There is a question haunting Black people in the President Donald Trump era like a soulless apparition in a low-rent horror movie: Were we every really woke, or did we merely think we were because a few white people were paying attention to us?
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You may be surprised to learn this, but the term “woke” has been around for a minute. Marcus Garvey, the founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, was one of the first to use a derivative of the term when he wrote “Wake up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa!” Bluesman Lead Belly was the first to put it on wax when he said, “stay woke” on his 1930s song “Scottsboro Boys, ” that talks about nine black teenagers who were falsely accused of raping two white women. He says at the end of the song, “I advise everybody, be a little careful when they go along through [Scottsboro] best stay woke, keep their eyes open.”
So, the phrase has been around a while, but it exploded in use after the Ferguson police killed Michael Brown in 2014. The phrase was used by activists to encourage Black people to pay attention to how the police were treating us. Then, not long after that, the meaning of the words were expanded to mean a general political and social awareness…and this is where the question comes into view:
Were we every really aware? The current state of the world says no.
Trump is simply the result of a decades-spanning plan of the far right. The political polarization we now see has been a long time coming. And the cutting of the federal workforce? Republicans have always said they wanted that…this administration was just the first to try and do it. But where Black folks have failed the most has been ignoring the clear signs that there are many white people who just want to hurt us in every way possible
The race baiting we see President Trump and his followers engaging in goes back to at least 1981. In that year, one of President Ronald Reagan’s political strategists was caught saying the quiet part out loud when he explicitly stated he was trying to create a political climate where “blacks get hurt worse than whites.”
Then, right under our noses, white nationalists were ditching their KKK robes and neo-Nazi buzzcuts for suits and degrees from the best colleges in the country. We once thought we could spot a racist because they would talk with a country accent and have a confederate flag on the front of their Ford F150. We were not ready when more articulate and better dressed racists started showing up on Fox News and Breitbart.
The police were always killing or abusing us. Every heard of Phillip Pannell? What about Arthur McDuffie? Or even Annette Green? No? Those are all names we should have known. But most didn’t. Why? Because we were not paying attention. We were not woke.
What we are seeing now is not a surprising development. There were warning signs that there would be a whitelash to President Barack Obama. There were a multitude of scholars and activists imploring Black people to pay attention to things happening to our community.
We could have prepared for what we are seeing today. Instead, we were not paying attention. We were so focused on our individual upward mobility that we failed to see what was happening all around us.
Were we ever really woke? The answer is simple: No.
Straight From 
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