“Wokeism” as a term enters the U.S cultural lexicon at a moment of 21st century racial reckoning, and it is the concept of racial/cultural reckoning that continually shapes its lexical field. While liberals/progressives describe “wokeism” as a movement towards global liberation, conservatives describe “wokeism” as representative of the inherent problems of a liberal political order.
In this lightening paper, I think through and with “wokeism” using Saidiya Hartman’s "Position of the Unthought" and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments in conversation with 90s Hip Hop Thanatologies. Hartman's work refuses hopeful solutions to the reality of an antiblack world while documenting illegible and anarchic means of Black survival. Meanwhile, thanatologies of 90s hip hop provide a variegated field to understand “woke” on different registers. Taaken together, I highlight how "wokeism" as code for “multi-cultural equity” not only sustains an antiblack world, but ignores the phrase's operationalization as a “wayward” means of survival.