Stay Woke: Our Fight for Truth and Justice.
— Michael Thompson, Author
TALLAHASSEE, FLORIDA, UNITED STATES, August 2, 2023/EINPresswire.com/ — Stay Woke: Our Fight for Truth and Justice is a newly written book by Dr. Michael Thompson of Interprofessional Health Educators that provides the true and accurate meaning of the word “woke” often mischaracterized by today’s politicians according to the song Scottsboro Boys by the Black musician Lead Belly in 1938 where the term originated. As described by both Lead Belly and the Merriam-Webster dictionary online, the original definition of woke is to be “aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice and identified as U.S. slang. It originated in African American English and gained widespread use in 2014 as part of the Black Lives Matter movement. By the end of that same decade, some applied it as a general pejorative for anyone who is or appears to be politically left-leaning.” The phrase “stay woke” represents a warning for Blacks to be attentive to racism as emphasized in this song of 1938 with the concept being used for decades afterward.
This book reveals how politicians and political pundits falsely use the word “woke” as a pejorative and harms the African American community in six vital areas: voting rights, education, housing, the criminal justice system, health disparities, and generational wealth. Each chapter provides historical context allowing the reader to understand better the origins of inequality from slavery and its sustainment through the Jim Crow era drawing a direct line between past historical inequities to those identified today in each chapter. In addition, the book draws attention to current policies that represent extensions of inequalities seen since slavery and the Jim Crow era despite the passing of laws such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Examples include housing discrimination, Operation Pipeline, gerrymandering, book bans, prison sentencing, defunding of diversity programs, and more.
In Stay Woke: Our Fight for Truth and Justice, the author states that “the danger of accepting racial colorblindness results in generations of people not understanding the historical atrocities that have led to various systems of inequality seen today.”
As George Orwell reminded us in 1984: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
Michael Thompson
Interprofessional Health Educators, LLC
healtheducators@pharmedconsult.com
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