'Woke' by any other name: Stop erasing the terms of our survival

I have watched a word that once helped keep my people alive get turned into a punchline, then a slur, and now, this month, a punchline again, this time by people who are supposed to be on our side. On Aug. 11, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) sat across from Jonathan Karl on ABC's “This Week” and, asked about positions held by democratic socialists in 2020, repeated a phrase she attributed to a fellow politician: "Woke 1 was crazy." She moved on quickly, arguing reasonably that candidates should be judged on where they stand today rather than where they stood five years ago. Since then, those four words have become part of a larger debate about what Democrats should leave behind from 2020. Some of that reckoning is overdue. But before we turn "woke" into a convenient label for everything that went wrong, we should remember something important: woke was never a branding exercise for Black people. It was an instruction. I say that as someone who admires Ocasio-Cortez and the power she has built for working people. This isn't about piling on. It is about asking who gets to declare a chapter of Black political consciousness embarrassing, close the book and move on. Who gets to decide when our vigilance has become inconvenient? Who gets to gatekeep the language of our survival? "Woke" did not begin as a hashtag or cable news category. Its roots run through generations of Black political consciousness. Marcus Garvey urged Black people to "wake up" to the reality of their cond…