Transcript: What AOC’s ‘Woke” Comments Say About Her and the Left

Scholar Deva Woodly says progressive politicians shouldn’t distance themselves from the movements of the early 2020s.

This is a lightly edited transcript of the August 17 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: Good morning. This is Perry Bacon from Right Now on The New Republic. We have a great guest. It’s Deva Woodly. She’s a professor of politics at Brown University. She’s a fellow at the Kettering Foundation. And she’s the author of books on social movements and on Black Lives Matter. So Deva, welcome. Thanks for joining me.

Deva Woodly: Thank you. Wonderful to be here.

Bacon: So I want to ask you about the discourse of the last 10 days, which I think started off with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez being on an interview on one of the Sunday shows and talking about what she phrased Woke 1.0. Let me read what she says. I want you to react to it. Because we’re a week out from it, but I still think her actual quote was important to read in the context of what it was.

So there was some video played. They have autoplay these days. All right, so anyway, she was asked about Francesca Hong, who was running for governor of Wisconsin, as we know. “I have a local city councilman, has this saying, ‘Woke 1 was crazy.’ And I think what’s important is, we have to assess what a candidate is saying now. During this time, during COVID, there was a huge opening of the Overton window. We were shut down. There were some of the highest unemployment rates we’ve ever seen, because of those shutdowns. The doors were really open in trying to entertain any and every kind of policy that was going to get us to a better place. The discussions that we had at that time were quite fruitful. And then we talk about crime today, it’s fundamentally different than when we talked about crime and talked about bringing crime down, right? We all share the goal of having crime as low as possible. I think that during lockdown, of course, rhetoric in that time was not rhetoric we would use today, and I’m grateful these candidates have the opportunity to present who they are to the electorate and who they’re campaigning for in this moment.”

So the totality of that is, there’s a Woke 1.0 thing—she’s quoting someone else saying it’s crazy, she’s referring to that quote—and then she’s saying lockdown introduced some kind of language we don’t use today. So the totality of that, what did you make of what is said there?

Woodly: OK, so there’s a world in which we can take AOC’s comments in, I think, the spirit that she meant them. But of course, that’s not appropriate for national television, right? In a hostile political environment, there’s a way in which sometimes people say things like crazy, right? That was crazy. It’s not necessarily an insult. It means that it was something unexpected, and that it was an experience.

I think that’s what she meant, but since she said it in a national forum that is hostile to what has been dubbed woke—which again is also a terminology that I think is misplaced and should not, honestly, be used to describe a period of multiple social movements that happened back to back for reasons of persistent inequality across several different sectors, a reasonable and rational response to that inequality which was not able to be addressed through institutional pathways. That’s why you have social movements.

Social movements are a normal democratic institutional check. They’ve existed as long as there have been democratic governments, and they’re not crazy. They’re a rational response to being unable to get redress through official channels.

In addition, the movements that I assume they’re referring to as Woke 1, right—the Black Lives Matter movement and Me Too, chief among them, but also probably Marjory Stoneman Douglas kids talking about gun control. All of these movements were, at the time, popular movements, and indeed the Black Lives Matter movement is the most popular movement that has existed in American history. So the idea of diminishing its impact as Woke 1 and calling it crazy is a misremembering of history, and also the significance of that movement.

It’s also, additionally, I think, politically quite silly for someone who is on the left and claims to be trying to make significant changes, because it also paints a politics where people are making, as she said, fruitful interventions to push the perspective of what is possible and necessary for a thriving society. It makes it so that any big swing in that direction could be termed crazy, which is antithetical to the kind of politics that I think that she’d like to advance.

Bacon: You led with the, let’s be charitable and let’s say crazy was just a word meaning a lot happened. And OK, so the charitable explanation is, like, she was saying that a lot happened in that moment that was unusual in that moment. That’s what she was—and then her comment that some of the things were fruitful is saying, she can’t quite say defund the police moved us toward—she doesn’t want to say defund the police moved us in the right direction. That’s the coded way to say that, right?

Woodly: Yeah. And I think, look, I think that generally speaking AOC is more short-sighted than this in her communications. So I was actually surprised to see this slip. And I interpret it in the more charitable way, because I feel like sometimes she talks casually—which is part of her appeal—and uses kind of colloquialisms to express herself. And in this context, it just does not advance the goals of people who are interested in making significant changes from the status quo. And I assume she’s in that camp.

Bacon: Let me—I’m going to lead with some more uncharitable explanations and see what you think about them. The first might be the phrase Woke 1.0 itself, or the phrase woke, and then 1.0. Woke, I often read from people on the right and the center left who want to make fun of Black Lives Matter went too far, DEI went too far—they are hostile to a lot of the things that happened during that period. Woke 1.0 is a phrase I’ve even seen from sort of people who are socialist and leftist, and what they would say is that there’s too much focus on, quote unquote, identity politics, not enough focus on class politics.

And so even that phrasing alone makes me think she’s not reading a lot of people like Deva Woodly, and she’s reading a lot of people on Twitter, white left. My first reaction was, is she not—if you’re invoking Woke 1.0 a lot, you’re not reading a diverse enough group of people. I know she quoted a Black city councilman, but in general, that phraseology is coming from a sector of people who are generally skeptical of what happened in 2020. Do you agree with that?

Woodly: Yes, I do think that’s true, but I also think that it is one of the coups of right-wing discourse to have made that phrasing something that is popularized. So now, even though it derives from a criticism from the right, it has been taken up by other people, who—some are criticizing it from the left, some are not criticizing it at all, but think of it as a descriptor. It’s very much like Democrat for the Democratic Party—people who use that in print as though it’s not incorrect, right? That’s because it’s been a successful discursive coup by the right wing.

So yes, I think that someone who is aware of the power of language and words, and is interested in shifting the Overton window, would be careful about using a phrase like Woke 1, which in the first instance is an appropriation of the term woke, which is actually a serious term that comes from African American vernacular English and means to be aware of systemic oppression, which is important given the times. But then, additionally, styling it as Woke 1 mashes together a lot of phenomena and makes them seem trivial, when they are significant political movements that are ongoing, and the reasons for them continue and continue to intensify.

Bacon: If she had said the Black Lives Matter movement was crazy, people would’ve been like, “What?” If she had said the protests against George Floyd were crazy, people—because the phrase ended up meaning—the most frustrating about it was, like, in theory, her job is to communicate clearly, but in reality, I’ve read 10 days of think pieces about Woke 1.0, because no one can agree about what that means, meaning it wasn’t a clear phrase, right?

Woodly: Yes. It’s a catch-all phrase, but it’s also a catch-all phrase that is meant to diminish. And so I think that anyone who not only respects the movements but respects the causes that deserve ongoing redress would not use that phrasing, should not use that phrasing.

So it’s my hope that not only she but also any other office holders or decision-makers on the left or the center left would not use that........

© New Republic