That the word that was passed from one black person to another, expanding its reach from the streets of Harlem to the West Coast and eventually into the airwaves for mass consumption, making Muldrow an integral part of woke's story. As important as the word is to our current political state, it is also important to understand the word's ties to blackness. I started this journey researching the work of Harlem author William Melvin Kelley, who's credited with coining woke in his 1962 New York Times essay "If You're Woke You Dig It," and traced its use to Badu's "Master Teacher" almost five decades later. But I also hoped to highlight the erasure of the people who invented it in its political and racial context - black people. I embarked on this journey to discover the origins of the word woke because of the uniqueness in its present ubiquity, considering its past is shrouded in mystery. But I wanted to talk about the word woke and her role in introducing it to the mainstream. I could have called Muldrow to talk about a number of topics such as her storied career or multiple collaborative albums with partner Dudley Perkins.
"They're too busy being depressed to call themselves woke." Most people who are woke are agonizing inside," Muldrow says. "Most people who are woke ain't calling themselves woke. But she also doesn't mince her words on wokeness becoming a performative trend for the masses in recent years. Sure, she's happy to see the word woke become a rallying cry of resilience for black people in America. This is only one of many profound insights Muldrow offers on the idea of wokeness during our two-and-a-half-hour talk, and what it's become since she first uttered the word on Erykah Badu's "Master Teacher" a decade ago. There was no year where the fight wasn't going down." Just being in touch with the struggle that our people have gone through here and understanding we've been fighting since the very day we touched down here. That's woke - understanding what your ancestors went through. You got kidnapped here and then you got punked out of your own language, everything. They're not acting in a neighborly fashion, they're the ones who conked you on your head. Then: "Woke is definitely a black experience - woke is if someone put a burlap sack on your head, knocked you out, and put you in a new location and then you come to and understand where you are ain't home and the people around you ain't your neighbors. I posit this thought to Georgia Anne Muldrow, one of the most forward-thinking musicians of our time, as we speak on the phone in early October.
In the second installment of the " Origin of Woke" series, Elijah Watson highlights Georgia Anne Muldrow, the musician who introduced Erykah Badu to the word woke.
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