Source: Win McNamee / Getty
If there is one thing I wish we could leave in 2022, it’s conservatives’ white and fragile obsession with the word “woke.” I honestly rue the day white people discovered the word—this word that is born from Black vernacular and has been used for literal decades to mean general awareness of racial discrimination and injustice. The way white people, and white conservatives specifically, have mangled the word by applying it to any and everything that gets their white tears flowing (including matchbooks, apparently) is disgraceful, if not inherently racist AF.
And when it comes down to it, conservatives’ anti-woke campaign hinges on one thing—their ability to simply make up sh**.
In October, for example, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis claimed during a gubernatorial debate against his Democratic opponent Charlie Crist that K-12 schools “around the country” instituted “programs where they will take a student and look at their race and say, ‘You’re white, you’re an oppressor…’”
Did DeSantis cite even a single example of specified schools that do this? No. Was this just another example of right-wing woke fiction inspired by the woke boogie man that hides under DeSantis’ bed to invade his deepest white nationalist nightmares? I mean, probably. Was DeSantis’ made-up nonsense more or less ridiculous than when Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) erroneously claimed “wokeness” was responsible for school shootings? Well, that’s for you to decide. Either way, these people are just out here lying, fibbing, falsifying, misleading, dissembling, untruthinating (I made that one up) and distorting reality.
This brings us to Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN).
Blackburn is basically the Mother Te-racist patron saint from the “Church of Woke Make Believe.” Like many Republicans, she has a reputation for being an anti-critical race theory propagandist, and now she’s claiming she knows a couple who moved from New York to Tennessee in order to find non-woke preschools and kindergartens for her children.
During a recent interview, Blackburn claimed this anonymous couple from NYC was “told by somebody, ‘Well, you need to hire a consultant to coach your child to get into a preschool because there are so few good schools… available that are not into the woke kindergarten.'”
Now, look, I can’t definitively say that Blackburn is lying. All I can say is it seems unlikely that a couple was told by an educational consultant that their small children need woke coaching classes to get into preschool, so they moved from NYC to one of the least educated states in the country.
But the real question I have is this: What the hell goes on at an anti-woke preschool?
I mean, are the children just napping for six hours straight because being awake is a slippery slope to wokeness? Are there MAGA-friendly arts and KKKrafts activities involved? If the children misbehave, are they sent to the corner and made to repeat the words “America was not founded on slavery”?
All I’m saying is “I Believe the Children Are the Future of White Fragility” seems like an inappropriate school song, but that’s what I imagine students at a non-woke kindergarten are being taught.
Not that any of this matters—because we all know Marsha Blackburn is probably lying just like the rest of them.
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