Defining “Woke”

According to this article, many people who decry wokeism have trouble defining the term.

When challenged in this regard, I borrow from what etiquette maven Emily Post said about manners, in an effort to calm an anxious lady who had been invited to a fancy dinner party and didn’t know what fork to use with a given course.  “Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others. If you have that awareness, you have good manners, no matter what fork you use.”

In a related way, we have this definition of “empathy,” which is used in the introduction to each episode of “The Hidden Brain,” a weekly radio show syndicated on NPR: “Empathy, at a deep level, is the understanding that someone else’s world is just as real as yours.”