![]() ![]() The work is often done in private in ways that are hard to articulate to others. There are two key questions: What do you want? And are you ready to do the work to get what you want? We must be willing to do this work not as an Instagram story or tweet thread to publicly demonstrate the work. It is an intentional aspiration that will cause you everything while simultaneously rendering you everything. The conversation is about whether you are ready to get free or not, because freedom isn’t a willy-nilly shot in the dark launched with no intention or out of boredom. Wokeness is not a conversation about having the privilege of being woke. Wokeness is an experience of being right here in this moment, experiencing our joy as well as our sorrow, all while knowing that everyone around us is having the same experience whether they are aware of it or not. Thus wokeness is not a feeling, a thought, or something that we claim and perform. In other words, my understanding of wokeness is compassion. It is awakened when we want to free ourselves and others from suffering. ![]() The heart of wokeness is the practice of empathy. When I talk about wokeness, I am talking about our capacity to realize that our personal brokenheartedness is the same brokenheartedness that all beings are experiencing on some level at the same time. Even as a young person, I was already tired of suffering, and I wasn’t looking forward to a life of this suffering. This interest was awakened and fueled by my growing awareness of the suffering I was experiencing as a Black queer boy in the South. My understanding of wokeness began in my early teen years when I was developing an intense interest in justice. What I mean to say is that being woke doesn’t mean we somehow permanently transcend being harmful. I am not a woke person in the same way that I do not consider myself a good person, because any positive place we claim to occupy as a static identity location makes it hard to notice the times when we are not so good. Considering how we define wokeness these days, I fear that I am not cool enough or pretty enough, or that I don’t wear the right clothes or have enough pseudo-spiritual catchphrases or social media followers. Contemporary wokeness is basically a New Age feel-good cult mentality steeped in neoliberalism and expressing the traits of performativity (or the pursuit of the cool and hip), reductionism (oversimplification), and a lack of accountability (folks do and say whatever they want)-all stuffed into a machine of over commodification. When I think about contemporary wokeness, I reflect on what I call social media gurus and self-help experts who craft glitzy personas and offer simple wisdom with little depth. Wokeness these days seems more like a performance meant to hide the performer’s deep terror of anyone realizing that they are as full of pain as everyone else. We move around in our circles gauging the wokeness of the people around us, and I can’t help but feel that this inquiry is a kind of elitist performance attempting to establish yet another hierarchy within an experience that is supposed to be inherently anti-hierarchical and inclusive. ![]() There is a desperation to get woke or else. Not only does being woke feel like trying to be the coolest kid on the block, getting woke also feels like some kind of competition we are desperate to win, because the losers get blamed for all the bad shit in the world. So the woundedness, the trauma, is actually disrupting the foundation of that identity, and then actually having to sit with the intensity of trying to figure out who you are now, after this identity location of whiteness has been disrupted.The work of wokeness is not what you think When I’m working with white folks, it’s helping to support white folks in actually connecting to the trauma of whiteness and what whiteness has meant, whiteness as a system that has to be maintained because that’s where identity location has been planted. I think a good example is whiteness, white supremacy. What are you actually doing in channeling the energy of this anger, and is that channeling of the energy actually helping you to somehow take care of the hurt? For people who experience a lot of oppression and social marginalization, I think there’s a closer connection to the hurt than I would say for people who experience more social privilege. But as you move away from the hurt into the tension that arises, it’s how we’re channeling that anger. It all comes from hurt, and for me, I don’t judge the hurt. ![]()
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