My Aunt Maryam never let us leave her presence without the same farewell: “Stay woke and watch your back.”
She was our matriarch. She introduced my Mama to Islam and to Malcolm before I was born, and for the rest of her life she kept placing revolutionary thought in my hands. Books, history, and questions. Deepening everything my parents and my teachers were pouring into me. She always shared that farewell the same way you say a prayer over children walking out into a country you know too well. We would be fools not to heed her words, her caution, and her love.
My cousins and I carried her charge in our own vernacular. Sucka-free, we told each other, borrowing the refrain from hip hop — our youthful way of saying stay woke. Don’t fall for the okie-doke.
So when Jenice Armstrong wrote this week that she doesn’t care what anyone says, “being woke isn’t a bad thing,” I heard Aunt Maryam at the door. Armstrong described a longtime friend who now says “woke” like it names something disgusting, and a rising Democratic star repeating a councilman’s line that “Woke one was crazy.”
Since when did consciousness become something our friends apologize for?
Being woke means being alert to racial transgressions. The opposite is being asleep at the helm — steering our children’s futures with our eyes closed to the conditions our people actually live in. Neely Fuller Jr. issued the companion warning back in 1971: if you do not understand white supremacy, what it is and how it works, everything else that you understand will only confuse you.
The cost of this war on one syllable is already steep. A president fired Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the second Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. We shed no tears when generals in an imperialist army get canned by their imperial overlords. The Pentagon purged the publisher, editor-in-chief, and a reporter at Stars and Stripes to steer the paper away from “woke distractions.” The White House brands museums the last remaining segment of “WOKE” and is moving against them too.
The campaign running through our schools and libraries is another matter. More than 10,000 books were banned from public school shelves in a single school year. The Naval Academy pulled Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings from its library while Mein Kampf stayed on the shelf.
The corporate space is no different. In the summer of 2020, corporate America pledged $49.5 billion toward racial equity. Within a year, barely $250 million had actually been spent, and more than 90 percent of the commitments were structured as loans and investments the companies stand to profit from. The diversity officers hired in that season were phased out first, and the ones who remain are mostly white — with Black women absorbing the deepest cuts.
Target, Amazon, and Walmart rolled back their programs within days of the White House order. Too many signed on in the middle of a reckoning, started breaking their promises less than a year later, and greeted the edicts as the excuse they had been waiting for.
When Erykah Badu, who carried “I stay woke” into a generation’s ears on “Master Teacher,” was asked what they mean by woke, she answered: “I think they mean Black.”
She’s right. And what they are hunting is older than all of them. Marcus Garvey cried “Wake up, Ethiopia! Wake up, Africa!” a century ago. Lead Belly told Black travelers passing through Alabama to “stay woke” in 1938, after singing about the Scottsboro Boys. Martin’s final Sunday sermon, delivered at the National Cathedral four days before Memphis, warned us against sleeping through a great revolution — Rip Van Winkle slept twenty years and woke to a world that had changed without him. And Malcolm named the greatest mistake of the movement: trying to organize a sleeping people around specific goals. Wake the people up first, he said. Then you get action.
When people are sad, Malcolm taught, they don’t do anything — they just cry over their condition. When they get angry, they bring about a change. Part of being woke is carrying a productive rage over how this country treats the underprivileged and the under-resourced, those of the darker hue and the recently arrived, the eldest and the youngest. America has professionalized ensuring the most vulnerable become the most vilified.
Baldwin knew that rage. To be Black in this country and to be relatively conscious, he said in 1961, is to be in a rage almost all the time. And Derrick Bell built Faces at the Bottom of the Well around the hardest conclusion of all: racism is a permanent, indestructible component of this society, and we must acknowledge that truth not as a sign of submission, but as an act of ultimate defiance. Woke enough to be enraged. Woke enough to be defiant. And woke enough to be of action — to organize, to advocate, to teach, or to just plain do something. Being woke was never only a feeling. It is why our Freedom Friday podcast exists — a classroom for us and for our audience, built to keep us woke and active, informed and in community, prepared and productive.
Every time people attempt to re-construct this country from its initial maniacal, genocidal savagery, the whitelash and the whitewash are bound to come. To not notice — to stay ignorant, blissfully or concertedly — to choose not to be aware, to not prepare, only to succumb to despair, and to not resist against it all: that is far too much for me to bear.
Despair isn’t just a feeling that visits; it’s a surrender you can refuse.
As a kid at Nidhamu Sasa, the African Freedom School that trained us for a world that would daily threaten the safety of Black children, I pledged allegiance to the resistance — my classmates all did. Allegiance means being consciously woke. And I was raised to bet on being woke and active as the optimal choice. I chose wokeness.
The tradition Aunt Maryam raised us in says it too. The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, taught that whoever among us sees a wrong should change it with his hand; if he cannot, then with his tongue; and if he cannot, then with his heart — and that is the weakest of faith. Even the weakest of these choices calls for a level of awareness, agency, and being conscious — being woke. Rumi taught that the breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you — don’t go back to sleep. Both of my inheritances, the Black radical one and the Muslim one, carry the same instruction: wake up, stay up, and keep your people close.
A line long attributed to Rumi makes room for the reluctant:
“Those who don’t want to change, let them sleep.”
Some in our community want to run from being woke and hand it over to the people weaponizing it; many more never will. Wisdom is not automatically assigned to us older folks — perception, insight, and discernment can turn elusive at any age. And plenty in the rising generation stand primed and ready to carry the traditions of vigilance and perception on. Being woke is a blessing.
And we owe this wakefulness to our progeny. We stay woke and push for societal and political change so our children inherit an improved world — and not a false sense of security in it. I expect my own children to carry both halves of the charge: awareness, the perception to see the conditions as they are; and wariness, the posture to guard against them.
Aunt Maryam held the same expectation for her daughter and for her niece — my Mama. Malcolm warned us that racism is like a Cadillac: they bring out a new model every year. So those of us who insist on vigilance have to be just as vigilant about rejuvenating our souls, our spirits, our minds, our hearts, and our bodies. A healthy resister in mind, body, and spirit is able to do much, much more.
This vigilance has been written down before. For thirty years, a Harlem mail carrier named Victor Green published a guide to which businesses would serve Black travelers — and which of the thousands of sundown towns to clear before dark. The Green Book was about staying woke and staying alive: go to sleep in the wrong place, wake up dead. We are not as far from that time as we would like to pretend.
Parents still keep informal green books for schools — which classrooms see our children, and which ones merely enroll them. And our communities keep a ledger for politicians, at least when we are not charmed out of consulting it by a saxophone solo on Arsenio’s stage, a photo op over fried chicken, or a sudden appearance in our pews right before the polls open. Winks and smiles go in one column. What actually got delivered goes in the other.
M.K. Asante told Armstrong, “You can co-opt a word, but the spirit of what ‘stay woke’ means is alive and well.” That spirit does not belong to any political party, and no party’s discomfort can repossess it. It belongs to Garvey and Lead Belly, to Martin and Malcolm, to Baldwin, Fuller, and Bell, to Badu, and to a matriarch who blessed her children at the door. I’ll be damned if I’m going to let these jokers hijack a warning — a loving cajole — to stay woke.
Black August has just passed — a month our people set aside for study, discipline, and remembering. So we will keep “woke,” and the practice it names. May our genealogy of helping each other stay woke endure.
Stay woke, yaw. Watch your back. And watch each other’s.
