Eyes Wide Open: How Republicans Are Betting on Our Apathy

I. Wake Up, America
We keep hearing Republicans sneer at the word woke like it’s a curse word—tossing it around with no clue what it means, only that it’s supposed to scare us. They’ve weaponized our history, turned our rallying cry into a boogeyman, and far too many Democrats have bent the knee. “Weak and woke,” they assert. Tell us in what instance in recent years have they been subjected to law enforcement assault or detainment for protesting injustice, yet persisted in demonstrating daily, aware of the inherent dangers? Jamaal and I can name several people and groups and yet not one being any of the groaning Republicans or Democrats. The weak people are the ones capitulating to Donald Trump. “Stop saying woke,” they stress. “There’s no woke agenda.” But whose agenda is it when our children are bullied for existing? When our neighbors can’t afford groceries? When our bodies—Black bodies, trans bodies, disabled bodies—are policed and punished by people we pay to protect us? Republicans want us to be steeped in despair. They don’t want us to pay attention to the red carpet they’ve laid out for Project 2025 to further their racist, bigoted agenda. They want us asleep.

Donald Trump’s recent actions have dealt a direct blow to the communities we fight for—here’s just a portion of how:

• Undermining Equal Opportunity
  By scrapping Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs across federal agencies and issuing an executive order to deprioritize enforcement of the Civil Rights Act’s nondiscrimination provisions, he’s signaled that bias in hiring, housing, and public services no longer matters.

• Reversing Life-Saving Protections
  He moved to dismantle long-standing safeguards against racial segregation in our schools and public spaces—threatening to roll back decades of progress toward truly integrated, supportive communities.

• Eroding Federal Oversight
  Seeking to abolish the Department of Education, he aimed to strip away the nation’s primary guardian of students’ rights—leaving families without recourse when schools fail to protect or accommodate vulnerable learners.

• Shielding Law Enforcement from Accountability
  With an executive order indemnifying police officers against lawsuits, he removed a critical check on abuse and excessive force, making it harder for survivors of police violence to secure justice.

• Militarizing Our Streets
  By expanding the 1033 program—funneling surplus military equipment into local police hands—he turned community policing into an occupying force, escalating fear rather than fostering trust.

• Weaponizing Investigations for Political Gain
  Launching threats of federal inquiries into elected officials, he blurred the lines between law enforcement and political retaliation—using the justice system as a cudgel against anyone who dares oppose him.

These rollbacks don’t just weaken policies on paper—they inflict real harm on real people, leaving our most marginalized neighbors to bear the cost of lost rights, lost protections, and lost hope. This is why we need our fighters for justice to the front.

II. From the Streets of Ferguson
Let me remind you how this word was born in this context: activists, musicians, and writers, from Marcus Garvey back in 1923, to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, Barry Beckham, and even Erykah Badu all used their platforms to express the importance of being awake to injustice. Then, in August 2014, after yet another unarmed Black young man—Michael Brown—was executed with impunity, the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, erupted. For more than four hundred days, community members faced tear gas, rubber bullets, attack dogs, and battlefield munitions. People were pepper-sprayed in their faces. Journalists were arrested. Police tried to silence us—beat us, frighten us, cage us.

But you know what happened? We didn’t go home. We didn’t “tone it down.” Instead, we woke up. We woke up to the fact that killing Black people with impunity was American policy, not an aberration. We woke up to see that our justice system didn’t hold police accountable—so we had to demand it ourselves. We woke up to know that silence is complicity—and that, if we didn’t stand up, our children, our siblings, our friends would never know safety or dignity in this country. We began to proclaim we were woke. And we did so as if it was a badge of honor. We were proud to no longer be asleep to injustice and our own power to fight against it.

III. We Are Connected
As word spread, solidarity protests ignited across the country—across the world. Black Lives Matter, as an ideology, became a global language of liberation. We chanted it in Paris, in Johannesburg, in Tokyo, in Mexico City, in Honduras. And we realized our struggle was woven into every fight against oppression: for trans rights, for disability justice, for immigrant rights, for poor and working-class folks denied healthcare and housing. To be woke is to see those connections, to stand with the most marginalized among us—and to know that an injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

IV. Reclaiming Our Narrative
And yet, today, Republicans use woke to mean “dangerous liberal nonsense.” They say we’re destroying America by demanding equality. And too many Democrats are so afraid of being called names that they’ve agreed to stop talking about racism, stop talking about trans kids, stop talking about poverty and oligarchy and the systems that keep wealth and power concentrated in a few families. No more “divisive identity politics,” they say.

But let me ask you: when did justice become “divisive”? When did standing against the murder of Black people become “too political”? When did protecting children from hate become “extreme”? The real extremists are those who would rather hush us than heal the wounds they helped inflict.

V. Rise Up, Take the Mic
We cannot let the right rewrite our history. We will not kneel to their fear-mongering. We must reclaim woke. We must call Republicans to the carpet and demand: if you’re so against being woke, does that mean you condone the police killing our people? Does that mean you want children to suffer mental, physical, and emotional harm? Does that mean you think a handful of billionaires should keep buying elections while working families go hungry?

And to my fellow Democrats: why can’t we organize as fiercely as they do? Why can’t we hold more rallies and town halls, podcasts and livestreams, coffee clutches and teach-ins—fiercely amplifying our voices in every city, every neighborhood, every school, every living room debunking GOP rhetoric and teaching community solidarity? They use their bully pulpit to spread lies; we must use ours to spread truth.

VI. Stay Woke
So yes, we are woke—and by that we mean we are awake to every injustice; we refuse to look away. We are awake to the pain of our people, and we are not merely outraged—we are organized. We won’t let our names be erased. We won’t let our history be stolen. We won’t let our struggles be belittled.

To be woke is to choose life over death, love over hatred, justice over impunity. If you’re woke, you’re fighting for the humanity of every single person in this country. If you’re not woke, you’re complicit in their suffering.

So keep your eyes open. Keep your hearts burning. Organize your block, call your representatives, show up in the streets, speak out in the halls of power—and never, ever go back to sleep.

We are the dreamers and the doers. We are the living proof that justice can—must—come. Be woke. Stay woke. And together, we will win.

Oh and by the way, there’s nothing weak about our woke friends.

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