the fight against racism against African Americans, the individuals who claim to be today “Woke” embraces several major causes:
- the fight against racism and against police violence (the Black Lives Matter movement is still very active)
- global warming (the strong mobilizations during the climate marches)
- the fight for gender equality (#metoo).
“It is about a change of lifestyle, of way of inhabiting, of moving, of living together on Earth with its non-human inhabitants. Gender assignments and sexual identities are deeply questioned ”, summed up Pap Ndiaye.
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What are their detractors saying?
Critics of the “woke” in France, that we find on the right – the member (Les Républicains) of Bouches-du-Rhône Valérie Boyer denounced in September a “Woke totalitarianism” –, on the far right (the president of Debout la France, the sovereignist Nicolas Dupont-Aignan evoked in June “The drifts of ideology”woke ” “), but also on the left – among the supporters of “offensive secularism” – are worried about the rise of intolerance towards opposing opinions, and a muzzling of freedom of expression.
Denouncing the statues of slavers unbolted, university conferences canceled, the responsibles dismissed from their functions… They are worried about abuses, such as the “cancel culture”, which would aim to ostracize from the public space any personality whose words or actions are considered to be “offensive” to the public. towards minorities.
Another fear often relayed: the importation of a debate on race made in USA within a French society driven by republican universalism. Opponents of this term believe that certain popular ideas within the American radical left, such as the organization of single-sex meetings, intersectionality, debates on gender issues, would undermine the French Republican ideal and threaten the cohesion of the country.
These “wokist” ideas are worrying right up to the top of the state. While the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, denounced the theories in social sciences imported from the United States, the Minister of National Education, Jean-Michel Blanquer, considers “That these movements are a deep destabilizing wave for civilization. They call into question humanism, itself the result of long centuries of maturation in our society ”.
He has also announced, in August, the launch of a “republican laboratory” against the ” “cancel culture” and the woke ideology ”. And this even though sociologists have called this threat exaggerated.
According to a recent survey by FIFG, “woke thought” remained little known among the French: only 14% of respondents had already heard this term and 6% knew what it was.
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