What is woke?

By Janie Walenda

The day before the new Marvel television show “Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man” debuted, its lead voice actor Hudson Thames sparked controversy in a conversation
with Collider. 

“I mean, my biggest fear was that it was gonna be annoying and woke, and it wasn’t, and I was like ‘Yes this is great, it’s so well written.’” 

When viewers tuned in the following day, the controversy quickly turned to confusion. Within the first two episodes alone, Peter Parker’s best friend Nico Minoru is a bisexual Asian woman, another friend Lonnie Lincoln is racially profiled by the police and both Harry and Norman Osborn are portrayed as black men. While most viewers agreed with Thames that the show is well-written, they weren’t sure what about the show made it “not woke.”

For such a popular word, the definition of woke is tricky to pin down. It originated as African American slang, in the context of “Black people’s awareness of their history and their power to resist injustice,” according to the Legal Defense Fund. In recent years, however, it has become a derogatory buzzword for anything perceived as liberal ideology.

“Honestly, when people say ‘woke” I don’t even 100% know what they mean because there’s no exact definition,” Timothy Anderson said, a junior Business Management student.

This uncertainty is echoed by senior Professional Writing and Information Design major Aspen Schiebout.

“Originally, [it] did have a meaning, but in the modern day, the word woke has become almost meaningless.”

Subjectivity is intrinsic to media criticism. Criticisms such as “flat acting” or “rushed pacing” aren’t objective, but are instead ruled by the viewer’s opinion. You could argue that all terms in film criticism are meaningless.

If I come out of a new Marvel movie and tell you it’s bad, what am I telling you? Not much. If I tell you that the CGI is obvious and there’s no character development, then I’m giving you information about the film that means something, even if
you disagree.

So, what am I telling you when I say a film is woke?

The ugly truth is that the word woke is often code for diverse. We don’t want to say “This film has women or people of color or gay people and I don’t like it,” so instead we use woke as
a shield.

As seen in the case of “Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man,” once we decide we like something, we drop the woke label, even if it still fits the loose criteria. 

It’s also noticeable that only new movies are considered woke. If a film came out today where a supporting female character with no battle experience killed a main villain and said “I am no man,” everybody would lose their minds. But no one is calling Eowyn and “Lord of the Rings” woke. That’s not to say there wasn’t pushback when Tolkien wrote the books or when the films came out, but because we’re looking back at something we like, we don’t try to point a finger at it.

“Nobody would refer to ‘Mulan’ as woke, because they didn’t hate it … they only do it when it’s something they don’t like,” Anderson said.

Oftentimes, the greatest critique of a woke film is not that it is diverse, but that it is forcing diversity. Gay representation in film might not be problematic, but it becomes problematic when films force gay representation unnaturally. I’m inclined to agree with this point, but with one question: How can we tell if representation is unnatural?

Whenever a new Disney movie is deemed woke, people often claim that Disney was better at diversity when they weren’t trying to be, citing films like “Mulan” and “Lilo and Stitch.” They ignore that the creative teams on both films took months-long trips to China and Kaua’I to research the location and culture. The intention behind the films was to push for more accurate representation. 

Is it forced diversity for a filmmaker to tell a story that’s personal to them? Is it only forced diversity when a writer or producer purposefully adds a character of diversity that doesn’t represent themselves?

A lot of the issues with forced diversity come from adaptations of beloved stories. The race-swapping of characters in live-action films like Ariel in “The Little Mermaid” or Astrid in “How To Train Your Dragon” paints a picture of studios prioritizing diversity over casting the best representation of the character. This argument assumes that the best person has everything to do with being a clone of the original version, and nothing to do with the acting potential of the chosen actors.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t valid criticisms of how modern media views and uses diversity. We absolutely can hold media to a higher standard and call them out when they use clumsy writing or the hollow appearance of representation to gain brownie points, but crying woke at every new piece of media is both vague and potentially intolerant.

The biggest problem with the word woke isn’t its flimsiness or bias. Its biggest problem is what it reveals about how we watch media.

“It falls into a very pervasive problem that we have in modern American society…  anti-intellectualism,”
Schiebout said.

Anti-intellectualism includes a dismissal of art and deeper thinking. With the growing popularity of viewing art as content, we’ve started to respond to art the same way we respond to our Chipotle order: made to match our exact taste.

We seem to live in a golden age of storytelling. We have centuries-old storytelling methods like literature and theatre and also get to experience the technological wonders of film, television and video games. We have all of these mediums at our fingerprints, so why do we want to avoid engaging with a perspective outside of our own?

As Christians, we have a powerful opportunity to understand other perspectives through storytelling. 

It’s foolish of us to hold secular storytellers to Christian standards that we know they don’t hold, and when we gain a reputation for outrage whenever we see something we disagree with, we only weaken our ability to be good witnesses. What does it say about us if our reputation is being upset about the presence of a gay person or person of color in a film?

“Don’t be afraid to call out a problem when you see it, but do it with specificity, do it with intellect, don’t just hide behind a vapid word,” Schiebout said.

Media is subjective. Every person’s interpretation and opinion will differ, and that’s the wonderful thing about storytelling and media criticism. But the pervasiveness of the word woke weakens how we article our opinions and constrains our ability to interpret media intelligently.

 Janie Walenda is a senior Global Business major and the A&E editor for Cedars. She is overly passionate about musicals, caffeine and weirdly enough Dracula.