We were raised learning the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them done unto you. We were taught that Jesus loves “all the little children of the world.” Everyone knows the first rule of Fight Club is “never talk about Fight Club.” Living with a 19-year-old college sophomore teaches you other dos and don’ts. No. 1 is: No one should ever, under any circumstances, call themselves “woke.”
“Stop,” the college student ordered before I even said it. We were discussing the state of the world, from COVID-19 to political upheaval to racial injustice. “No. Stop.”
She could sense what I about to utter, and she wasn’t having it. “Even if you are, you can’t say you are. It’s not for you to say. People can say it about you, but you can’t say it.”
“So,” I said, “it’s like giving yourself a nickname?”
“What?”
“On the Appalachian Trail, everyone has a nickname, but it’s given to you by your hike mates, and you can’t suggest it,” I explained. “Like Howard Wolowitz on The Big Bang Theory … He wanted his fellow astronauts to call him ‘Rocket Man,’ but instead, they called him ‘Fruit Loops’ because they overheard his mother calling him for breakfast. ‘How-ward, your Fruit Loops are ready.’ ”
“Not really, but maybe. No,” she said. “So, what was your nickname?”
“Same as it was in high school—Snail,” I said.
“Wonder why?” she quipped, implying that I’m not only slow of foot but in evolution.
I told her about living in Baltimore when I was young and taking swimming lessons at an all-Black high school, and about being in the middle of Louisville court-ordered desegregation in the 1970s, and about being a sports reporter covering a historically Black university and being the only White guy on the sidelines and sometimes the lone white guy in the building, and about that time I took the MARTA back to the Atlanta airport with 300 men who had just come from a Louis Farrakhan rally.
“So you can name, what, four days in your life where you felt out of place?” she asked.
I could hear how ignorant I sounded without actually saying any of the things rattling around in my head. I read Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison in high school. I watched Cicely Tyson in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman in 1974. I watched all eight nights of Alex Haley’s Roots in 1977. I cried when Toomer died in The Great Santini. I choked up when Miss Daisy called Hoke her best friend.
Author James Baldwin wrote that segregation is not just being blind to how others live, but having no desire to see. Black activists such as Baldwin knew it was convenient to exhibit a pretense of “wokeness” without its substance. And so “staying woke” was as critical and challenging as “getting woke.”
To be truly woke, according to Baldwin, is to be conscious of the harsh realities of the racial struggle and remain committed.
“Listen, Dad, here’s the problem with people your age. You’re like, what, 70-something [I’m 58]? You may think you’re whatever it is that you think you are, but still, you can’t see it.”
“See what?”
“It,” she said. “And as much as you think you understand, you don’t.”