Actual meaning? Being “awakened” to the incompleteness of civil rights, aware of the long and difficult social justice work that needs to happen to make oppressed peoples equal, and willing to learn and act in response to that knowledge; particularly as it pertains to the position of Black people in the United States, but generalized more broadly to oppressed peoples outside that group.
But today? It’s been co-opted by the Worst People You Know to mean “anything not regressively conservative,” and synonymous with “socialist” (the actual definition of which they also don’t care about). It is often a red flag that the person you’re talking to holds an extremely propagandized view of modern life; and at best thinks that civil rights is done, and at worst thinks that people of color are subhuman.
Actual meaning? Being “awakened” to the incompleteness of civil rights, aware of the long and difficult social justice work that needs to happen to make oppressed peoples equal, and willing to learn and act in response to that knowledge; particularly as it pertains to the position of Black people in the United States, but generalized more broadly to oppressed peoples outside that group.
But today? It’s been co-opted by the Worst People You Know to mean “anything not regressively conservative,” and synonymous with “socialist” (the actual definition of which they also don’t care about). It is often a red flag that the person you’re talking to holds an extremely propagandized view of modern life; and at best thinks that civil rights is done, and at worst thinks that people of color are subhuman.