You might have noticed that over the last week or so, half the world’s paid and unpaid commentators have suddenly started putting out their own boutique definition of wokeness. Since the precise definition of wokeness is, in 2023, about as relevant as the precise borders of the Aztec Triple Alliance, this seems like a fairly dry academic exercise, but somehow the project has managed to produce a lot of excitement. As far as I can tell, we’re in this hole because some right-wing critic wrote a book decrying the evils of wokeness, and then when she was asked on TV to define what woke actually meant she couldn’t provide an answer. This must have understandably led some people to conclude that woke doesn’t really refer to anything at all, that it’s a deliberately amorphous name for an essentially fictive enemy, to be bandied about by various oleaginously entrepreneurial conservative commentators—because now we’ve all been drafted into this game of pulling out our definitions of wokeness and comparing sizes. As it happens, I do think that wokeness is (or, frankly, was) a real phenomenon, and that it has a definition; I’m going to be showing you mine in just a moment. But it still strikes me as significant that while many of these definitions have been perfectly coherent and sometimes even persuasive, no two of them have been entirely the same.
