They Stole the Word. Now They Fear It.

They say it like a curse word now.

Woke.

You hear it in campaign ads. You hear it in school board meetings. You hear it from governors who build their entire political identity around hating a word they cannot even define. They spit it out with contempt because contempt is all they have. But before you let them take this word from you, you need to know where it came from. You need to know who built it. You need to know what it cost.

Because this is your word. And they know it.

---

It Started With a Warning

In 1923, a Jamaican philosopher named Marcus Garvey raised his voice across the Atlantic. He sent a message to every Black person scattered across a world that had stolen them, sold them, and then forgotten them. His message was simple.

Wake up, Ethiopia. Wake up, Africa.

He chose Ethiopia on purpose. Most of Africa was still under the boot of European colonizers. Ethiopia stood. Ethiopia resisted. So Garvey used Ethiopia as a signal, as a lighthouse for a people who had been deliberately kept in the dark about their own history, their own power, their own worth.

Wake up. Stay alert. Know what is happening around you. Know who is doing it.

That was the original meaning. That has always been the meaning.

Eleven years later, in 1938, a Blues musician named Lead Belly recorded a protest song about the Scottsboro Boys. Nine Black teenagers. Falsely accused of assaulting two white women. Sentenced to death. Lead Belly told his listeners to be careful, to pay attention, to stay woke, keep your eyes open. That was the first recorded use of the phrase in American music. It was a survival instruction. It was a warning from one Black person to another about what this country was capable of doing to you if you let your guard down.

In 1962, the novelist William Melvin Kelly wrote a piece for the New York Times called "If You're Woke You Dig It." Kelly traced the word through Black jazz culture and noted something that should sound very familiar today. He wrote about how white beatnik poets were absorbing Black slang, changing it, hollowing it out, until Black people had to abandon the words and start over. They did this with jazz. They did this with rock and roll. They did this with hip-hop. And now they are doing it with woke.

This is not new. This is the pattern.

---

Ferguson Changed Everything

In 2014, Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Missouri. Black Lives Matter activists picked up the phrase "stay woke" and carried it into the streets. It meant what it had always meant. Stay alert to police violence. Stay alert to systemic racism. Stay alert to the gap between what America claims to be and what it actually does to its Black citizens.

That is when the right latched on.

Between 2017 and 2019, they scoffed. They called it virtue signaling. They rolled their eyes and hoped it would go away. When it did not go away, because the truth does not go away just because powerful people find it inconvenient, they shifted tactics. Between 2019 and 2021, conservative media built woke into their operating vocabulary as a catch-all smear. Anything progressive? Woke. Anything about racial justice? Woke. Anything about gender equity, labor rights, climate science, or teaching accurate American history? Woke.

Ron DeSantis turned it into a presidential campaign. He said it out loud, with pride:

We fight the woke in the legislature, we fight the woke in the schools, we fight the woke in the corporations. We will never ever surrender to the woke mob.

Then CNN anchor Jake Tapper asked him a simple question. What does woke mean?

DeSantis said, and this is a direct quote:

Not everyone really knows what wokeness is.

He built his entire political identity around a word he could not define. Read that again. Slowly. Let it settle.

---

Why It Matters

They are fighting to protect institutions that have kept Black people underserved, underpaid, underrepresented, and under threat for the entire history of this country.

They are fighting to protect a version of America that does not have to look at what it has done.

They took a word born from Black survival and tried to turn it into a weapon against Black people. They took Marcus Garvey's wake-up call and tried to make it a punchline. They took Lead Belly's survival instruction and turned it into a campaign slogan for men who want you too confused to fight back.

This is the con. Now you see it.

---

Pennsylvania Is Not Exempt

This is not happening somewhere else. This is happening here. In your legislature. In your school boards. In your districts. The same forces that turned "stay woke" into an insult are the same forces working to dilute Black voting power, restrict access to the ballot, and ensure that the communities they have neglected for decades stay too divided to demand anything different.

The Pennsylvania Democratic Black Caucus exists because Black communities in this state need organized, focused, relentless power. Not the kind of power that waits for someone to hand it over. The kind of power that builds itself, elects its own, and shows up for its people no matter what.

Staying woke is not a trend. It is not a bumper sticker. It is a hundred-year tradition of Black Americans refusing to be blindsided by a country that has made a habit of doing exactly that.

Marcus Garvey said wake up. Lead Belly said stay woke. Black Lives Matter said keep your eyes open. The Pennsylvania Democratic Black Caucus says the same thing today.

Stay woke. Stay organized. Stay in the fight.