Woke. Its meaning and how that meaning has changed.
There was a time when the word "woke" meant, basically, to be deeply aware of suffering with the intent to do something about it. At least, I thought it did. It no longer means that.
Back in December 2014, I wrote this piece for my then blog. I called it, echoing Eric Garner's final words, "# I Can't Breathe." This is what the word meant to me, at least, in 2014. In Spanish, "ponte buso" seemed to be the closest equivalent. Here it is:
"#I Can't Breathe!
ADVENT
The season of staying awake, watching for encroachments of the national security state. Waiting for the time to move.
CRUCIFIXION
A public announcement by which a paranoiac national security state tries to immobilize with fear those watching and waiting. A refinement of torture by which a threat to the national security state is exposed, humiliated, mocked, broken, hung up, stretched out, suffocated. An excruciating slow violence. I Can’t Breathe said Christ glimpsing the violet of the soldiers’ robes. The crowd cheered!
ERIC GARNER
A threat to the national security state. Immobilized, humiliated, stretched out, suffocated by navy uniformed agents, crucified on a beam of New York City pavement. I Can’t Breathe!
AN INFANT IN THE SONORAN DESERT
Her young mother, their coyote and other members of a terrified party of threats to the national security state. They had watched and waited before daring to cross. The anxious coyote thought he detected an agent of the national security state nearby. He covered the baby’s mouth so she wouldn’t cry. I Can’t Breathe. A silent crucifixion beneath the blue Arizona sky.
NOVEMBER 20, 2014
In words carefully crafted to obscure more than they revealed, the President [Obama] announced further expansions of the national security state. Many had been watching and waiting for a sign of deliverance for the Unauthorized Ones. Breathing a sigh of relief, they cheered. But they cheered from a deep sleep of misunderstanding, confusing expansion with deliverance.
JESUS IN THE GARDEN
Couldn’t you have stayed awake? #StayWoke! Read the fine print! The national security state willingly concedes nothing!
TWO WEEKS LATER
Two weeks later, a grand jury failed to indict those who crucified Eric Garner. Those who had applauded the expansions of the national security state on November 20, were outraged on December 3.
#STAY WOKE!
Father, they don’t understand what they are doing."
That was in 2014.
It was around that time that I was introduced to the "woke mob." By "woke mob" I mean those who don't know much about the subject at hand but are willing to subject the one who does to pillorying—that peculiar ritual of public humiliation for which stocks were once constructed.
Now, to be sure, I have experienced real hostility from people who have been opposed to my immigration advocacy and my lgbt allyship. But these are not part of "woke mobs." Woke mobs exist solely among those who consider themselves to be well above the Republican/MAGA fray—the "deplorables" about whom Hillary Clinton once sneered.
Here are a couple of anecdotes about things I've actually experienced, things which I now understand to be more widespread than I previously understood.
At least two institutions, one a university and one an advocacy group, called into question my poster for The Second Cooler, my immigration documentary. Never mind that I was the acknowledged expert who was being paid to come with the documentary and to participate in a Q&A afterwards. Never mind that I had made multiple trips to the border to interview all manner of experts in their fields. Never mind that I had fact checked everything told to me there. Never mind I had built relationships with undocumented people over the years who trusted me with their stories and their status. Never mind I worked on it for 4 years, even carrying on when my child was killed by an undocumented man.
Especially at the university, none of this mattered. Nor did it matter to find out who I was, what my message was, what the themes of the documentary were.
All that mattered was—a word. A word in a poster. A forbidden word. I word I had chosen deliberately, after much reflection, as all writers do, for the sole purpose of communicating effectively with the woke unwashed, those so outré they would never be able to mount the carriages of the cognoscenti.
I replied I would not change the word in the poster. Instead, I suggested, we have a discussion about the word. That's when the woke mob showed up. These academics had no interest in finding out more about my decision to use the forbidden word, about the poster which had been the result of a series of decisions. Instead, these keepers of the flame of correct thinking subjected me to a low-intensity inquisition. Not quite "Are you now or have you ever been" but pretty damn close.
The advocacy group was more willing to discuss. Their concern had been that undocumented people might get their feelings hurt. I believe I responded that a) the poster could not be changed without considerable expense, b) I didn't believe that one who had forged the Rio Grande with a child or her back would be so sensitive to a word expressing precisely her status in this great country, and c) if anyone were interested, we could always discuss it in the Q&A. As it turned out, no one was interested in having that discussion.
At another university, I met a different kind of woke mob. I had been invited to a school that admitted DACAmented students. One of them was one of the children, then college-age, who had appeared in my film. They were not interested in my poster. They were interested in—me. To get to the punch line, I committed the grave sin of being a white woman and a US citizen. That was made clear to me at the first meeting in which I was introduced. Never mind (see above). Later on, there was another meeting in which I had been asked to address the issue of what makes a good advocate. Among other things, I said that a good advocate needed to understand the system. Needed to understand things like the contents of the disastrous 2012 Comprehensive Immigration Reform package. Needed to understand what a DACA deferment was and that it never was a guarantee against deportation. My talking with those students in a straightforward manner led to my being called condescending, etc. As though trying to educate people, in a university setting, was somehow condescending. Isn't that what teachers do? Tell students things they didn't know?
To be sure, these were only 3 organizations out of dozens of other festivals, universities, and organizations at which I confronted woke mobs. Let's make that 2 since the advocacy group was willing to understand my position and never actually threatened to cancel as did university #1.
But these mobs are no different, to my mind, no different in authoritarian mindset than the right-wing mob I encountered at a speaking event a long time ago in Alabama. An event that resembled a Klan gathering minus the burning crosses. Enough to make me shake and fear for my life. Enough to make me relax a little when police officers slowly began to walk into the crowd to make their presence known.
Switching topics.
There is an especially pernicious woke mob that has manifested around ideological support for trans people. Make that trans children. Adults should do what they want to do. However, adults have only one real job—to protect children.
I have a little, not much, history with the subject. I have a young female-to-male trans friend whom I've known almost his whole life. When I was first getting to know him, I thought he was a biological boy. His name can be heard as a boy's name or a girl's name, and I made an assumption. When he was well out of high school, well out of puberty, he made the decision to transition. He was an adult. He had every right to take advantage of the surgeries and medications that might make him happier. I stand by him 1000%. His mother supports him and always has. His aunt, uncle, and cousins support him. He has never not been supported, never not been loved.
I have another story. A few years ago, I got involved with a woman who was—no other way to put it—a grifter with serious psychological problems. Somehow she had in her home a teenage boy whom she said the state had placed with her. Said she was the only big-hearted soul who would take in a foster boy who was gay. The only one in the state of Alabama. She said. Then, she proclaimed not only was his gay, he was trans. She encouraged him to wear wigs. Wear dresses. Practice his drag routine. I was so naive about these things, so unaware that preying on kids under the guise of loving them was a real thing, so unaware that actual people, people I liked, did these kinds of things—knowing it wasn't true. For her own purposes. In my defense, what later came to bother me was not that he was trans—I took him for a makeover at a local department store, encouraged him to sit with his knees together when he was wearing a short dress, and called him by his "trans name." It never occurred to me to dead name him.
Fast forward. The trans teenager wound up in prison. He would often call me to pass the time, deal with the boredom, I suppose, and ask for money for the commissary. He was desperate to have someone to love. Desperate to have someone to love him back. I warned him, as kindly but definitely as I could, not to turn tricks in prison. Several times he told me he had gotten engaged and wanted me to officiate at his wedding. All these men invariably turned out to be a lot older than he, and he had never met them in person. Cat-fished, I'm guessing. Anyway, one day he called and said, "Miss Ellin, I'm not trans." Ok, I said. "I'm gay, but I'm not trans."
The grifter woman who loved him so dearly? Put him on a bus to an unknown person in Ohio or somewhere and from there he made his way to San Francisco. The last I heard, he was turning tricks there, still desperate to love someone, still desperate to have someone love him back.
Now, my point in all this is that it could have been even worse than it was. If my memory serves me, the grifter "mom" who loved him so dearly, was angling towards gender reassignment for him. He would have done anything to make her happy. To make his "mom" happy. That I know for a fact certain. Had she been able to pull it off, and it is amazingly simple these days, he could have been injected with hormones and had a penectomy.
This is actually happening. And it is happening to girls especially who are being pushed into radical mastectomies at the age of 13, pushed into taking hormones which will forever change their bodies, end their ability to get sexual pleasure from their breasts, end their ability to breast feed the children they say now they don't want to have.
Genuinely trans people like the elder, Buck Angel, are horrified. But they've been silenced by the woke mob which calls him transphobic. People who are not genuinely trans, like Chloe Cole, the young woman who had the radical mastectomy when she was 13 thinking she'd be happier as a boy, will never get her breasts back. Or the young man who transitioned after being given a 15-minute "psychological evaluation." While pushers at Vanderbilt Medical School crow over how much money is to be made in gender reassignment.
Along comes Bud Lite, trying to appeal to a younger, more woke potential customer base, who hires Dylan Mulvaney to take bubble baths while drinking Bud Lite. Genuine trans people, like Buck Angel and others, are horrified. Disgusted. As they should be. But the woke mob, not trans themselves, to be sure countenance no objections to Dylan Mulvaney's grift. He is not a girl. He is not a woman. He will never have a period. He will never carry a baby. He impersonates being a woman. A woman oddly stuck in the 1950s. He is an actor. He is not trans.
In my opinion, we need to do a lot better by undocumented people than using them for our own virtue-signaling purposes. We need to be careful what programs we push on them so mindlessly and uncritically. We need to do a lot better by young kids, not famous for having an easy ride through puberty nor being able to make the best decisions for themselves, than pushing them into surgeries and hormones when they are too young to give informed consent and from which they can not turn back.
"Woke" once meant "aware of suffering with a determination to end it." Now it means ignorant bullying, grandstanding, and the infliction of suffering on people who have done us no harm.
Thanks so much for reading this and for all your support!!