The world expects the more familiar, stereotypical image of us as the server of side eyes and roller of necks. But Black Girl Magic is a celebration that frees us from the confines of narrow expectation or subtext.
Girl!
I began hearing the call-out beyond my network of Black girlfriends. ‘Girl,’ Kim Tatum said, greeting fellow trans activist Rhyannon Styles during a podcast episode I hosted during my time as an editor at British ELLE. We were discussing what it meant to be trans, an idea that had entered the mainstream for the first time through global headline makers such as Orange Is the New Black star Laverne Cox and writer Janet Mock.
‘Damn, girl, you look fabulous,’ an Instagram post by the body positivity activist BodyPosiPanda read, inviting women to embrace their most authentic, unfiltered selves and learn to love the back fat, stretch marks and acne scars.
‘I’ve got your back, girl,’ I overheard a middle aged white saleswoman say to her co-worker, hair streaked with grey, as she fixed a frozen cash register during a shopping trip.
In a way, the word had become a positive affirmation and a vocal show of unity in our age of outrage. Yet there is little written about its use in this way.
I’ve watched ‘girl’ come full circle, just as my relationship with it has. I now openly use it to show sisterly affection, shared cultural experiences or not — as do many Londoners I know. When I checked in on a pregnant friend in south London who had birthed a baby boy after three days of labour, her reply, a single word sent via text, spoke volumes about joy, exhaustion, relief and perseverance: ‘Girl…’
She didn’t need to say anything more.
At a women’s festival at the Saatchi Gallery where I appeared as a speaker, the green room was a joyous din of loud laughter, chatty group hugs and enthusiastic ‘hey girls’ between authors, journalists, models, activists and athletes. On stage, I asked Halima Aden, the Kenyan-born woman who made history as the world’s first hijabi supermodel, if she ever felt a weight of responsibility as A First. ‘Well, girl, when you put it that way,’ she laughed before admitting she does.
Here, ‘girl’ wasn’t tied to any specific country of origin. Just as it wasn’t during the London Women’s March months later where protestors of all ethnicities and ages walked with placards featuring such ballsy messages as ‘Girls just want to have fun-damental human rights’ and ‘Girls doing whatever the fuck they want.’
Girls! Girl. Gurl. Girl, hey. Girl, bye. Girl, stop. Girl, go. Girl, we see you, and feel seen.
‘Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.’
– BALDWIN
Few things in the Internet age have not been named. And many things, even if they have been named, have been rechristened, and rebranded again and again.
Healthy food, sleep and exercise combined to become ‘wellness’ and ‘clean living’. Down-time became ‘self-care’. Role models were repackaged, simply, as ‘Goals’ (with a capital G). And goals (lower case ‘g’) in the traditional sense became ‘intentions’. The practice of making those goals happen, meanwhile, is now called ‘manifestation’.
On the more sober end of the spectrum ‘racism’ was sugar-coated to read ‘unconscious bias’ and ‘white supremacy’ became ‘white nationalism’. On the Internet, no person, place or thing is exempt from rebranding. And in the process, the meaning evolves, twists and turns, and at times, gets lost. One of the biggest examples of this is the very old idea wrapped in thoroughly modern packaging called ‘woke’.
As I write this, I’m staring at a fashion magazine with the coverline ‘woke bespoke’. Next to it, a newspaper supplement featuring a dating diary on the search for ‘Mr Woke’. On my desktop, a guide to a ‘woke Christmas’, and in the adjacent tab, an Internet rant in response to said guide demanding people and publishers leave all writing about wokeness to Black writers. In another tab, an article bemoaning the Great Awokening of American politics. Meanwhile, on British television, a debate rages between royal correspondents and pundits about whether the royal family’s most polarising members, Meghan and Harry, have in fact become too woke for their own good.
But what is woke? Most online dictionaries define it as an awareness of inequality and other forms of injustice that are normally racial in nature — as in, Nelson Mandela or Malcolm X. A few describe the term as merely being ‘with it’ — as in every cool kid you knew at uni. And increasingly, these days, many use it as a pejorative term to describe someone who is a slave to identity politics. How can all three possibly be the same? It’s a sensibility, a quality, a state of being, a feeling backed up by a set of actions, sometimes all those things at once.
I can’t think of a word that reflects the era as well as ‘woke’ does. There’s its relative newness (woke was born and grew up alongside social media), its popularity as a hashtag and its political implications and activist leanings. And then there are its many definitions — the word’s nature changes with each rotation of the news cycle. There’s also its journey crossing over from Black culture to the Internet and mainstream news. Appropriation! All qualities that are extremely particular to this moment in time.
Confession: I’m allergic to the word. (An affliction I first developed in 2016, when MTV declared the term the new ‘on fleek’.) Ironic, considering I am textbook woke. I identify with what it was. But cringe at what it’s become. And bristle at the way the word is now weaponised. The disparity compels me to interrogate the term and its evolution. As Susan Sontag said in Notes on Camp, which inspired this very study, ‘no one who wholeheartedly shares in a given sensibility can analyse it; he can only, whatever his intention, exhibit it. To name a sensibility, to draw its contours and to recount its history, requires a deep sympathy modified by revulsion.’ So let’s consider what woke is, and what it isn’t.
1 Woke extends to conversations around art, politics, economic and social class, gender inequality, trans rights and environmentalism. But woke in its original incarnation rests on activism and Blackness.
2 The essence of woke is awareness. What you are newly aware of (a pay gap, systemic racism, unchecked privilege, etc) and what to do with that newfound knowledge is the question. And the answer keeps changing depending on who you talk to. But regardless, you’ve answered the wake-up call, pushed your way out of bed, and are now listening.
3 To be woke, in the original sense, is to understand James Baldwin’s declaration that ‘to be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.’ It’s to understand the unique kind of exhaustion that comes from being perpetually attuned to discrimination. It’s to be weary and wary. To be woke is to long for a day when one doesn’t have to stay woke.
4 Woke blurs the lines between politics and pop culture. You can’t have one without the other; the latter is how woke culture entered the public consciousness and is the thing that sustains its relevancy, for better and for worse.
5 Most date woke’s origins back to the American singer songwriter Erykah Badu’s anthemic political medley, ‘Master Teacher’ from her album New Amerykah, a work she released in 2008, two years after the birth of Twitter and eight months after Apple released a thing called the iPhone, two facts that are pertinent here because woke is a term that owes its popularity to both. Badu sings over a psychedelic collage