Editorial
We find ourselves increasingly perplexed by the repeated and peculiar use of the term “woke” as a pejorative to deride liberal politics, especially as they relates to race, gender and social justice. It seems to be one of the most frequently used political terms today, though we’re not sure there is a consensus on what woke actually means.
What got us to thinking about the proliferation of the use of the term was an announcement made earlier this month by Pete Hegseth, U.S. secretary of defense, that Moses Ezekiel’s Confederate memorial sculpture would be returned to Arlington National Cemetery. The sculpture, declared Hegseth, “never should have been taken down by woke lemmings. Unlike the Left, we don’t believe in erasing American history – we honor it.”
The woke lemmings to which Hegseth referred was a bipartisan commission that directed the sculpture’s 2023 removal. That commission was created to remove vestiges of the Confederacy from military installations in the wake of racial unrest following the killing of George Floyd. The Ezekiel sculpture, with its depiction of African Americans in subservient roles in the Old South, was deemed to be sympathetic to the Confederate cause.
Ezekiel, a renowned 19th century sculptor, was the first Jewish cadet at Virginia Military Institute. He was also one of the cadets who fought in the Battle of New Market during the Civil War. Another of Ezekiel’s creations is the statue of Stonewall Jackson that was removed from the VMI parade ground several years ago and relocated to the New Market Battlefield. He also sculpted “Virginia Mourning Its Dead” at VMI.
Ezekiel’s Confederate memorial sculpture was to be relocated to the VMI-owned New Market Battlefield Park before the recent announcement that it would be returned to Arlington. Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who had made the arrangements for the sculpture’s relocation to New Market, announced more recently that the sculpture was being fully refurbished and would be returned to Arlington in 2027.
What struck us, apart from the bizarreness of the comings and goings of this historic relic, was the role that wokeness is believed to have played in initiating these events. Wokeness, it seems, is being blamed or used as justification for a whole slew of actions taking place in Washington, D.C., these days.
“We don’t need woke at the Kennedy Center,” President Donald Trump said earlier this year when he named himself the center’s chairman after firing the center’s bipartisan board of trustees for allegedly spreading “anti-American propaganda.”
Just last week, Trump said, in reference to a directive his administration issued to review exhibits at all of the Smithsonian Institution’s museums, “We want the museums to talk about the history of our country in a fair manner, not in a woke manner or in a racist manner, … ” We recall that Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, in response to President Joe Biden’s state of union speech in January of 2023, accused the administration of being “more interested in woke fantasies than the hard reality Americans face every day.”
What, then, is this wokeness that has gotten some folks so worked up about. A cursory search of the internet (Wikipedia) tells us that it is “an adjective derived from African-American English used since the 1930s or earlier to refer to awareness of racial prejudice and discrimination, often in the construction ‘stay woke.’ The term acquired political connotations by the 1970s and gained further popularity in the 2010s with the hashtag #staywoke. Over time, woke came to be used to refer to a broader awareness of social inequalities such as sexism and denial of LGBTQ rights. Woke has also been used as shorthand for some ideas of the American Left involving identity politics and social justice, such as white privilege and reparations for slavery in the United States.”
Wikipedia goes on to say that, “Since 2019, the term has been widely used sarcastically as a pejorative by the political right and some centrists to disparage leftist and progressive movements as superficial and insincere performative activism. In particular, it has been used to denigrate diversity, equity and inclusion.”
So, it appears that the increasingly frequent use of the term woke is happening in tandem with broad efforts on the political right in its war against DEI initiatives. That’s how a long-ago VMI alumnus has come to be invoked in the war on wokeness.
