The Psychology of Woke - Part I

Propagandizing the Rorschach Test - Sam Ray © 2023 - Counter-Narcissist Intel

As someone who was born, raised, and lived most of their life in Wokeville, aka the multi-cultural, multi-racial, multi-ethnic, socially accepting California and the San Francisco Bay Area, I never gave the word “woke” a single thought until recently. 

Here, our non-labeled version of being “woke” is quite simple. Be a good, kind and cool person, help the systemically disadvantaged if you can and be respectful of each other’s ethnicity, culture, religion, sexual orientation, mental health, struggles or whatever. You respect me, I respect you, you celebrate your culture, I celebrate mine, and we are all good. Simple, right?

However, several months ago, a question from a close Southern California friend who would be considered very “woke” in all the best ways struck me like a lightening bolt. He asked with a tone of concern, “What does ‘woke’ mean?”

I immediately understood his confusion and why he was asking. Here in Wokeville, I had only heard the term occasionally used over the last 10 years or so, but seemingly out of nowhere, I started hearing “woke,” “wokeism,” “the woke mob” and “the woke mind virus” become the favorite new insults and headlines of right-wing politicians such as Florida’s Disney villain governor and Republican propaganda media like Fox News, but since “DeSatan and Faux News are two peas in a pod,” one has to wonder if he is just mirroring their pro-Republican propaganda or are they mirroring his selfish pathology? Psychology indicates the answer is both.

Regardless, until my friend set off the “woke” warning signal, the Republican grift machine stealing a word from black culture and falsely conflating it with some boogeyman extremism to ridiculously attack black folks and Democrats seemed as if it was just another day in the life of The George Santos GOP.

This completely on-brand GOP behavior clouded the need to define what seemed like such an obvious word. To be “woke” by its simplest definition means to be awake, aware and to care. This apparent clarity is why I remember fumbling so badly when I tried to define “woke” for my friend. 

In the end, I came up with something like, “It means to be aware of racial and other types of injustices, and want something done about it.” We moved on but I don’t recall either of us being very satisfied with that answer. In that moment, it became crystalized that the meaning of “woke” was not so clear anymore. What was also crystal was the concept of “wokeness” had been culturally appropriated and turned upside down by repetitive GOP conflations, manipulations and propagandized definitions.

It was my struggle to easily explain simple positives like being awake, aware and to care, that made it apparent that the GOP rebranding of “woke” as their primary attack messaging and propagandized Rorschach Test was having some redefining success against things that do not serve the Republican Party’s owners. However, when they are even confusing us unlabeled woke folks about our own way of being, it is an obvious sign that the term needs to be filtered through political and psychological lenses, so we can know how to use counter-narcissist intelligence to defeat this dishonest and Orwellian use of language being deployed against us.

The Political Lens

The first clear use of “woke” was by the famous Blues musician Lead Belly, in a song he wrote about three young black men in the South who were falsely found guilty of the crime that gaslights insecure white men the most, and then were cruelly sentenced to death in 1931. With the white-supremacist racism in the 1930s South, who could possibly argue with black folks warning each other to “best stay woke, keep your eyes open” when in former pro-slavery states or other white-supremacist strongholds.

According to professor of propaganda Dr. Damariyé Smith, the word “woke” rose to some prominence in the 1960s Black Power and Civil Rights Movements. It makes perfect sense that staying “woke” would become a rallying cry for being aware of the many forms of systemic racism and injustice black Americans were protesting against, and equal rights they were fighting for in the 1960s.

The mainstream American emergence of the term “woke” came in 2014 after yet another young and unarmed black teen Michael Brown was shot by a white police officer, a member of a mostly white police force, in the mostly black town of Ferguson, Missouri, where the white police force shamelessly harassed and fined black and brown citizens excessively to fill their own coffers. Importantly, this is also when the Black Lives Matter movement was born. Is it wrong to be aware your city is being systemically abused and robbed by your people’s traditional oppressors? Too much?

“The resulting (DOJ) report included one of the most unambiguous formal findings of institutional racism and predatory policing in the DOJ’s history of investigating local police departments for systemic violations. The Ferguson Police Department was more focused on a racially discriminatory strategy to generate revenue – criminalizing and squeezing money for public services out of its non-white residents – than public safety, the DOJ concluded.” - Reuters - 11/10/22

Once again, it seems completely reasonable that black Americans would use a totally descriptive word to define how they must always stay aware that the system in former slave states like Missouri and other white-supremacist regions have been rigged against them for a very long time, and often still are. 

After all that has happened, how could black folks not be aware that far too many racist and unawake white people including some white police and politicians narcissistically claim they are the real victims of systemic racism when citizens are “woke,” instead of trying to rise above any of their self-serving nature or entitled racist grooming. 

Certainly in 2020 when George Floyd was murdered by a white policeman’s knee on his neck, all black folks were once again traumatically reminded to “stay woke” about their surroundings, the mortal threat of racist and sadistic policemen, any racist powers that be, and that they should demand equal, fair and respectful treatment by the authorities. Who among us doesn’t want to be treated fairly, justly and with some cultural or personal sensitivity by law enforcement or other government authorities? They are supposed to “serve the people,” right?

As part of the endless comedic irony of “woke” being stolen and misused by the GOP establishment and various fringes, it was recently reported that young Republican operatives cringe every time they hear older leaders use the term and have been “begging” them to stop. It is not that they do not want to fight culture wars, they just know that to the ear of most younger people, being “woke” is positive sounding, no matter how often conservatives, Disney villains and “fake news" claim it is something else. It is also almost comical how conservative Christians do not make the connection between people becoming “woke” and what they call their own emergence in America, “The Great Awakening.”

In fact, no fair and aware person can deny that the word “woke” has been culturally appropriated by the “right-wing outrage machine” and turned into another boogeyman label by Republicans conflating all progressive, left-leaning and moderate people and ideas with extremism and anti-Christian evil, just as it was done to words like “liberal” and “progressive” years before. I remember all too well how Republicans would go on TV and spin these quasi-abstract yet generally positive terms into dirty words, would keep saying them with an angry gaslighting nastiness, and now they are repeating history by doing the same thing to “woke.” 

It is telling when a conservative commentator writes a scary book about “woke” and then struggles on TV to define the meaning of the word.

“Woke is something that’s very hard to define.” - Bethany Mandel - 3/14/23

In other words, a well understood term in black culture about “keeping your head on a swivel” for racist police and being “aware of racial injustice” in society has been weaponized into an abstract catchall phrase that Republicans and the right-wing media deploy vs. anything progressive, liberal, moderate, reasonable or fair that they don’t like, or whatever else they want it to mean when demonizing anyone or anything that stands against them and their rigged and gerrymandered political dominances.

Anti-Woke Culture Warriors

Disturbingly, one of the most aggressive anti-woke culture warriors is South-African immigrant Elon Musk, but both politically and economically it makes little sense why he has executed a very poor business strategy for someone with an environmentally “woke” primary customer base. Since buying Twitter, Musk has more publicly revealed a darker Apartheid-esque, anti-woke authoritarian nature and tweeted really ridiculous things such as, “The woke mind virus is either defeated or nothing else matters.”

Really Elon? The man who says we need electric cars to fight human climate destruction and must go to Mars to best survive as a species by being multi-planetary thinks people being aware of past and present systemic racism, bigotry and wanting justice is a greater danger than destroying Earth’s human habitat and human extinction?

What escapes Elon and many others who use the phrase is they are revealing via projection their own “woke mind virus,” aka a level of unhealthy narcissism. In other words, “the woke mind virus” is pretty much the psychological opposite of what Elon and other powerful libertarians and conservatives self-servingly claim it is. In fact, their anti-wokeness is exposing their, "accuse the other side of that which you are guilty" pattern of abuse. 

No doubt the white minority “authorities” in white supremacist Apartheid South Africa would have called the black majority’s desire for equal rights, “the woke mind virus” too, if “wokeism” was propagandized then like it is today. Essentially, accusing others of having a “woke mind virus” is projecting one’s own lack of self-awareness. Need proof?

The Musk family story is that they were against Apartheid, but then why does Elon take such a militant and aggressive stance against a concept that says black folks should have racial justice and equal rights too? Elon, your anti-wokism is a really bad look for you and for your companies once positively regarded as “woke” like Tesla and SpaceX. Who can trust the science of someone who denies history?

Unfortunately, the evidence in Elon’s psychological profile indicates his own “woke mind virus” seems to be far more about his childhood trauma and vicious bullying crushing his empathy, distorting his view or reality and his trans daughter disowning him for his anti-wokeism, than any racist tendencies following him to America, but if you grew up in systemically racist Apartheid South Africa (or a former slave state) and are against black or white folks being aware of historical systemic racism in America, you might be a racist.

Do some “woke” people take it way too far? Absolutely! They will be filtered through a psychological lens in the next parts too, but this is not the vast majority of us who are awake, aware and care enough to want humankind to do better, and right past wrongs.

To be truly “woke” is to be real, not extreme, to want justice, not vengeance, and to find the healthiest and most healing path moving forward. Unfortunately, anti-woke propaganda has obscured these simple truths, and conflated wokeism with all their worst fears, as narcissism tends to do.

As noted, when viewed through a political lens, “woke” has been predictably culturally appropriated by the Republican Establishment and their media from black culture. It has since been propagandized into a Rorschach Test used to gaslight and trigger all conservatives against acknowledging any historic or current systemic forms of racism, bigotry or any other types of injustice.

The Republican elite never want to acknowledge and admit past racial or other forms of injustice, since it is likely many of them gained their generational wealth from injustices committed by their forefathers who were the slave-masters, robber barons, con men, thieves, oppressors and corrupt politicians of their day. Of course their family name would be defamed, or at least would be held the most accountable and their descendants would have to pay the most in reparations. Coincidentally, one of the things the anti-woke and narcissists hate the most is their own accountability.

Thus, avoiding personal responsibility is why the powerfully unjust will do anything and everything politically to stop black, white, brown and especially purple people from becoming “woke” to past injustices, and wanting to do something about it.

Essentially, we are presented with two choices. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, we can ignore the mistakes of the past because they might be uncomfortable for some but we will be doomed to repeat them, or we can be politically “woke” with truth, justice and the American way, towards a brighter, kinder, more honest, reconciled and positively unified future.

The Psychology of Woke - Part II - Unpoisoning the Well

III, IV & V Coming Soon!

If you found The Psychology of Woke - Part I useful, please be sure to like, share and comment. It will be a little while before the deeper and much more revealing Parts II and III are published, so also be sure you are subscribed to receive notice of what will be an epic profile that will filter “woke” through an incredibly illuminating psychological lens.

In the meantime, if you are still exploring, I would suggest reading the profile Dr. Bandy X. Lee endorsed. Trumpism is Narcissism is a foundational piece in understanding how counter-narcissist intelligence can be utilized to answer the toughest unanswered political and human questions via psychology, but every profile here should age very well based on a years long track record of intuitive analysis via psychological filters.

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