Woke: Revolutionary Education for Transformation and Liberation

The Oxford Handbook of Sociology for Social Justice Corey Dolgon (ed.) https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197615317.001.0001 Published: 2024 Online ISBN: 9780197615348 Print ISBN: 9780197615317 CHAPTER 14 Woke: Revolutionary Education for Transformation and Liberation  Anthony J. Jackson, Walda Katz-Fishman https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197615317.013.42 Published: 19 September 2024 Pages 279–302 Abstract This chapter explores the collective materiality of exploitation, oppression, White supremacy, and patriarchy, and evaluates the growing death and destruction under the system of capitalism in the 21st century. It o ers a call to action despite the seemingly irreversible crisis of capitalism in this new historical moment and answers essential questions around what it means to be woke in relation to the revolutionary process in this moment. It discusses the philosophical and theoretical foundations of wokism and its relationship to revolutionary education and the critical and liberatory consciousness that is produced. It theorizes two types of woke activists—woke reformists and woke revolutionaries. It illuminates woke revolutionary intellectuals, embracing their legacies and highlighting lessons learned from their contributions to revolutionary education. It ends with the hope and possibility of liberation, emphasizing the need for revolutionary education. Keywords: woke, capitalist crisis, White supremacy, anti-Blackness, revolutionary education Subject: Political Sociology, Sociology Series: Oxford Handbooks Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/58211/chapter/481898092 by OUP-Reference Gratis Access user on 09 October 2024 Search in this book The Urgency of Now Overview As we lift up revolutionary education, we begin by exploring the collective materiality of exploitation and oppression and evaluating the growing death and destruction under the system of capitalism in the 21st this new historical moment. We emphasize how the global movement toward fascism maintains White supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist class power dynamics and preserves the system of private property amid growing political and economic upheavals. Fascism has a devastating impact on working-class people across our diverse identities. Our lived experiences shape our consciousness, and our reality of intensi ed alienation, violence, and oppression is undeniable. To transform our world rst requires developing a woke liberatory consciousness through revolutionary education. Wake Up, Calling All Revolutionaries Wake up! Capitalism is killing us, and the urgent moment for a mass revolutionary awakening is upon us. We are in a qualitatively new moment in our human existence. The epoch of capitalism in the 21st century has rapidly transformed our material realities toward abundance, while simultaneously convincing the planet’s workers of scarcity. We live in a world where the need for human labor is in decline as technology p. 280 permits shifts from mechanics to automation, digitization, and robotics (Peery 2002; Davis and Stack 1997). Advanced technology in manufacturing, production, and telecommunications has ushered in a new wave of possibilities for a bright future where the necessities of life are plentiful and available to those in need. However, the system of capitalism and private property denies us the ability to actualize this new world; its control over economic, social, and political apparatus ensures working-class people remain subjugated. We have an abundance of resources though a scarcity of money and distribution. Because money provides subsistence under capitalism, the rich and wealthy control it and thrive while workers only struggle to survive. White supremacy—with roots in European expansion and colonialism—has long been the ethos of American culture, and the invention of whiteness (and white skin privilege) has been a ruling class tool to divide workers (Anderson 1994; Allen 2012). Racism exists; it is whiteness congealed into a weapon fashioned against anything and anyone that challenges White power, authority, and privilege (Delgado and Stefancic 2012). The ideology of White supremacy protects the capitalist class system’s control and domination while the creation of white skin privileges disrupts organizing and mobilizing challenges by pitting workers against one another, thus preventing the development of a collective consciousness across race, sex, gender, religion, nation, and other identities. Historically, White racial consciousness formed to help implement the continued exploitation of the White worker by setting them apart from the dehumanized condition of enslaved, Black workers. W.E.B. Du Bois highlighted how, although White workers experienced exploitation, they received a “psychological wage” (whiteness), which conferred compensation to the White worker by providing social status and political advantages. Institutions have codi ed whiteness into “privilege” for White workers. Political leaders echo this sentiment. In the 18th century, Andrew Johnson stated, “This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I’m President, it shall be a government for white men.” Chief Justice Roger B. Taney declared that “black people have no rights which the white man is bound to respect.” Louisiana’s Constitutional Conferences emphatically stated, “We hold this to be a Government of white people, made and to be perpetuated for the exclusive bene t of the white race” (Anderson 2017:18). Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/58211/chapter/481898092 by OUP-Reference Gratis Access user on 09 October 2024 century. “The Urgency of Now” is a call to action despite the seemingly irreversible crisis of capitalism in We see this racist sentiment’s embeddedness in ideological and institutional frameworks today as it codi es whiteness with psychological, sociopolitical, and economic privileges for white folk. President Donald Trump, while discussing migration from primarily Black countries, asked, “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” He stated that Nigerians would, “never go back to their huts,” and claimed Haitians, “all have AIDS” (Kendi 2021). We see similar racial policies for regions like Central America, where Brown folk, eeing from violence and corruption, get turned away through immigration policies that deny access (Human Rights Watch 2021). Vice President Kamala Harris stressed, “I want to be border. Do not come. Do not come” (Rodriguez 2021). Simultaneously, the United States embraces Ukrainian refugees—White folk eeing from war. President Biden stated, “The United States will be welcoming one hundred thousand Ukrainians so that we p. 281 share in the responsibility of Ukrainians eeing …,” announcing his Unite for Ukraine program to “enable Ukrainians seeking refuge to come directly from Europe and to the United States” (Ainsley and Bacallao 2022). Whiteness and the privileges associated with it are dialectically linked to the vili cation, dehumanization, and oppression of Black folk—creating divisions that penetrate the psyche of White workers. This convergence of race and class integrates the investment in whiteness with a commitment to capitalist exploitation. Furthermore, the formation of whiteness made White folk forget about their “practically identical interests with the Black poor and accept stunted lives for themselves and for those more oppressed than themselves” (Roediger and Cleaver 2007:13). The bene ts that White workers receive from the capitalist system based on their whiteness is a bribe developed by capitalist class elites that prevents working White people from recognizing their own subjugation. Lyndon B. Johnson’s sentiment expressed the capitalist system’s agenda to implement a psychological payo to shape the consciousness of White workers and divide the working class. I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it. If you can convince the lowest white man that he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you. (as cited in Williams 2003:107) By weaponizing whiteness, capitalists e ectively protect their system of alienation and exploitation by giving White workers a reason to defend the production and reproduction of inequality so long as they do not feel the force of oppression—they are numbed by and to racial privilege. This current global hegemony of White supremacy helps to enforce the conditions of inequality in a capitalist system never designed for equality, for equity, for inclusion. Nowadays, diversity is welcomed insofar as it does not interfere with existing power dynamics and, at the core, capitalism’s productive processes. The long history of exploitation, racial, gender, and other forms of oppression has never ended; it is presently, as it has historically been, constricting us, denying us from liberty, freedom, and our basic right to life (Bonilla-Silva 2018; Lipsitz 2012; Williams 2003; hooks 1995). Although all workers across race, ethnicity, nationality, sex, gender, and other identities experience exploitation and oppression within the United States and around the world, Black people are “super exploited” and experience intensi ed forms of subjugation and terror (Jackson 2021; Anderson 1994; KatzFishman 1992). White supremacy is an oppressive ideology inextricably bound to capitalism, serving the interests of the ruling class who bene t from labor exploitation inextricably bound to racial capital (Du Bois 1998; Katz-Fishman, Scott, and Destine 2016). The marriage between whiteness and capitalist domination is akin to the relationship between blackness and labor exploitation. Marx reminds us that, “Labour in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin.” Oppression intensi es the further you move from the centrality of White supremacist ideology. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/58211/chapter/481898092 by OUP-Reference Gratis Access user on 09 October 2024 clear to folks in the region who are thinking about making that dangerous trek to the United States-Mexico p. 282 Today, capitalism su ers from an irreversible crisis, deadly and destructive in nature. The causes of this economic upheaval include technological evolution; the crisis of capitalist expansion where growth possibilities are limited or exhausted; the crisis of labor where workers become increasingly super uous; and the crisis of overproduction, which includes the crisis of accumulation, distribution, value, and pro t (Jackson 2021; Goldstein 2012). Polarization is deepening within the ruling class based on con icting strategies and tactics to save capitalism. In capital’s drive to expand corporate interests, polarization has also deepened between capitalists and the working class: fascism on the one hand and an intensifying other. This crisis-ridden system seems on the precipice of collapse, and capitalist entities seek to stabilize it by increasing the use of force and coercion to avert the destruction of the capitalist system (Amin 2010; Robinson 2014). Rising fascism not only seeks to protect and preserve private property but also squelches the increasingly woke working-class whose revolutionary consciousness seeks liberation from economic and racial exploitation. As the process of capital development irrefutably pauperizes our working-class communities and lays waste to the planet, we must consider the social realities about the world we live in today. From joblessness, houselessness, poverty, famine, ecocide, global warming, mass incarceration, police brutality, and the criminalization of the working class to the cultural genocide of indigenous lands, global political and social unrest, the killing of Black and Brown bodies, the attack on historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), and even the overt attack on critical race theory, all call out for a new approach to understanding and challenging the power of racial capital (Alexander 2012; Guardian 2021; Goetz 2022; Khazan 2019; McGrath 2022; Niedzwiadek 2021; Owens 2022; Reilly 2022; Yong 2022; Khazan 2019; Jones 2022; Kelley 2016; Taylor 2016; Camacho 2022; Anderson and Svrluga 2022; White House 2022). The revolutionaries of our time must engage the academy and our communities in revolutionary education that awakens, enlightens, and empowers the mass of workers who must unite across identities in a movement to save us all. “Woke”: Revolutionary Intellectuals in Theory and Practice Overview We begin this section with re ective statements to tell our readers our stories—who we are and how we have come to write, “ ‘Woke’: Revolutionary Intellectuals in Theory and Practice.” Humanity exists across a spectrum of identities that shape our lived experiences in this world across time and place. We all are born inherently invaluable simply because we exist; our perspectives, the lenses by which we view the world, and p. 283 the consciousness we share as humans must come to a point of convergence that recognizes the necessity to support, protect, and when necessary, ght for life, not simply to survive but to live and thrive. It is our hope that telling our individual stories will show our readers how our lives are all connected to one another, to a collective reality where we have come to know and confront forces that threaten life itself. We illuminate the unity of scholar activists, proletarian intellectuals, and movement organizers, and emphasize the signi cance of theory and practice. We see the radiance of revolutionary education as the light of life; it opens our eyes to the death and destruction that capitalism engenders. Revolutionary education must be seen as life giving and it must be passed down from generation to generation to liberate us all. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/58211/chapter/481898092 by OUP-Reference Gratis Access user on 09 October 2024 working-class struggle against all forms of oppression, dispossession, and climate catastrophe on the From Crisis to Consciousness: The Awakening of Revolutionary Intellectuals Anthony J. Jackson Deep down, I have always had the spirit of a revolutionary, though I may not have had the language to call myself one. My curiosity sometimes drove me to illuminate uncomfortable truth—truth masked behind a veil of conformity that we are conditioned to avoid or even uphold. But my wonder about the world was maternal grandmothers. I was spoiled and had the freedom to exist as a child in every sense. I could explore my autonomy. I could run and fall. I could jump on beds. I could express my range of emotions: if I cried, I was comforted; if I was scared, I was reassured and protected. If I asked for something just the right number of times, my family made sure I got it. So, you see, I was surely a revolutionary in the making—okay, well … maybe just a spoiled brat. But my mom did not believe a parent could spoil a child. Her philosophy was that you could never love your child too much. From the beginning, I felt an overwhelming communal and shared experience, what was spoken in word and proven through deeds, was patient, kind, and not selfserving—“it” was love. My story starts with love because it is the catalyst for all things. Love is the core of a revolutionary. Love is the spirit that motivates and moves us. Love is what we sacri ce for, and it is what we must be prepared to die for. My rst semester at Virginia State University (VSU) in 2011 challenged me greatly and signi cantly impacted my overall development. My eyes opened and I became woke. At that time, “woke” was a term of enlightenment and endearment. People encouraged others to be woke—to understand the history and present of social, political, and economic oppression. To be woke meant to wake up and see these conditions and dynamics for what they were. While not exclusively an academic experience, many Black folks came to learn about being woke at (HBCUs). At VSU I learned how little my earlier schooling had taught me about systemic exploitation and oppression. I saw Black brilliance and studied Black history, literature, art, and culture from around the diaspora. I saw that Black people were multicultural, diverse, and had di erent p. 284 identities. But the Black experience connected us all as we shared a collective history, colonialism, slavery, and the ght to exist in a world that demonizes blackness and dei es whiteness. I remember taking my rst intro to sociology course with Dr. Sharon Zoe Spencer (a ectionately called Dr. Z). She taught us about dialectical historical materialism. She was a three-time alumna of the HBCU Mecca, the helm of Black intellect, and the premiere Black Ivy League in Washington, DC—Howard University. Dr. Z’s class set my understanding of the world ablaze and from the ashes emerged a new understanding and a vision for a liberated a world. She charged her students to help create it. My initial intellectual crisis gave rise to a liberatory consciousness. At the time I did not articulate this experience as a revolutionary education, but once my eyes opened to race and class consciousness, I could not close them. I saw the world in a new light. At VSU I learned about systems of racial oppression and class exploitation, and institutions laden with racism and grounded in the ideology of White supremacy. I learned who I was as a Black man, objectively, and my value as a worker within a capitalist system. I took classes with the department chair, Dr. Joyce Edwards, also a Howard University alumna. She was the rst professor who assigned the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx, Black Bourgeoisie by E. Franklin Frazier, and The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois. At that time, unbeknownst to me, both Dr. Z and Dr. Edwards were taught and trained by—my current mentor, comrade, and friend—Walda Katz-Fishman. These two generations of revolutionary intellectuals teaching revolutionary education at HBCUs inspired and shaped my evolving liberatory consciousness. The mark of such consciousness came when I helped lead a protest calling for the VSU president’s resignation in 2014. Students re ected on the reality of dorm closures, cafeteria closures, deep cuts to student activities and academic instruction. Amid multi-million-dollar de cits, my cohort and I noted the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/58211/chapter/481898092 by OUP-Reference Gratis Access user on 09 October 2024 never crushed. As an only child in Durham, North Carolina, I was raised by my single mom and three simultaneous rise in administrators’ pay. We attended a board of visitors meeting, but were overlooked, ignored, and disregarded—the board continued making decisions that directly impacted us without our input. Students and faculty organized, demanding the administration’s resignation. We were again dismissed, but we refused to be passive. The next day, September 30, 2014, I gave a speech at a rally of over 200 students that formally called for resignations (Kapsidelis 2014). We attended town halls, rallied around campus, talked to the press, and learned that the issues we were experiencing had been going on for years (Matthews 2014; Hausman 2014). belonged. Dr. Z and Dr. Edwards were front and center as we organized a collective whose bond remained unshattered because we had a collective consciousness, vision, and strategy to achieve our end. After a month of challenges and schemes by administrators to disrupt our unity, we held together. On October 31, the board of visitors announced the president’s resignation (Lazarus 2014). Through revolutionary education, I developed a woke liberatory consciousness, which stimulated self-re ection, and sparked transformative action, giving rise to transformative change. By organizing and being actively involved in the struggle, I learned something the classroom could never teach—how to engage in a movement—to sacri ce, to persevere, to abound in the love of community amid hardship and marginalization. p. 285 Eventually, I found my intellectual home at Howard University. Arriving in the summer of 2015, everything struck me as new, but felt weirdly familiar—even nostalgic. It was almost as if I was longing to come back to a place that I had never actually been. I knew what Howard University represented: excellence in scholarship, but also the scholar-activists, and woke revolutionary intellectuals it produced. I realized I had experienced Howard University vicariously by studying with alumni. I was eager to share my readiness but quickly learned that revolutionary education, historical materialism, and so forth, were not widely accepted in academia, even at an elite HBCU. I grew somewhat disillusioned, recognizing that the trappings of neoliberalism and elite professionalism dominated Howard, too. After graduating from Howard and returning as a lecturer, I joined the faculty union and fought for basic human rights (Lumpkin 2021). As a woke revolutionary intellectual it is important to practice liberation just as much as we teach it. During the longest student protest ever held at Howard in fall semester of 2021, I took my classes (over 200 students) outside on the yard to stand in solidarity (Marlow 2021). During the spring semester of 2022, unionized, non-tenure-track faculty took a stand after years of bad faith bargaining; I joined the ght for better wages and dignity (Gomez 2022). We won the battle for improved contracts and averted a strike (Shivaram 2022). However, our collective struggle within the academy to protect life and support our communities continues. Even though the battles we face may be uphill, we ght. As a woke revolutionary intellectual— ghting for liberation is what I do. I believe revolutionaries are vessels of love. Although our beginnings may not be the same, our experiences may be di erent, our journeys interconnect. We converge at points of crisis and with revolutionary education, we emerge from it changed, woke, thirsty for love and righteousness. Through revolutionary education, collectives, and active engagement in struggles we mature as revolutionary intellectuals with a woke consciousness. I come from an intellectual lineage of revolutionary educators. This is the story of how I’ve come to understand, and be, woke. Walda Katz-Fishman At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality. —Ernesto “Che” Guevara Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/58211/chapter/481898092 by OUP-Reference Gratis Access user on 09 October 2024 Students, with the help of faculty, sought to take back power and give it to the people, to whom it always At the core of my re exive statement is our theory and practice as revolutionaries and revolutionary educators. Since the late 1960s, along with Jerome Scott and others, we have been developing tools for revolutionary education in the US context. Analytically we centered “the South” as the site of the most intense class exploitation, racial and gender oppression, and the dialectics of historic and contemporary multiracial, multinational, multigendered, and multigenerational struggles for human emancipation and social transformation. We worked to create in ourselves and others—coworkers, students, colleagues, p. 286 friends, movement actors—revolutionary class consciousness and working-class unity. Our goal has humanity’s and our planet’s survival. And to reproduce ourselves as revolutionary educators. Brie y, let me explain how I came to revolutionary education as social justice praxis. I have collaborated with Jerome, Rita Valenti, and others since we met in West Alabama in 1986 while ghting to defend voting rights in the South. US government policies threatened to roll back voting rights only twenty years after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 became law. We understood in that moment that the US state was in motion to reverse civil rights and New Deal welfare state reforms. We also grasped two key lessons: one, the power of the state apparatus and politicians in the South creates a historic anchor for fascist activity; and two, the reality of White supremacy as the DNA of capitalism and ruling-class strategies to divide the working class in ways that politically disorient them and control rising movements for social justice and systemic transformation. We were among the founders of Project South: Institute for the Elimination of Poverty and Genocide and were members of the Communist Labor Party and today the League of Revolutionaries for a New America. My personal journey taught me that political education, despite the ebbs and ows of the revolutionary process, is essential for staying the course and realizing systemic change and our vision of a cooperative, peaceful society that meets human needs and protects the earth. I have been engaged in revolutionary education in many spaces—from universities and classrooms to Project South and the US Social Forum, to community and labor struggles and social movements throughout the United States (Katz-Fishman, Brewer, Albrecht 2007). My path to getting here was a journey from my Jewish family roots in New Orleans and the reform struggles of the Jim Crow South, to graduate school at Wayne State University, to teaching and learning as a member of the sociology faculty and family at Howard University. My collaboration with Anthony is grounded in our Howard experience. Anthony is the “third generation.” I taught and nurtured Anthony’s VSU mentors Joyce Moody Edwards and Zoe Spencer and was dissertation adviser for both. Joyce and Zoe taught and mentored Anthony at VSU and “sent” him to study at Howard. We, of course, bonded immediately, and Anthony became the “go to” grad student who could interpret “Walda’s teaching and readings.” He was known as “Walda’s words toolbox”—translating Marxist and revolutionary theory into “ordinary language.” Anthony comoderated with Britany Gatewood the 2017 program at Howard featuring Jerome Scott, “Race, Class and Struggle Then and Now—Lessons from the League of Revolutionary Black Workers.” As we write this, we continue to brainstorm syllabi, readings, and tools and collaborate around League deeper dive conversations with revolutionaries that Anthony comoderates and incorporates into his teaching at Bowie State University. Our methodology continues to center on developing revolutionary education and praxis grounded in analyses of the world as it really is, not the way so much of bourgeois scholarship distorts and describes and considers it to be. Our model of revolutionary movement struggle is consciousness, vision, and strategy in p. 287 relation to day-to-day tactics. Revolutionary education is organized around the existential crises of our lives—how we intellectually understand their root cause and politically act to qualitatively transform the foundations of our world. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/58211/chapter/481898092 by OUP-Reference Gratis Access user on 09 October 2024 always been to build the necessary power to abolish the capitalist system and reconstruct a new world for Wokeism: The Essence of Revolutionary Education Overview As we prioritize the necessity of revolutionary education, we do so by answering the following questions: What does “woke” mean? What is wokeism? What is revolutionary education? What is the relationship consciousness and how is liberatory consciousness di erent from a critical consciousness? In de ning Black Power, James Cone (2018) writes on the imprecise nature of language to accurately describe an object or phenomena, namely that, “the inability of a word to describe accurately the object of reality to which it points, is characteristic of all languages” (p. 6). He continues, We are still in the process of de ning such terms as “democracy,” “good,” “evil,” and many others. In fact the ability to probe for deeper meaning of words as they relate to various manifestations of reality is what makes the intellectual pursuit interesting and worthwhile. But if communication is not to reach an impasse, there must be agreement on the general shape of the object to which a term points. (Cone and West 2018:6) Although the philosophical and theoretical parameters of the term “woke” have never been shaped, African Americans have a general agreement on what it means to be woke. Moreover, woke is not a new phenomenon, however, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, it has garnered the attention of mainstream media as the world grapples with trying to understand what it means. We are answering the question, to what object does the term “woke” point? What is the philosophical and theoretical foundation of the term; and in the words of Cone, what does it mean when it is used by its advocates? Woke And one of the great liabilities of life is that all too many people nd themselves living amid a great period of social change and yet they fail to develop the new attitudes, the new mental responses— that the new situation demands. They end up sleeping through a revolution. (King and Washington 2006) p. 288 Black folks in America have developed a term to represent when a person comes to a point of cultural revelation. The term marks the moment when we have developed a race-consciousness and critical awareness of our history and culture; when we begin to understand and identify exploitative and oppressive forces that shape our lived experiences; and how we mustn’t perpetuate the harm done unto us. This enlightened awareness is what we call being “woke.” Cornel West captures such an awakening in Black people in describing the birth of “blackness” as he writes, It is the death of a certain kind of deferential disposition to white supremacy in the hearts and minds and souls of black people themselves and the birth of a certain kind of self-assertiveness—a courage to be. (West as cited in Cone and West 2018:xiii) Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/58211/chapter/481898092 by OUP-Reference Gratis Access user on 09 October 2024 between woke, wokeism, liberatory consciousness, and revolutionary education? What is liberatory Being woke developed in the African American community as a term of endearment suggesting the overcoming of an institutionalized miseducation, internalized oppression, and the ability to discern propaganda and sociocultural, political, and economic patterns adversely impacting our people. The term “woke” means having a critical consciousness or awareness of exploitation, oppression, and anti-Blackness. It requires standing in true solidarity with Black people. It is a metaphysical state of being that emerges from an epistemological spirit of discovery through a dialectical method of analytical processing. We contend that being woke, as a form of critical awareness, recognizes and identi es systemic forces of exploitation oppression. “Woke” is a term rooted in the philosophy of wokeism. Woke is not a “multicultural” concept despite conservative media’s attempt to caricature it in order to criticize and minimize its radical potential as being divisive, racially charged, and deviant. Black folks employ “woke” to encourage and acknowledge one another’s intellectual and even spiritual awakening and development; it represents a unity of mind within a globally oppressive and exploitative system of anti-Blackness and class exploitation. A non-Black person has the potential to be woke, but only through the purview of Blackness—through the lens and experiences of Black people. To be woke you must not only have an awareness of exploitation and oppression in general and anti-Blackness in particular but also you must be in true solidarity with Black people. Woke as a communal state of being is the development of a collective consciousness, a mutually shared recognition and striving for a unity in humanity; it is a solidarity of mind, body, and spirit. Paulo Freire reminds us that, Solidarity requires that one enter into the situation of those with whom one is solidary; it is a radical posture … true solidarity with the oppressed means ghting at their side to transform the objective reality. (Freire 1970:23) Wokeism Wokeism is as an epistemological, metaphysical, dialectical, and sociopolitical philosophy grounded in an p. 289 awareness of the multidimensional forms of anti-Blackness, exploitation, and oppression. It means, an awareness of anti-Blackness, racial oppression, and class exploitation while also acknowledging the dialectical nature of various components of social life in creating the conditions of oppression. The major tenet of wokeism is the awareness of social forces that produce and reproduce anti-Blackness, exploitation, and oppression. Furthermore, wokeism is a philosophical worldview acknowledging racism and classism as interlocking forces operating within the capitalist system as root causes of exploitation and oppression. This philosophy also acknowledges other forms of oppression as a means of protecting the capitalist system and maintaining the hierarchical power structure within it. This philosophy is embedded within revolutionary education and is used to explore social problems such as inequality, marginalization, dehumanization, criminality, state violence, social and environmental injustice, and the degradation human life and our planet. A person that is woke has an awareness (or critical consciousness). We contend that wokeism is a philosophical underpinning of liberatory consciousness, and that this distinct form of consciousness can only be developed when a person is woke. The essence of wokeism philosophy exists within revolutionary education, and this type of education produces both a critical and liberatory consciousness. Du Bois explains, for the South believed an educated Negro to be a dangerous Negro. And the South was not wholly wrong; for education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent. Nevertheless, men strive to know. (Du Bois 2017:18) Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/58211/chapter/481898092 by OUP-Reference Gratis Access user on 09 October 2024 and oppression and involves confronting forces that produce and reproduce anti-Black exploitation and Revolutionary Education Revolutionary education is an evolving body of knowledge, comprising research, literature, and cultural and experiential data that all provide a critical analysis of race, class, gender, and other identities. It explores exploitation and oppression within society and oneself, and seeks to transform the capitalist system. The body of knowledge from which revolutionary education is composed holds the essence of wokeist philosophy and encourages an awakening—the birth of a critical consciousness. Both critical and liberatory consciousness revolutionary education wherein a person develops a critical awareness of anti-Blackness, exploitation, and oppression within the capitalist system. This form of consciousness is synonymous with being woke. Revolutionary education provides the catalyst for developing critical and liberatory consciousness. Liberatory Consciousness Liberatory consciousness is a critical consciousness that has developed into a revolutionary awakening wherein a person develops an understanding that class exploitation and White supremacy are inextricably bound to the capitalist system, are contingent on its survival, and that to eliminate class exploitation and p. 290 racial oppression—particularly anti-Black racial oppression—is to transform the system of capitalism. The wedding of a race and class consciousness is what gives birth to liberatory consciousness, interchangeably understood as a revolutionary consciousness. Liberatory consciousness is the higher form of consciousness. This form of consciousness is an awareness actualized into an understanding of the necessity of transformative social change within an inherently oppressive and exploitative system. This type of consciousness recognizes the converging of all forms of oppression across identities and the commonality of exploitation that workers share under the capitalist regime. Liberatory consciousness engages a type of analytical (dialectical) processing that involves thinking about the world and questioning long-held assumptions about truth, reality, and social constructs, conceiving of new ideas, reimagining, envisioning a new world, and engaging in critical dialogue, pedagogy, and praxis that centers rehumanization and the liberation of oppressed and exploited people. The aforementioned process describes the epistemological spirit of discovery that gives rise to a state of being woke. Although a liberatory consciousness means that you are woke, being woke does not exclusively mean that you have developed a liberatory consciousness. The juxtaposition between “liberatory” and “critical consciousness” is akin to that between “transform” and “reform.” A person that has a liberatory consciousness seeks to transform the system of capitalism whereas a person that has a critical consciousness seeks to reform the system thus preserving it. We contend that when a person has developed a liberatory consciousness—interchangeably expressed as revolutionary consciousness—this person is not simply woke but also a woke revolutionary intellectual, in short, a woke revolutionary. Thus, some who have come to be woke are woke reformist and some are woke revolutionaries. A radical posture, one in which some may presume and scholars in the future may argue, is that if you do not have a liberatory consciousness, if you do not seek to transform the system of capitalism you are not woke. The distinction between woke reformist and woke revolutionary is nuanced but signi cant; the woke reformist may seek to simply reform the system of capitalism, which will not ultimately eliminate class exploitation, racial oppression, and anti-Blackness within it, whereas the woke revolutionary seeks to transform the system of capitalism, thus liberating humanity from exploitation and oppression and saving the planet from the death and destruction that the system of capitalism engenders. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/58211/chapter/481898092 by OUP-Reference Gratis Access user on 09 October 2024 are produced from revolutionary education. A critical consciousness is a form of consciousness developed from Revolutionary Education: Teaching Truth to Empower To fully understand the necessity of teaching truth to empower, we must rst identify what truth is. Truth is objective. It is not a subjective product of our individual understanding, it is impartial to our feelings and emotions, it is not unilateral—only appending itself to one person, group, or community’s experiences, but instead it holds consistent throughout humanity and nature. The truth simply is, it exists independent of our subjective interpretations, and it will continue to simply be despite how we socially construct our world. patterns, to teach it, and to explore its nature and ensure that society is developed around truth and not its antithesis, a lie. p. 291 A person’s reality within the social world changes over time and place. Our identities and life experiences— who you are, how, as well as when, and where you were raised—impacts how you navigate through the world. These processes determine what you understand to be true about the world. For example, White supremacy is not true, however, whiteness, and white skin privileges, are all real social forces that can be experienced di erently based on your identity. Racism, as the weaponization of White supremacy has created real conditions of subjugation, inequality, destitution, violence, and death for Black people—all of which are objective realities based on a social construct, that is, race. Michel Eric Dyson gives us more context on the relationship between truth and reality as he writes, Whiteness, like race, may not be true—it’s not a biologically heritable characteristic that has roots in physiological structures or in genes or chromosomes. But it is real, in the sense that societies and rights and goods and resources and privileges have been built on its foundation. (Dyson in Diangelo 2018:x) Acknowledging the objectivity of truth does not deny or dismiss a person’s reality. Whether or not you think that White folks are supreme cannot deny the reality that racism exists. Whether you think the United States justice system is just or unjust cannot and must not dismiss the reality of mass incarceration and death of Black people from police and other forms of state sponsored violence (Alexander 2012; Taylor 2016; Robinson 2020). We are reminded that social reality is produced, Just as objective social reality exists not by chance, but as the product of human action, so it is not transformed by chance. If humankind produces social reality … then transforming that reality is an historical task, a task for humanity. (Freire 1970:25, italics added) In all of this, the point that we emphasize is that what is real about the world and your experiences within it can impact your understanding of what is true about it. The ruling class has developed hegemonic worldviews that are disseminated throughout systems, structures, and institutions within society to socially construct a world where their power and privilege are not only protected but also reproduced, reinforced, and naturalized. Antonio Gramsci wrote that, “Through its dominance of the superstructural organs of the state, the ruling class controls and shapes the ideas, hence consciousness, of the masses” (Gramsci in Berberoglu 2005:57). Gramsci adds, the system’s real strength does not lie in the violence of the ruling class or the coercive power of its state apparatus, but in the acceptance by the ruled of the “conception of the world” which belongs to the rulers. (Gramsci in Berberoglu 2005:57) Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/58211/chapter/481898092 by OUP-Reference Gratis Access user on 09 October 2024 The point of science in general and social science in particular is to nd truth, to observe it, to identify its We stress that as social reality exists as a product of human action there can be a disjuncture between truth and reality. Bourgeois “truths” about the world are central to promoting conformity and thus ensuring the subjugation of the oppressed. It is the bourgeois developed “truth” that woke workers, scholars, and p. 292 revolutionaries’ challenge. We recognize that your reality may be that you are impoverished, but it is not true that you are biologically inferior; you may be incarcerated, but it is not true that you are born a criminal; you may be Black, but it is not true that you are three- fths of a person. Ruling-class ideas obscure truth and reality to maintain power as they struggle against a critical consciousness whose The disjuncture between truth and reality is what woke workers, scholars, and revolutionary intellectuals have come to recognize they must overcome. Those of us that are woke have an intellectual obligation to identify, study, and teach truth to empower people just as our woke revolutionary forefathers and mothers have done. Revolutionary education must answer the question about truth not only as an exploration of the world as it is but also to help humanity envision a world without exploitation and oppression. Woke revolutionary intellectuals actively struggle to create a more just, more equitable, safer, healthier, and more life sustaining world. We are reminded that, Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of a man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion. To surmount the situation of oppression, people must rst critically recognize its cause, so that through transforming action they can create a new situation, one which makes possible the pursuit of a fuller humanity. (Freire 1970:21) Legacies and Lessons: Consciousness, Vision, and Strategy Overview There is a long lineage of woke revolutionary intellectuals who are essential to the ever-evolving body of knowledge that we have come to know as revolutionary education. In this section, we establish a foundation for revolutionary education by lifting up the woke revolutionary intellectuals that have in uenced what we do. We cannot capture the full depth of their scholarship, but we will highlight major elements that focus on their essential contributions to revolutionary education. Legacies and Lessons In The Souls of Black Folks, W.E.B. Du Bois introduces two signi cant conceptual tools of analysis that allow us to make sense of not only anti-Blackness but also the duality of the Black American experiences where we might nd the seeds of wokeism: the “Veil” and “double consciousness.” p. 293 the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,—an Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/58211/chapter/481898092 by OUP-Reference Gratis Access user on 09 October 2024 potential is to disrupt and dismantle systems of oppression. American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain selfconscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a ood of white Americanism, for man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face. (Du Bois 2017:4) The Veil is a powerful visual metaphor that encompasses the notion of a physical barrier, as well as a social, emotional, and spiritual separation of Black from White Americans. It also includes their economic deprivation, political disenfranchisement, social degradation, and dehumanization. Linked to the Veil was Du Bois’s deep insight into “double consciousness,” the “two-ness,” that African Americans experience as being both African and American. Each analytical dimension brings something special to the whole, and the unity of these opposing forces and realities in the lives of real people creates a tension that pervades every aspect of the Black folk’s identity and of the larger American experience. Du Bois captured the essence of being African American and established the intellectual foundation for wokeism far ahead of the times. For Black folk, being woke occurs when we experience this cultural revelation: when we fully recognize the existence of the Veil and the forces that produce and reproduce it. We also understand the con ict within— and unity of—our two selves, and strive for “a better and truer self.” This is why being woke is particular to the African American but can be extended to the global Black experience. It stems from recognizing, analyzing, and striving to confront what the world—laden with anti-Blackness/White supremacy— constantly asks Black people: “How does it feel to be a problem?” (Du Bois 2017:3). Subsequently, a nonBlack persons’ potential wokeness can only be actualized through the Black experience—requiring an awareness of anti-Blackness in particular and being in true solidarity with Black people. Mark Lamont Hill (2016) rearticulates Du Bois’s concept of Black folk being a “problem” expressed contemporarily as being a “Nobody.” He writes, “To be Nobody is to be vulnerable,” “To be Nobody is to be subject to state violence,” “To be Nobody is to confront systemic forms of State violence,” “To be Nobody is to be abandoned by the State,” “To be Nobody is to be considered disposable.” (xviii) p. 294 To be clear, although non-Black people, particularly White folks, may not experience racial oppression like Black folks do, they may experience other forms of oppression based on other marginalized identities. Furthermore, all working-class people across race and other identities experience exploitation within the capitalist system. However, if a non-Black person does not have a critical awareness of anti-Blackness they cannot be considered woke. On the contrary, this person has a false consciousness, which is, “the lack of working-class [and race] consciousness and the adoption of bourgeois ideas” (Berberoglu 2005:57, brackets added). Working-class non-Blacks may never be treated as a “problem,” but they can still be treated as what Hill calls a “nobody.” While, Nobodyness is strongly tethered to race, it cannot be divorced from other forms of social injustice…. Despite the centrality of race within American life, Nobodyness cannot be understood without an equally thorough analysis of class. Unlike other forms of di erence, class creates the material conditions and relations through which racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression are produced, sustained, and lived. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/58211/chapter/481898092 by OUP-Reference Gratis Access user on 09 October 2024 he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a (Hill 2016:xix–xx) Nobodies have the potential to become a “problem” when they develop an awareness of anti-Blackness and racial oppression, standing in true solidarity with Black peoples’ struggles for liberation. Arguably, to stand in true solidarity with Black folks, non-Blacks, particularly Whites who claim they are woke must transition from what James H. Cone describes as liberals to radicals. The liberal, he writes, con ict. Therefore, when he sees blacks engaging in civil disobedience and demanding “Freedom Now,” he is disturbed. Black people know who the enemy is, and they are forcing the liberal to take sides. But the liberal wants to be a friend, that is, enjoying the rights and privileges pertaining to whiteness and also work for the “Negro.” He wants change without risk. (Cone and West 2018:31) However, the radical is “prepared to risk life for freedom” (Cone and West 2018:33). We contend that nonBlack folks who claim they are woke must be willing to give their lives to the Black liberation struggle—the nexus of the human struggle for liberation. Such moments of solidarity threaten to decenter White supremacy and in so doing challenge capitalism. Lilla Watson echoes this sentiment of true solidarity with the oppressed as she says, “If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. If you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together” (Aboriginal activist from Queensland, Australia). Among the many contributions of Karl Marx and V.I. Lenin, we highlight the following: The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the p. 295 means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance … thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch. (Marx and Engels 1976) Marx highlights the power of the ruling class as both material and intellectual forces. Revolutionary education helps us to develop a race and class consciousness that is awakening; and once woke, we can begin to develop a collective vision to save humanity and the planet. A broad and deep social movement is necessary for transformative social change and can only be accomplished through consciousness, vision, and strategy. Lenin reminds us that, “Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.” Revolutionary education—popular and theoretical—is essential for consciousness-raising, visioning, and strategizing within the arising transformative movement. As sociologists and social scientists—as teachers and learners, as researchers, as social actors—we occupy a position to participate in shaping and informing this transformative process (Cox and Nilsen 2014; Freire 1970; Giroux 1997; KatzFishman and Scott, 2006, 2012a, 2012b; Hill-Collins 2013). Lenin writes, every state in which private ownership of the land and means of production exist, in which capital dominates, however democratic it may be, is a capitalist state, a machine used by the capitalist to keep the working class and the poor peasants in subjection. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/58211/chapter/481898092 by OUP-Reference Gratis Access user on 09 October 2024 wants to change the heart of the racist without ceasing to be his friend; he wants progress without (Lenin 1973, as cited in Berberoglu 2005:55) Lenin describes the origins and nature of the state. He explicitly de nes the state as “the irreconcilability of class antagonisms,” or more plainly articulated as “an organ or instrument of violence exercised by one class against another” (in Berberoglu 2005:59–60). The modern-day state includes the police, military, National Guard, and other forms of government. Lenin’s contribution to revolutionary education emphasizes the fundamental role of the state in keeping workers subjugated. Examining the attack on increase in police killings of young Black men, we understand them all as State-sponsored attacks on the working class in general and the racially oppressed (e.g., Black) in particular. The attack on revolutionary education comprises an e ort to stop the “woke” movement in places like Florida and elsewhere (Jones 2022; Reilly 2022; Mele 2016). We are reminded that, “As more people of color raise our consciousness and refuse to be pitted against one another, the forces of neo-colonial white supremacist domination must work harder to divide and conquer” (hooks 1995). Furthermore, the material attack on workers through police violence and beyond reinforces subjugation as the working-class condition such as poverty, houselessness, p. 296 joblessness, growing inequality, and even reformative or revolutionary movement becomes criminalized. We must wake people up to the root cause of the death and destruction happening within the capitalist system by using revolutionary education as an intellectual force of enlightenment. And we must also develop a strategy that includes how to politically gain control of the material forces necessary to bring to life our collective vision. Bell hooks, the Combahee Collective, and Frantz Fanon in their respective works allow us to explore how our individual struggles with exploitation and oppression all converge to yield a collective reality of capitalist class domination and our subsequent working-class subjugation. From their contributions to revolutionary education, we emphasize the signi cance of wokeism as a philosophical worldview that allows us to link various components of social life and struggle. This form of dialectical processing stimulates the development of liberatory consciousness. Emphasizing the power of revolutionary education, bell hooks says, I’m very much in favor of the kind of education for critical consciousness that says: let’s not look at these things separately. Let’s look at how they converge so that when we begin to take a stand against them, we can take that kind of strategic stance that allows us to be self-determining as a people struggling in a revolutionary way on all fronts. (hooks 2013) Here we see how consciousness must inform strategy and the necessity of a revolutionary movement where various struggles coalesce to actualize visions for a better world. Through revolutionary education we come to understand that we have a mission; Fanon writes, “Each generation must discover its mission, ful ll it or betray it” (Fanon 2004:145). Woke people develop commitments to liberation inextricable from their new state of being. The Combahee River Collective represents this conviction as they write, The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression and see our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. (Combahee Collective 2019) As they acknowledge the interlocking nature of systems of oppression and declare their commitment to struggle against them, we are reminded that the revolutionary movement needed in this moment for Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/58211/chapter/481898092 by OUP-Reference Gratis Access user on 09 October 2024 revolutionary education (such as bans on teaching critical race theory or LGBTQ rights) con uent with the transformative social change will be a collective struggle that includes all peoples across the spectrum of identities that constitute the heterogeneous working class. We must acknowledge each other’s di erences, stand in solidarity with one another’s individual struggle, recognize our collective reality of exploitation and oppression, and develop a consciousness, vision, and strategy to save humanity and the planet. Wake up, our time is now! Do You Understand the Assignment?—The Future Is Now Capitalism is dehumanizing and its genesis gave rise to the multidimensional expression of alienation, exploitation, and violence. The total degradation of humanity is not a byproduct of capitalism, on the contrary, it is contingent upon its survival. We are dying and so is our planet. Under the capitalist regime, White supremacy has been centered—continuously alienating humanity and imposing a bourgeois worldview on workers all over the globe. We must recenter humanity and our stories as a multiracial, multicultural, multigendered, multinational, and multigenerational working-class people. We must use revolutionary education as an intellectual tool of enlightenment that awakens the masses of working-class people, that moves our individual identities and collective reality as workers from the periphery of a White supremacist and capitalist worldview to the center. We must view ourselves as subjects of history, as fully human, and not as objects of capitalist class domination, as commodities to be bought and sold on the market. We must encourage each other to stay woke because capitalism is destroying us in our sleep. We are reminded that, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it” (Karl Marx 1845). We understand that revolutionary education is fundamentally necessary for the foundation of a woke working class community and the development of a liberatory consciousness. Those of us that are woke have an assignment: Not only must we continue to develop our woke consciousness through study that centers revolutionary education but also we must navigate an increasingly fascist terrain, while actively engaging in social struggles, and empowering others to build a woke collective consciousness. The intensi cation of the capitalist crisis has pushed us to the precipice of epochal destruction. It is incumbent on those of us who are woke, who have studied revolutionary education, who teach it, who are intellectual and social activists, those of us who are engaged in the struggle for liberation to ensure that whatever social system emerges will be in the interest of humanity and the planet. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/58211/chapter/481898092 by OUP-Reference Gratis Access user on 09 October 2024 p. 297 References Ainsley, Julia, and Alexandra Bacallao. 2022. “Biden Announces ʻStreamlinedʼ Plan to Begin Bringing Ukrainian Refugees to the U.S.” NBCNews.com. Retrieved November 7, 2022 (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/biden-admin-announceplan-begin-bringing-ukrainian-refugees-us-rcna25340). Allen, Theodore W. 2012. The Invention of the White Race. Vol. 1: Racial Oppression and Social Control. 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