How Little has Changed Between 'Political Correctness' and 'Woke'

How Little has Changed Between 'Political Correctness' and 'Woke'


Americans like their gas cheap and their speech free, and aren’t about to accept technical explanations or moral posturing to get in the way of either.


“Politically correct.” I was introduced to that fatuous phrase about 35 years ago while watching an episode of the television series Thirtysomething. The following day, I mentioned it in a casual conversation with a colleague. Confessing that I had never before heard the expression, I told her I found an astounding clumsiness in its construction. “(The character) said it without a hint of irony,” I complained. “Isn’t ‘politically (long pause) correct,’ a contradiction in terms?”

“Not at all,” she educated me. “We used it all the time at Occidental,” explaining everything I needed to know. “Some things simply cannot be said,” she continued, “or even thought.”

We were both in our early 30s, and it had been years since either of us had sat in a college classroom. It dawned on me that my colleague had carried the burden of that knowledge for both of us for over a decade. I was impressed. As her lesson continued, I learned that speech that is hurtful or “denies what we know to be true” must be suppressed. I don’t recall whether she tried to enlighten me about what type of things constitute “what we know to be true.” If she did, it didn’t take.

Over the next two decades, it was nearly impossible to avoid the term. On balance, and honoring core principles of our sometimes-impolite founding, “politically correct” (or its diminutive, “PC”) found its more proper home in the camp of those using it as a pejorative. The ridicule, the market decided, was warranted. It has now been many moons since the phrase has been employed to shame the allegedly “incorrect” and remains an arrow in the quiver of the sane.

A Pose by any Other Name

So why this history lesson? To illustrate how little has changed. Instead of the Titanic’s deck chairs, we have busied ourselves with a change in the vulgate. If “politically correct” was clumsy, “woke” is positively spastic.

My introduction to the term occurred when escaped the large, wobbly, and always moving mouth of Congresswoman Maxine Waters in one of her infamous street-preaching press conferences. Like everything that comes from Mad Max, it hurt my ears, but “woke” seemed a particularly aggressive expression. The way she used it defied standards of English -- which, of course, is the point behind the point -- and exhibited both arrogance and a clear animosity toward those outside her congregation, whom she knew would balk at its calculated crudeness. Typical boomer, though. I was late to the party: it was 2017 by the time Auntie Maxine assaulted my senses. Apparently, BLM had been throwing “woke” around for several years, certainly by the time that Michael (“Never Said ‘Hands Up, Don’t Shoot’”) Brown was killed in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014. Some try to tie it to a common encouragement of vigilance, i.e., “stay woke,” between blacks during Jim Crow, but given its modern use, that ancestry seems questionable.



The gulf is wide between vigilance and vanity. The former doesn’t fret over pronouns or the feelings of boys who only want to beat the girls. Its concern is in not getting beaten. Vigilance doesn’t busy itself with counting the number of black women cast in a European costume drama or Asian men in a revival of Fiddler on the Roof. Vanity does. Vigilance doesn’t demand an alternative “national anthem” be performed before sporting events. That’s vanity, too.

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