*Conservative author Bethany Mandel has penned a new book that is centered around the term “woke.” But she struggled to define it during an interview. Now there’s debate surrounding what the term “woke” actually means.
Mandel appeared on The Hill’s daily news show “Rising” last week to promote her new book when host Briahna Joy Gray asked her to define the term “woke.” Mandel was seemingly at a loss for words for about 30 seconds before saying, “This is going to be one of those moments that goes viral.”
She was right. The clip has been viewed more than 34 million times in one tweet.
Mandel, who wrote a book on “woke” made clear during the segment that she could not explain what the word meant.
As Axios reports, she later said she was a bit bewildered during the interview because she overheard Gray go on a tirade about narcissistic parents. At that moment, Mandel said became worried that the host would attack her for being a mother of six.
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LOL: Briahna Joy Gray BREAKS the brain of Rising guest Bethany Mandel by asking her to define “wokeness” pic.twitter.com/uwRSSH0LaM
— The Vanguard (@vanguard_pod) March 14, 2023
In an essay for Newsweek, Mandel wrote, “Right before we went on air, I heard one of the hosts speaking about parents in what I perceived to be a negative way. I panicked. Over my career as a loud and proud “breeder”, I have often felt attacked by the left, and braced myself to be ambushed on air about my own life choices as a mother of six children.”
She goes on to say: “Throughout the entire interview I felt a panic attack growing, but just tried to get through the duration of the appearance without an incident. As we talked, I was stammering and trying not to set traps for myself. I did not want to open up questions about my own personal life.”
Mandel says she was “left speechless at one question—the basic definition of the word “woke.”
She adds, “It was a fair question; after all, it’s the centerpiece of my book’s premise. But by that point, the panic attack had arrived and I was rendered speechless. Eventually, I sputtered out what I thought was a decent definition of the word, but by then it was too late.”
After Mandel’s viral moment, social media users and media personalities are weighing in on the “woke” topic.
Per Axios, “Woke” was previously a term used in Black political activism to describe being aware of the ways racism plays out,” the outlet writes, adding “But political analysts and linguists say it has been adopted by the political right to accuse opponents of self-righteousness and blame the left for a host of undesired events, from school shootings to the Silicon Valley Bank collapse.”
Linguist Tony Thorne told The New Yorker in a January podcast that the term “doesn’t actually mean anything.”
“I think ‘woke’ has become a lazy slur,” Thorne added.
As noted by MarketWatch, “woke” has been added to Oxford English Dictionary as both a verb and an adjective.
“I wish it would just go away. Black people essentially stopped using ‘woke’ awhile ago, unless maybe using it with a side-eye,” photographer Jessica Kelley, the daughter of the late novelist William Kelley, told MarketWatch.
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