Abstract
Stay Woke: A People’s Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter, by Tehama Lopez Bunyasi and Candis Watts Smith, is a hybrid text that brings together both academic and public scholarship about the Movement for Black Lives. Interestingly, it also acts as a kind of interactive workbook. This rich text is an excellent example of the positive ways that academic studies can be used as teaching tools in the larger public realm. By avoiding jargon and using real examples and phrases, as well as including discussion questions and resources, this book is a useful way for non-academic readers to meet and discuss racial oppression and inequality in a concrete and sustainable manner. As academic studies can be occasionally seen as out of touch or not applicable, and popular texts as trendy or catchy but not always factually sophisticated, Stay Woke integrates these styles, increasing its ability to reach a wider audience. Through use of academic studies, data, tables, history, and popular culture examples, this text is original and is an ideal for the future of publically accessible knowledge.
The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) is a widely known contemporary social movement that highlights the historical disenfranchisement and structural violence against Blacks in America. Originally starting as a Twitter hashtag and then growing into a larger movement, its coverage has been twisted and turned by news media over the past six years. Depending on what channel you turn on or which news outlet you read, the M4BL is described as either an updated civil rights movement or a domestic terrorist organization. Stay Woke aptly clarifies that the movement is neither. Not only does the book use current facts and critical history, but it also provides the steps necessary for ordinary people to build an antiracist society. Rather than listing what white people can do to build an antiracist society, it shows how all people can become leaders rather than waiting for others to create social change for them. In Chapter Two, it defines “all the words people throw around,” or common keywords and phrases that tend to be misunderstood, in a very useful way. This lengthy list would have been more useful as an appendix, as it pushes back the central conversation of the book and breaks up the narrative flow.
Stay Woke describes the Movement for Black Lives by historicizing it within our contemporary moment. One of the major themes, particularly in Chapter Three, is that racial progress was never inevitable. The full citizenship of Black Americans always had to be forced, and even then, small successes were and are constantly met with attempts to undermine, obscure, or block full freedom and participation in American society. Bunyasi and Smith talk about the allure of being “almost there.” Even with legal wins, Stay Woke discusses the different ways our racialized social system has been maintained. We aren’t “almost there” when we live with the impact and vestiges of decades-old logic and policies like vagrancy laws, the Thirteenth Amendment, and residential and school segregation that require a full account of the ways they support a second-class citizenship for Black Americans and other minorities. Through it all, the book illustrates how Black Americans have participated in an “insurgent citizenship,” finding alternative ways to take part in democratic society despite the violent backlash or attempts to overturn Supreme Court cases. We learn that there is nothing naturally linear about racial progress.
Chapter Four takes up this common and controversial question, “Are you racist?” No one wants to be called a racist, but as Stay Woke explains, without an intentional antiracist framework, we still invest in the maintenance of white supremacy. It describes how we don’t have to be overtly racist to maintain white supremacy through the use of microaggressions, whitesplaining, or supporting ideologies like colorblindness. It breaks down the fallacies of common phrases like “I voted for Obama” or “if only he weren’t wearing a hoodie” to point out the way we avoid structural realities through focusing on individual choices. “But staying woke means recognizing the dominant mode of racial ideology is colorblind, and racism, generally speaking, is best understood as deeply embedded in our society—it’s structural, it’s almost invisible, and it’s insidious” (pp. 156–57). Antiracism can be an everyday choice to break down respectability politics and colorblind logic. In Chapter Five, “It Doesn’t Have to Be That Way,” Stay Woke describes antiracist advocacy through tangible perspectives citizens can have (being a leader, investing in local policies, elections, police accountability). The M4BL is a kind of “North Star” for the twenty-first century rooted in Black feminism, intersectionality, and the connections between white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism. The book does an excellent job defining the main principles of the movement as well as debunking why it and other Black social movements have been miscategorized as radical and undemocratic.
Stay Woke can be an effective academic text for an undergraduate course on race, inequality, and social movements. While Stay Woke centers on Black experiences and inequality, a discussion of how the authors define “Black” would have been useful, especially for the common reader, those who have only heard about M4BL through the media, and individuals interested in interrogating the ways in which they support white supremacy everyday. The text does a good job illustrating the connections between upholding white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism, but a richer conversation about dismantling capitalism was missing from the ending affirmations. These affirmations provide a kind of roadmap for modern organizing of all kinds. Stay Woke is an eclectic text and is a strong model of an academic work that can promote public discourse and conversation about racial inequality and social movements in the twenty-first century.