Erykah Badu
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Rihanna
Stormzy
The film Queen & Slim
The Childish Gambino video for “This Is America”
Gina Miller
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Harry and Meghan
The Guardian
Brixton
Harlem
Lagos
Detroit
Grace Jones
Adwoa Aboah
Bob Marley
The clothes of British fashion designers Grace Wales Bonner and Duro Olowu
The artwork of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Carrie Mae Weems, Glenn Ligon, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, and Toyin Ojih Odutola
Woke has also been weaponized, used in conservative media circles as the highest insult, often placed within quotation marks, to mean rigid, uptight, and socially and politically puritanical. When the Duke and Duchess of Sussex decided to step away from their roles, the Daily Mail complained that Prince Harry went from “fun-loving bloke to the Prince of Woke.” Meanwhile, the HBO show host Bill Maher implored Democratic presidential candidates to “get out of Woke-ville” or else lose the election altogether.
Woke has been just as weaponized in liberal circles, as summed up by the BBC’s gender and identity correspondent Megha Mohan’s tweet: “Note to editor; no-one in diverse circles uses the word ‘woke’ anymore. In fact, it’s the clearest indication of the insular nature of their world if they file copy using it in 2019.”
Dropping the word woke into conversation among strangers in a social setting is a pretty easy way to determine where someone sits on the political spectrum without having to invest too much time in uncomfortable debates. Just watch for the nods, stiffened smiles, or eye rolls.
As various feminists have done with the color pink, asserting it and the idea of femininity as symbols of strength and power rather than sexist marketing and naff children’s toys, some have attempted to reclaim woke away from internet misuse, punch lines, and clickbait in the spirit of Black consciousness.
Wokeness is often twinned with youthful indignation and optimism. See the scores of students who populated the People’s Vote March against Brexit in the UK, the March for Our Lives against gun violence in America, and the entire history of student protest, really. Also see the record number of young people who have entered politics in recent years from Mhairi Black to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Ultimately, wokeness is rooted in love—of self, family, humanity—just as injustice is rooted in hate.
Because despite its inherently pessimistic nature, woke is hopeful. To search for Badu’s beautiful world requires the belief that one is out there—or at least, capable of being made.
Chapter 3
Wakanda Forever
Much has been said about the fact that social media can make a person feel lonely. But I’d argue it can do the opposite for those who live chunks of their lives in spaces where they are an Only, an experience many Black people are well acquainted with. Anyone who has ever worked or socialized in a setting in which you are the Only One of One, Two, or at most Three understands the distinct sense of relief that comes from finally finding a network of people who have lived through similar experiences and who understand the particularity of yours. That unique kind of gladness in finding your tribe, people who can be both a mirror and validation of one’s difference as well as provide a kind of encouragement to embrace and celebrate it.
And while studies and polls reveal a loneliness epidemic sweeping through a generation of millennials thanks to social media, it’s impossible to ignore how Black Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook have heightened a sense of community, connectivity, and solidarity for an entirely different demographic, Black people and especially Black women.
In my case, the alternative network I found on social media helped soften the culture shock of moving to a new country until I could find my own tribe on the ground in real life.
As a transplant to the UK, navigating insular, difficult-to-break-into circles in publishing and fashion, I have often felt the isolation of life as an Only in a way I didn’t feel it stateside. Back home, during my childhood in Virginia and my twenties in New York, if I was an Only in the classroom or work, the extensive tribe of girlfriends I had outside of it all helped fortify me against any feelings of exclusion.
Not to mention I could wake up in Virginia or New York, walk out the door, and dive into a variety of enriching Black experiences according to whatever mood I happened to be in that day. This was something I took for granted—until I moved to London, where more often than not I found myself in the position of outsider.
In the UK, where I moved in the late aughts into a historically White, working-class Southeast London neighborhood in the throes of gentrification, I found myself seeking out sameness in any form as a reprieve from Otherness. I knew the city had a rich Black cultural scene, I just hadn’t discovered how or where to tap into it yet. During those first six months abroad, I lived alone waiting for my boyfriend (who is now my husband and, I should point out, an American mix of Irish and Italian) to tie up loose ends back in the States so that he could board a plane in order to move in with me.
I craved the company of other Americans, people who shared my accent and colloquialisms, people who didn’t pepper their spellings with u’s or say “sorry” instead of “excuse me” as they tried to navigate crowded pubs and rush hour trains. I formed tight, if fleeting, bonds with people I probably never would have gravitated toward back home in the States over the smallest Americanisms: a guilty affinity for Chick-fil-A and Ben’s Chili Bowl or subscriptions to the New Yorker and New York Magazine. It didn’t take much.
But more than anything, I craved a sense of community with other Black people, specifically Black women, and especially as Black people throughout the diaspora reveled in a new wave of pride and consciousness in the wake of the Obama presidency. I had grown up the product of institutions built to strengthen Black people in the face of systemic discrimination; I was the child of two historically Black university graduates. I understood the power of a strong tribe. And I knew if I was to successfully live in another country, I needed to find a community, even if it meant building one myself. I longed to be in a room where I was one of a loud, rambunctious many—like the greatest of all Black block parties, Sunday dinners, cookouts, or family reunions—rather than just the contained, observant party of one.
In the meantime, social media met the need, connecting me with my extended sister circle back home as well as with a group of talented Black women writers, early generation bloggers, and editors in other cities around the world whom I got to know through the internet. Social media tided me over until I could find what I was looking for offline.
I had found small pockets of it in London. At Notting Hill Carnival during my first full year as a UK resident. At the dinner party of a cousin of a friend’s friend later that autumn. And at a string of Afro hair salons I tried. But it wasn’t until January 2010 that I finally found what I had been looking for on a larger scale.
A friend, determined to show me that London was just as rich in community and melanin as New York (her words: “if not even more so!”), invited me to be her plus-one for an art party. The Tate Britain had just launched a sprawling, midcareer retrospective of the British painter Chris Ofili’s work. Chris Ofili, unapologetically Black and Manchester born, of Nigerian descent. Chris Ofili, Turner Prize–winning member of the famed Young British Artists. Chris Ofili, the man behind that painting of the Madonna rendered as a Black woman surrounded by big, Black, sexualized asses and actual elephant dung on canvas. The one that not only offended Catholics the world over but also divided the art world and pissed off a fair proportion of the viewing public. The one the mayor of New York tried to ban. Yeah, I’ll be there.