The Woke Mob Was Right

The death of Renee Good is the latest example of why the woke, radical left anti-fascists marching through the streets were right about every single thing.

(Nicole Neri/Minnesota Reformer)

There is a straight line between the death of 37-year-old Renee Nicole Macklin Good and the 2020 murder of George Floyd. Both were killed by law enforcement agents in Minneapolis. They were both American citizens. The video footage of both deaths sparked widespread protests. Still, there is another, more direct connection between the two.

Although the media lazily labeled them as the “Black Lives Matter protests of 2020," most of the demonstrators who participated in the George Floyd uprising did not represent an organization. They were there to help their country solve a problem. The participants wanted a thing. The “thing” was police reform. So they didn’t just march; they offered common-sense proposals and presented reasonable legislative solutions. By attacking this universally acknowledged problem with facts, common sense and their actual bodies, victory seemed inevitable.

Their aims were inarguably correct. Yet, all they got was a measly redesigned syrup bottle.

Still, there is a good reason the summer of 2020 did not lead to police reform. The institutions, corporations and government agencies that ultimately reneged on their vows to address diversity had an excuse. They all agreed that equality, fairness and a commitment to fighting white supremacy was the right thing to do. But there is still one thing that could defeat common sense, truth and the largest protest movement in U.S. history.

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Woke (adj): A term popularized during the white backlash of 2021.

Used by speakers of Caucasian American Vernacular English (CAVEmen), it describes perspectives, concerns or social issues that white people collectively ignored, overlooked or didn’t know about until someone (usually a Black person) raised their importance.

Contrary to popular belief, the word “woke”—either as an adjective or a political ideology—was never part of the Black American cultural lexicon.

Just as Tyrone was not the subject of the negro spiritual “Tyrone,” Erykah Badu was not bragging about having sporadic periods of Black consciousness in “Master Teacher.” Childish Gambino was not singing about occasional situational awareness in “Redbone.” In 1938, every Black human being in America knew Alabama was one of the lynch mobbiest states in America. So when Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter appealed to Black people traveling through the Heart of Dixie to “stay woke and keep your eyes open,” he wasn’t using the phrase that would ignite Caucasian consternation eight decades later.

Like most phrases colonized by people who consider Morton’s a seasoned salt, the CAVE translation had nothing to do with Leadbelly, Black culture or our ways of knowing. Caucasian America’s attempt to Christopher Columbus a Black term failed because they were focused on the wrong word. Anyone, including white people, can be intermittently woke.

“Stay” is the thing.

Among those fluent in African American Vernacular English, “stay” is the superlative form of the invariant be. For instance, my friend Keisha is very seldom at home. As I am writing this sentence, she is currently not inside her house. She has also assured me that she will probably not be home tomorrow. Any speaker of standard English understands this. However, in AAVE, there is a more accurate and more efficient way to express Keisha’s past, present and future levels of social activity.

“Keisha be outside.”

In fact, Keisha be outside so much, one might say that “Keisha stay outside.” While a well-meaning standard English speaker might wonder how I can be so nonchalant about Keisha’s homelessness, the sentence simply means that Keisha be outside more than most of the people who be outside. She stay gone (No, she’s not dead).

And Black people stay knowing.

When an armed, masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed a woman who was not an immigrant during a routine border patrol operation 314 miles away from the U.S. border, it wasn’t just tragic. It was inevitable. It was foretold.

It’s not like the wokety-wokedemics want open borders, zero police and less racism. We simply prefer common sense, logic and safety to gun-toting white boys wearing bank robber masks hopping out of unmarked cars to snatch people without a warrant. Just because you’re willing to sacrifice your peace, safety and constitutional rights to live in a less immigrant-y country doesn’t mean we have to play along.

For us, being aware of the danger lurking in this country’s shadows has never been optional, nor was it related to progressive political ideology. In fact, many of the wokest Black people are the least progressive. An original recipe wokeroo might explain how welfare, rap music and the white man’s religion destroyed the Black community. It’s all hidden in the Masonic symbols on the dollar bill, but you gotta stop eating pork and open up your third eye to see it. As absurdly illogical as it might sound, every form of true wokeness is based on one fundamental underlying truth:

White people be wrong.

They were wrong. Since Trump took office, they have gradually come to realize that they are wrong. Those who haven’t fully accepted how wrong they were and are will eventually realize the depth of their wrongness. They will always be wrong.

To be fair, this realization is not new. Whether it’s chattel slavery, Jim Crow, manifest destiny, Indian removal, the Civil Rights Movement, lynching legislation, police brutality or Crash winning the Oscar for Best Picture, the majority of white people have been on the wrong side of every racial issue in the history of this country. But this is not the time for “I told you so.” Anyone who has ever used a washcloth, a wave cap or a bonnet lined with satin implicitly understands that white people be wrong.

Not only were they wrong about every single issue that fell under the white definition of wokeness, but the Black predictions that un-oppressed, newly bearded white moderates dismissed as hyperbolic fearmongering or, in the case of Ezra Klein, “left-wing fatalism,” turned out to be spot on.

Now is the time for “I told you so.”

John Fetterman and white thought leaders like New York Times columnist Ross Douthat seemed reasonable when they chastised Vice President Kamala Harris, Rep. Jim Clyburn and others for comparing Donald Trump to Hitler and calling him a fascist. When wokey-pokeys expressed fears of America turning into an oligarchy, Bloomberg, a nonpartisan business publication owned by a wealthy, middle-of-the-road businessman, warned against demonizing billionaires. The argument appeared bipartisan and reasonable. Perhaps the fear of a Trump presidency had Black people “in over their skis” (CAVE for “doing too much”).

Then, the Donald Trump presidency happened.

Shortly before Trump handed the keys to the entire federal government to the richest man in the world and gave him unilateral authority to dismantle the federal infrastructure, Elon Musk performed a Nazi salute. After that, it was all downhill. Fortunately, the fascist oligarch’s tribute to Hitler happened on Trump’s first day in office, when Fetterman and five of the 10 wealthiest human beings on the planet gathered to salute the fascist president.

Nine of the men who control the 10 largest corporations in the AI industry supported Trump’s presidential campaign. He is repaying them by creating an economy in which the entire national economy depends on the AI sector. But asking “who’s gonna prevent them from poisoning Black people and polluting Black neighborhoods?” sounds too woke. Who’d let concerns about the environment or children’s ability to breathe get in the way of a billion dollars?

Mainstream voices countered wokester claims that Trump voters were motivated by racism by citing “economic anxiety,” lower taxes, small government and fiscal conservatism. But according to the independent nonpartisan Center for American Progress, the richest 1% of income earners will receive the largest tax break from Trump’s landmark Big Beautiful Bill while everyone else will get less money. This wealth transfer to the richest 1% will only cost taxpayers a few trillion dollars in deficit spending.

“Eat the rich” was too woke. Now the rich are eating us.

For years, the people most affected by police violence repeatedly warned the unaffected majority that police reform was not just a “Black issue.” When we tried to explain that white supremacy posed a danger to the entire country, pro-fascists dismissed it as “leftist drivel.” When Symone Sanders-Townsend, an actual Black woman, explained why increased law enforcement presence doesn’t make streets safer, Joe Scarborough sat on a nationally televised network and used a five-year-old poll and a text message from another white person to whitesplain Black people’s safety.

And since Sanders-Townsend is woke and Scarborough is white, he will never ever have to admit he was wrong.

Remember when mainstream media was reluctant to cast Trump’s immigration policy as white supremacy and Christian nationalism? By hiding beneath the artifice of “objectivity,” they shuddered at wokey terminology like “white nationalism,” “white supremacy,” or even “white people.” As the heralded institutions of truth-telling refused to sacrifice their journalistic integrity to appease the high-minded race-baiters, American media redefined critical race theory, diversity, equity and inclusion, and wokeness by collectively casting the white definitions as the default.

Then something changed. Either the woke mob was right, or there was no way for the heralded institutions to continue avoiding reality. Today, the front pages of the biggest mainstream outlets all look like this:

CNN, NBC, The Washington Post, Associated Press, New York Times, PBS

Speaking of cowardly journalism, remember when the wealthy oligarch who owns the Washington Post rejected wokeness for free market capitalism? Not for us, wokey! Amazon Basics Lex Luthor ultimately capitulated to Trump to secure taxpayer funding for his spaceship hobby. Buoyed by the anti-woke movement, CBS tapped Bari Weiss—a cuddly, right-wing Cabbage Patch doll who sounded competent when she threw on a pair of glasses and spewed right-wing talking points like someone installed a Rush Limbaugh cassette in the back of a Teddy Ruxpin—to run its news division. The fact that bizarro Rachel Maddow is turning one of the bastions of network news into a Joe Rogan podcast is not surprising to me …

I stay woke.

To be fair, no one is right all of the time. At least that’s what I’ve been told all my life. But when it comes to the people who dedicated themselves to staying woke, I can’t think of a single thing they were even partly wrong about. Since Trump took office, the predictions of the wokest doom-sayers, what-iffers and barbershop pundits have all come true.

Some were reluctant to admit that the angst over “critical race theory” was an attempt to erase Black history. Others felt that toppling Confederate monuments was too woke. We were crazy to take Trump seriously when he threatened to arrest his political enemies. The notion of the U.S. military occupying an American city was absurd. If the woke people just read the U.S. Constitution, they’d see that the president needs congressional authorization to go to war.

According to people who stand for the anthem, paranoid far-left fearmongers were crazy. America would never allow a secret force of masked stormtroopers to snatch American citizens off the street and hold them in secret concentration camps. The Centers for Disease Control is one of the most esteemed public health agencies in the world. Only someone with Trump Derangement Syndrome would believe that Trump could dismantle a century of scientific achievement and put our children at risk. We totally eliminated measles 26 years ago, so only a snowflake would worry about the disease making a comeback. It’s not like they’re crazy enough to turn everything upside down.

Then again, if we listened to those woke worrywarts, you might believe Trump was going to dismantle the Department of Education system, gut the Civil Rights Act, reverse the Great Replacement by paying white women to get pregnant, restrict immigration to white people, bomb the largest country in Africa, turn the elite colleges into white institutions, force media corporations to kick Black people off the air, silence the most trustworthy journalists and hand out reparations …

But only to white people.

As it turns out, there was no epidemic of trans people invading sports and bathrooms. Doctors were not performing gender reassignment surgery on minors. White men were not losing jobs to unqualified DEI hires. Venezuela does not produce fentanyl. Undocumented immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than homegrown Americans. Tariffs do not lower prices. Crime was lower under Biden. White people never had to apologize. There is no white genocide.

They are the crazy ones.

I’ve always ascribed part of the antipathy toward wokeness to the democratization of media. What if the entirety of the anti-woke enmity is one big misunderstanding? Think about it; before social media, blogging and technological interconnectedness, white people did not have access to the unfiltered thoughts of people who didn’t look like them. Meanwhile, every non-white person has to navigate and adapt to the political, social and economic whims of white America. It’s possible our unawakened brothers and Beckys genuinely believe their slaves were happy, their history was accurate, gay people didn’t want the legal protection of marriage, trans people didn’t exist and Black people loved when random white people rake their grubby, unwashed, copper-smelling fingers through our hair to pet us like almost-human zoo animals.

I couldn’t think of a single issue that conservatives demonized as “woke” that people also haven’t been ringing the alarm about for a century, but maybe the members of the pro-slumber party only recently found out about this equality and justice stuff. Just to be sure, I posed this question on every major social media platform.

Michael Harriot@michaelharriot

Can you name some examples of a specific issue or topic that you consider “woke?” I’m trying to see something

4:37 AM · Dec 16, 2025 · 45.3K Views

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149 Replies · 26 Reposts · 268 Likes

Still haven’t found one.

MAGA Republicans were not the only ones who were wrong. They weren’t as bad as the race-baiting, conservative, pearl-clutching Klanswomen and Dollar General whites who perch their wraparound sunglasses on the bill of their MAGA hats to whine about Hunter Biden’s laptop. James Carville, Joe Scarborough, David Plouffe, and tote-bag-carrying Karens who love Rachel Maddow almost as much as they love their privilege act as if social justice issues had an unsubscribe button. Klein and other members of the white intelligentsia are willing to sacrifice some people’s humanity in exchange for winning elections because, for them, caring about justice, equality and the very existence of human beings are just methods of gaining power.

Even the most well-meaning progressive thought leaders embrace social justice like a high-school dropout supporting their favorite college football team. The season was great when they were winning; when they started losing, they quickly abandoned the “woke era” for a more moderate, less niggerish version of politics that attracts moderates in Michigan suburbs. They are no different from abolitionists who supported gradual emancipation or allies who thought separate but equal was a reasonable compromise.

To them, “woke” meant marching through their suburban neighborhood during the George Floyd summer while prominently displaying a copy of The 1619 Project on the desk where they wrote a check to the “Help Homeless Keisha” GoFundMe. Plus, resisting is exhausting. Reform takes time and dismantling the very system that afforded them their privileges is understandably scary. Considering their immunity to the systemic oppression and racial inequities that Black people stay fighting, it’s easy to see why someone who has never been affected by a worst-case scenario would return to the milquetoast safety that whiteness affords.

This, ultimately, is the difference between people who “stay woke” and the retractable, idealized version of progressive politics that lives in the white imagination. The version of wokeness that was trending until white people started getting the heebie jeebies was not compulsory. Their lives did not depend on their ability to duck, dodge and weave America’s unceasing attack on their very existence.

Being woke is easy.

“Stay” is the thing.

I imagine that being white and wrong is easier than the unenviable, seemingly impossible task of turning America into a decent country. Then again, I’ve never had the choice. My only options are to stay woke, be dead or enter the coon transfer portal and switch sides. I probably couldn’t sleep at night, but Caucasoidal approval might be like Ambien for conservative negroes. Despite their incessant wrongness, Stephen A. Smith and Jason Whitlock seem pretty well-rested.

And boy, are they wrong. The unwoke have not solved a single problem they promised to fix. Their only skill is bamboozling the uninformed MAGA cult members into buying their snake oil. They rely on the stupidity of people who are willing to pivot from “no more foreign wars, America First” to “bomb Venezuela and take the oil.” They hate big government and corporations, but they love Elon Musk and the patriotic Brownshirts patrolling their neighborhood for Mexicans. They follow the teachings of Jesus Christ but believe in a messiah who contradicts every word their savior ever said and every scripture in the book they choose to ignore. Every atomic particle that makes up their asinine political belief system is morally unjust, scientifically baseless and factually incorrect.

They stay winning, though.

Winning doesn’t make them right. Hitler had a 12-year run. Mussolini’s Fascista controlled Italy for more than two decades. Joe Rogan has been famous for 30 years, has recorded nearly 2,500 episodes of the most popular podcast on the planet, but he might also be the wrongest man who ever wronged. Winning while lacking intelligence, integrity and basic human compassion is less important than being on the right side of history and decency.

And what exactly did they win, anyway? The news division at the Tiffany network is basically an Instagram page for a Trump fan account. Are Target stockholders winning after it reversed course on racism? What did Harvard get for its capitulation? Maybe it’s time to consider that the people who painted Ida B. Wells as a “slanderous and nasty-minded mulatress” and Booker T Washington as a “nigger” and Martin Luther King Jr. as an anti-democracy communist and Barack Obama as a Muslim socialist might not know what the hell they’re talking about.

Ever.

Conversely, the soothsayers who warned that America could turn toward authoritarianism, become an oligarchy, transform into a kleptocracy or evolve into a good-old-fashioned fascist state were all correct. There are not two equal and opposing sides to this story. Capitalism-powered Christian ethno-nationalism is the plague and the poison and the pandemic that will ultimately doom this nation. We are not the ones who are destroying America, nor is it our responsibility to save this project in settler colonialism from itself. Our only duty is to survive. In a country where being wrong is a sign of strength and virtue, American citizenship, being unarmed or even being right is not enough.

Renee Good is proof that we were right and America is wrong.

Perhaps that is what Leadbelly, Erykah, the ancestors and a never-ending list of unfailingly correct people have been trying to tell the residents of this God-forsaken, people-killing, newly fascist state.

So stay woke, Black people …

And alive.