I am asking this because Ms. Kay Ivey, governor of what her predecessor, George Wallace, always used to call “the great state of Alabama, used this term in explaining her firing of Ms Barbara Cooper from the Alabama Department of Early Childhood Education. She fired Ms Cooper because of a teaching manual that she had adopted as a resource for pre-K teachers.

This book reportedly maintains that there are “larger systemic forces that perpetuate systems of White privilege” and that “the United States is built on systemic and structural racism.” Governor Ivey doesn’t want school children to hear anything like this: “Woke concepts that have zero to do with a proper education and that are divisive to the core have no place in Alabama classrooms at any age level, let alone with our youngest learners. We want our children to be focused on the fundamentals, such as reading and math.” Kay Ivey is governor of a state with an ongoing history of vicious racial oppression, a state whose expenditure for education comes in as No. 40 in comparison to the other states. And so the Governor worry over the two centuries of racial violence that are fundamental in the state of Alabama and can rely on a defective education system to see to it that they will not become fundamental. The opposite of “woke” must be “deluded to the point of being asleep.”