As Kamala Harris prepares to get officially nominated as the Democratic candidate in less than a fortnight, an old video clip of the then California senator calling on Americans “to be woke” with gusto is doing the rounds on social media prompting reactions from general public and critics.
“We have to stay woke. Like everybody needs to be woke,” Harris had said during Recode’s annual Code Conference while speaking with philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.
“And you can talk about if you’re the wokest or woker, but just stay more woke than less woke.”
Several years after the 2017 conference, critics on social media went after Harris over the clip, including conservative author James Lindsay describing the vice president as a “Communist functionary.”
“Kamala is a low-level Communist functionary, and I’m tired of being told we have to pretend she’s not,” he wrote.
Skeptics also picked on Trump’s rant and labelled Kamala Harris as “too radical” for someone to uphold the top job in the White House.
“Kamala Harris is as Radical as it gets!,” Graham Allen Host of dear America said.
The resurfaced clip also drew public ire.
“Everybody needs to be woke.” -Kamala Harris I’d rather suck start a shotgun,” a user said.
“Thanks to Kamala Harris being woke, most Americans are broke,” another user wrote.
The 2017 conference had touched on issues such as immigration and the environment, including Harris speaking out against the Trump administration’s drug policies and immigration polices just before she called on Americans to be “woke.”
“I get upset when we say we’re going to shut our door to refugees who are fleeing such atrocities and have been standing in line for two years to qualify for refugee status, and they arrive here, and we turn them away. Yes, I’m gonna get mad about that. I’m gonna get mad when we have an attorney general who’s trying to resuscitate the war on drugs. And he thinks the greatest evil that mankind has ever seen is marijuana. … Leave grandma’s medical marijuana alone,” Harris said.
Harris intensified her comment in a message posted to X a day later, which read: “We have to stay active. We have to stay woke.”
The term “woke” gained prominence in 2017 when it was officially added to dictionaries like Oxford and Merriam-Webster, where it was defined as being aware of social justice issues. Over time, it has evolved into a broad term often used to refer to various left-wing concerns and agendas.