Right-wingers livid over resurfaced video of Kamala Harris saying ‘everybody needs to be woke’

Kamala Harris has enraged right-wingers again, after an unearthed clip shows her saying Americans need to be “woke.”

The vice-president and presumptive Democratic nominee for the presidency was recorded during a 2017 interview saying she believed wokeness is what the US needs to solve its issues.

“We have to stay woke,” she said, laughing. “Everybody needs to be woke. And you can talk about if you’re the wokest or woker, but just say more woke than less woke.”

The comments were made during a Code Conference for the now-defunct news website Recode in 2017, before she became vice-president.

The comments have riled-up right-wing pundits who called her a “communist functionary”, while others said she was “too radical” to be in the Oval Office.

But Harris’ comments are no different to the political beliefs that she has fundamentally stuck by during her entire political career.

At the time, Harris was in a transitional period, shifting from being attorney general of California to becoming one of the state’s senator, serving until January 2021 when she was sworn in a VP.

She continued to promote queer rights, particularly marriage equality, and would go on to introduce the Gay and Trans Panic Defense Prohibition Act which aimed to curtail the reviled gay and trans panic defences used to justify attacks on LGBTQ+ people.

As vice-president, she has continued to back LGBTQ+ rights – and her presidential campaign might be one of the queerest yet.

What is ‘woke’?

The word woke, or wokeness, has changed substantially over the past decade and, for many, it is still difficult to define. It is typically used as an adjective and is derived from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) to mean alertness to racial prejudice and discrimination.

Over the course of the early 2010s, and particularly during Donald Trump’s presidency, the word gained popularity among Black Lives Matter groups and activists as a way to keep people alert to issues such as police violence against ethnic minorities, and racial prejudices.

It has since shifted to encompass most, if not all, injustices against marginalised groups, such as LGBTQ+ and disability rights.

However, conservatives often use it as a pejorative – typically against initiatives aimed at helping those marginalised groups – as a way to signal their disdain for something without having to give a definitive reason for doing so.

Possibly the national champion for overuse of the word in this way is Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis, who hinged much of his failed presidential campaign on claiming everything and anything he opposed was “woke”.