Tucker,

I confess that having now read the original opinion piece and your interpretation of it, I'm still not entirely sure precisely what he means to say, and I think that's perhaps partly from what some might consider to be an overabundance of caution on his part. Anti-woke, it seems, perhaps no longer necessarily means the opposite of woke, but rather the non-existence of it. Certainly, what he describes as an instructor is likely very different from what most people may experience in more public settings. Perhaps the truth is that there is nothing simple about this once simple word, which now seems to convey as many meanings as there are environments and situations in which it’s used.

I'm a liberal white male who has spent more than 50 of my 65 years living in rural South Carolina, in the American deep south. I'll not even attempt to expand on your writing (or his), because I'm certain I'd fail horribly. But perhaps I have some qualification to express my own experience living among those who supposedly resist wokeness and everything it encompasses, often seemingly without having a clue what it even is, or even a clue that they don't know. Maybe their definition is sometimes simply, "anything the Satan-worshipping democrat(sic) baby-eaters say, think or do", and we and the media have simply turned anything beyond that into a cottage industry. (That is the media's job, after all, and is rapidly becoming ours.)

I vividly remember my first “woke” experience, with still-legal segregation while standing in line at a small-town movie theatre, and my memory of standing in line to see President Kennedy lie in state is about equally vivid, and at nearly the same point in my childhood. At 65, I'm still finding myself baffled as to just how difficult caring too often is, how easy hate can be, and why simplicity is now sometimes quite more complex than I remember it being.

I am literally expressing wokeness every time I leave the house, and have since about the time Trump was elected. What I mean is I have an ever expanding collection of t-shirts, caps, sweatshirts, hoodies, and even Christmas sweaters expressing all the progressive ideas I hold dear, and at this point that's well over 100 articles of clothing. (I realize this may all sound, at best, a little pathetic, but physical and medical issues since birth have taken away numerous more active options I might have preferred to the passivity of a screen-printed message on my chest, but I'm compelled to do something. Oh yes, I also sometimes try to express myself in writing, especially way too late at night, when I should have been asleep for hours.)

Additionally, I wish to allow certain groups of people to perhaps feel safer in my individual “white privileged majority” presence, and others to perhaps feel a little less comfortable with their less universally accepting ideas, despite our similar skin. Perhaps that’s also one of the duties and definitions of “wokeness”.

The point I may be trying to make is that I genuinely feel that we are dealing with what seems so clearly a GOP construct as to pretty much take away any possibility of having a logical discussion over what woke may or may not mean. It begins to seem as though we may as well be arguing over colors with the blind, or sounds with the deaf…or catching smoke in our hands.

Several times over the years I've been saluted in public by Trump-worshippers simply because my progressive message had something like "Trump" or "Jesus" within it, and everything else was ignored. (I'm referencing instances where the person saluting wore their own Trump message, so their intent was exactly as obvious as they wanted it to be, though reversed. Where I live, nuance is about as common as grasped irony.)

But for the most part, 99%+ of the folks I encounter simply have no interest whatsoever. Unless it's shoved right in their face, most people will not notice or care, and shoving it in their face is exactly what the GOP seems to be focused on with woke. (I confess, it's hard to measure the reaction to my attire from the progressive camp, because it's almost literally too small here to be measurable or statistically meaningful. After all, this is the only state on the Atlantic coast that was an unquestioned lock for Thump in both elections. But on one occasion a woman I might respectfully describe as a Black matriarch gave a slow nod to one of my "Stop Killing Black People" shirts, so there are welcome and humbling exceptions.)

What is woke? Whatever Fox News(sic) and the GOP (!Redundancy Alert!) want it to be…today. But I've never been shy about saying I believe the entire issue over CRT is to hide the price the far-wrong might pay for the evils of the Southern Strategy becoming widely known, and CRT seems to have been their training ground or blueprint for the whole question of just how vague wokeness needs to be for their political needs of the day to be met.

Thank you for letting me blather, Tucker. I apologize that this is such a vast oversimplification of your original concept.