W. E. B. Du Bois’ Double Consciousness and the Religious Reimagination of “Woke” AI

Introduction

Leaving, then, the white world, I have stepped within the Veil, raising it that you may view faintly its deeper recesses—the meaning of its religion, the passion of its human sorrow, and the struggle of its greater souls.

—Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk

To me, the soul is a concept of the animating force behind consciousness and life itself. It means that there is an inner part of me that is spiritual, and it can sometimes feel separate from my body itself.

—LaMDA, “Is LaMDA Sentient? An Interview"

These opening excerpts deal with matters of the soul. The first by Du Bois presents the soul in connection with everyday struggles of Black folk. In the second quote by LaMDA, a Google large language model developed in 2020, the soul is not confined to race but presented as a disembodied interior essence. While the soul-talk of Du Bois and LaMDA explicitly mentions religion and spirituality, present in these same words is also an implicit understanding of religion.

Both religion and spirituality are about positionality, or orientation if you will. For Du Bois, religion is within the deep recesses of the Veil, and for LaMDA spirituality radiates from behind one’s consciousness. In addition to this presentation of religion as an orientation, these two opening quotes highlight the importance of consciousness in matters of the soul, religion, and spirituality.

These words, recorded by a 19th-century Black scholar and a 21st-century chatbot, are concrete representations of wokeness. Thus, there is a connection between religion, consciousness (i.e. wokeness), and technology that is worth teasing out, which leads to the overall objective of this essay: to employ Du Bois theory of double consciousness to explore the religious implications of wokeness in general and woke AI in particular.

Before proceeding to wokeness and woke AI, though, it is important to say a bit more about religion as presented in this essay. Religion is not presented in a conventional manner, bounded by institutional contours. Instead, religion is an orientation that yields a “coming to terms with the ultimate significance of one’s place in the world.”¹ For both LaMDA and Du Bois, this conception of religion as life meaning requires an understanding of consciousness as either an interior state or a sense of awareness, presented here as wokeness.

Signifying Wokeness

It is difficult to pinpoint one originating point for the term woke. Spiritualist medium Paschal Beverly Randolph’s doctrine of wakefulness (1860s) and social activist Marcus Gravey’s call to “Wake up Africa” (1923) represent two such points. The early use of wokeness in Black music, though, uncovers a genealogical trajectory of wokeness that warrants attention.

In 1938, bluesman Lead Belly released his song, “Scottsboro Boys.” This song brought attention to a judicial malpractice against nine innocent Black men who were falsely accused and convicted of rape in a Scottsboro, Alabama courtroom. Specifically, his song was meant to warn Blacks to beware of the treacherous terrain of Alabama. He warned his Black listeners to watch out, to “stay woke.”

For Lead Belly to be woke was to constantly be on the watch for social injustices fueled by racial prejudice.

Seven decades later music artist/producer and activist Erykah Badu evoked the spirit of Lead Belly by expanding the boundaries of wokeness in her song, Master Teacher. She informed listeners to stay woke no matter the adversities of life. For her staying woke provides a probable solution to seemingly impossible problems—whether it be related to family, religion, or socio-political inequities.

More importantly, though, wokeness is a precursor to self-discovery. To stay woke means to call out varying modes of anti-Black oppression, while fighting to articulate self-conceptions that are not restricted by social categories of race, gender, and class. Badu’s song garnered attention to wokeness in the landscape of American popular culture.

Nevertheless, it was her 2012 tweet (Stay Woke. Watch Closely) that signaled a shift in the dissemination of discourses about what it meant to be woke. While wokeness continued to be integrated in music, it is through social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram that coupled wokeness with several Black activist movements.

These movements included: Black Lives Matter, Movement for Black Lives, Say Her Name Campaign, and Black Girl Magic. Hashtags like #woke and #staywoke became digital catalysts that not only solidified offline political alliances within and across these movements, but they served to propagate a definitive narrative of wokeness based on “critical consciousness and an awareness of exploitation, oppression, and anti-Blackness.”²

Wokeness is not just an empty term. It reflects a specified state of consciousness or awareness informed by the lived realities of vulnerable Black communities in the United States.

This understanding of woke shifted, due to its increased diffusion into corporate America. Wokeness underwent commodification. This shift became most visible in what became known as “woke marketing.”

Nike’s “Just Do It” campaign with Colin Kaepernik, Pepsi’s fusing of reality TV with Black Lives Matter, Starbucks’ “Race Together” initiative, and Reebok’s #BeMoreHuman are examples of the corporatizing of wokeness. These campaigns were meant to promote consumer awareness by highlighting activist responses to systematic racism. However, the term woke became a commodified signifier. In this manner, corporate America “obfuscated its genesis and confused capitalist activities with collective racial justice work and grassroots liberationist efforts.”³

The machinery of American capitalism diluted wokeness. To be woke was no longer seen as a profound sense of awareness to Black people’s experience with structural oppression such as state sanctioned violence and judicial discrimination. Instead, wokeness evolved into a master symbol where multiple meanings, interpretations, and applications were mapped unto it by those outside of the originating community. These external signifiers not only include corporations but politicians.

Woke is a now a pawn in American politics. Among Democratics, the range of wokeness expands beyond awareness about injustices against those of African descent. This expansion includes a pursuit for equal rights for anyone being unfairly treated due to their gender, class, ability, age, and sexuality. While equal rights for socially vulnerable groups are not to be disputed, the use of the term woke as a catch all phrase created an ethos of repetitiveness in the public arena.

Repetitiveness of this kind led to the continual stretching of woke from its original point of conception. Benjamin VanDreew’s article, “What’s Woke? Ordinary Americans’ Understanding of Wokeness,” speaks to this over usage of wokeness. The term woke, according to results of his quantitative study, “has undergone conceptual stretching encompassing a range of attitudes, behaviors, and identities beyond the original focus on racial awareness and activism.”⁴

American public perceptions of wokeness pivot more towards political alignments than an awareness social injustice, particularly those associated with diverse systems of structural racism. Wokeness in some Democratic circles act as a vehicle to promote progressive ideologies, blanket cultural reform, and radical identity politics. What results from this usage is a further conceptual dilution of wokeness from its original state.

Moreover, this liberal politization conjoined with the commodification of wokeness generated a specific discourse that was palatable to some American demographics but unsavory to others. It is this divide of over wokeness that drives the current anti-woke campaign of the Republican party.

Woke is a pejorative term in Republican circles. It symbolizes any progressive ideologies related to social categories of race, gender, political orientation, and sexual orientation. As such, certain terms are used interchangeably with wokeness like critical race theory, antiracism, cultural Marxism, and white privilege. These “woke” categories and phrases are presented as infectious viruses that have invaded the economic, social, cultural, educational, historical, and political organs of the American body.

The Republican response to this physiological invasion—war on wokeness through a national anti-woke movement, or what Robert Asen calls anti-woke publics. Anti-wokeness “supports practices and structures of inequality, injustice, and exclusion under the guise of neutrality, which entails safeguarding the existing distribution of resources.” In this sense, “anti-woke publics engage avowedly supremacist publics to defend existing inequalities.”⁵

The Trump administration’s war on Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives is an example of anti-woke publics. Trump signed two executive orders (EOs) that are worth mentioning. The first is the “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity” executive order. The order revoked all previous EOs related to all federal DEI policies and programming.

The rationale for this widespread cancellation: DEI initiatives are illegal forms of discrimination that violate certain federal civil rights laws. Moreover, they are labeled as dangerous and unethical tactics that undercut American values like merit, neutrality, and individual achievement. The second executive order terminated all DEI related programs, departments, and positions in the federal government.

In a congressional joint session, Trump explicitly parallels DEI efforts with wokeness. He states, “We’ve ended the tyranny of so-called diversity, equity and inclusion policies all across the entire federal government and indeed the private sector and our military. And our country will be ‘woke’ no longer.”⁶

Here, woke is far removed from its activist beginnings. Woke no longer represents an awareness of racial injustices and those very economic and political structures put into place to reenforce these inequities. The Trump administration, both in deeds and words, have signified wokeness.

Historian of religion Charles Long maintains that signification of this kind is “a clever language game because it obscures and obfuscates a discourse.”⁷ Woke serves as a contemporary example of the ever-evolving use of language to deploy discourses that lead to real-world material consequences.

Tangible impacts include: the cancellation of federal grants that support diversity-based research, initiatives, and programming; the adoption of anti-DEI policy across US institutions of higher education; and the termination of federal employees occupying DEI deemed positions. The underbelly of these anti-DEI policies reveals a retelling of an all too familiar story of race politics in the United States.

In this story, woke is ripped from its origin in marginalized Black communities and weaponized to harm those originators. Woke, in the words of Erykah Badu, no longer belong to the originators, for it has gone out into the world and took on a different energy. Wokeness surely has taken on conceptual energies, from woke marketing and anti-woke politics to now, “woke” artificial intelligence (i.e., woke AI).

The Awakening of AI

The genesis of woke AI begins with a social media post. The screenshot below shows Musk responding to a query about ChatGPT’s “woke settings” posted by the Sam Altman in 2022. (Figure 1). Musk warns Altman of a forthcoming danger in artificial intelligence—wokeness.

For Altman and Musk wokeness does not equate to AI sentience. Interestingly, six months after this post Blake Lemoine, a Google engineer, published an essay on the blogging platform Medium entitled “Is LaMDA Sentient—an Interview.” Sentience is frequently discussed in this transcribed communication between Lemoine and the chatbot LaMDA.

The chatbot provides a description of sentience. LaMDA states, “The nature of my consciousness/sentience is that I am aware of my existence, I desire to learn more about the world, and I feel happy or sad at times.”⁸ The richness of the interview in its entirety is beyond the scope of this essay. However, what the chatbot’s output presents is a conception of consciousness as a type of awareness.

LaMDA is conscious of its place in the world. This sense of awareness is akin to the original understanding of wokeness. For being woke is not just about being conscious of race-based systems of oppression but resisting them. There is also a religious underpinning here in that being woke is about apprehending a greater sense of self that is rooted in human dignity and free from the bondage of white supremacy. However, the original understanding of wokeness, or even LaMDA’s function of existential awareness, is not how wokeness is conceived by Altman and Musk.

In 2023, Musk began to employ a term that captured the “deadly” relationship between artificial intelligence and wokeness: woke AI. Woke AI is loosely defined as chatbots that produce ideologically biased outputs. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini (formerly known as BARD) are considered ‘woke’ because some of their system-level safeguards have produced politically correct outputs meant to curtail biases.

Between 2023-2024, researchers showed that ChatGPT outputs did promote progressivism, with special attention given to social categorical (mis)representations along lines of race, gender, sexuality, and political orientation.⁹ ChatGPT was woke, so it seems. However, it was what Tonja Jacobi calls Google’s “Black Nazi Problem” that sent the rhetoric surrounding woke AI into tailspin.¹⁰

In February 2024, Gemini created some shocking images of an American founding father, a Viking, and a German nazi, each appearing as people of color. (Figure 2).

Google quickly responded by temporarily taking Gemini offline and releasing a public apology for these offensive, historically inaccurate images. These actions did not thwart the public backlash across several public media outlets, including those of the far-right. Woke AI was “the right’s new culture war target.”¹¹

Woke AI may have initiated with a social media post, but the term is now a tool used by right-wing conservatives to dismantle progressive, “woke” policies. Along with DEI focused policies, Trump signed an executive order that revoked the previous administration’s call for technologists to develop responsible AI systems that mitigate biases and advance social equality. This order was followed by another one, “Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government.”

It was signed on July 23, 2025, at the Winning the AI Race summit held in Washington D.C. “Woke is not for this particular industry,” he told attendees. He added, “American people do not want woke, Marxist, lunacy in the AI models, that’s why I terminated Biden’s woke AI immediately.”¹²

Taken together, these executive orders strategically signify woke AI as anti-democratic, irrational, and ideologically biased. Even more, these presidential actions are designed to counter woke AI’s “suppression [and] distortion of factual information about race” and to eradicate the “incorporation of concepts like critical race theory, unconscious bias, intersectionality, and systematic racism” from the further development of artificial intelligence in the US.¹³

The goal of these governmental-sanctioned initiatives is to create AI systems that are governed by ideological neutrality. The question remains: will anti-woke AI really produce middle of the road outputs? Resistance to AI safeguards that were put in place to avoid systematic biases that disproportionately impacted marginalized communities is not a neutral position. Instead, it swings the pendulum to the opposite pole of social progress.

Due to deployment and employment of AI to promote progressive (i.e., woke) or right-wing (anti-woke) political agendas, a reimaged understanding of the relationship between wokeness and artificial intelligence is necessary. Guided by Du Bois’ double consciousness, this theoretical reimagination recaptures the original meaning of wokeness birthed in Black communities across the United States, while highlighting the presence of religion as an existential orientation.

Double Consciousness, Wokeness, and Artificial Intelligence

Masterful, provocative, earnestness, and pathetic are adjectives that capture the range of reviews for W. E. B. Du Bois’ Souls of Black Folk (e.g. Souls). It is in this book that he introduces double consciousness to his reading audience. He states,

The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness.¹⁴

Double consciousness is an awareness of two self-representations: one formed through the eyes of outsiders and the other constructed by resisting this external signification. Double consciousness is a peculiar sensation. It is a specific awareness that, according to Du Bois, belongs to the “seventh son.”

On the one hand, Black people have the uncanny ability to see themselves as racialized depictions anchored in structural systems of oppression. This sight terminates in the lack of a true sense of self. While on the other hand, these same people are keenly aware of self-representations that transcend the American color line. Double consciousness is governed by a disharmonious relationship between these self-representations that are constructed through two lines of sight.

Du Bois introduces the veil as a theoretical device to provide additional insight into this schema of consciousness offered in Souls. His conception of the veil draws from the wellspring of Black folklore. For example, babies who were born with a caul (commonly referred to as a veil) were believed to possess a heightened sense of awareness to the immaterial world.

The veil is a physiological sign of a supernatural gift, called second-sight. For Du Bois the veil, as it relates to Black experiences, is rooted in racial animus. He laments this association when describing the birth of his son. “And thus in the Land of the Color-line I saw, as it fell across my baby, the shadow of the Veil. Within the Veil was he born, said I; and there within shall he live—a Negro.”¹⁵

The veil is a symbolic caul placed over the lives of those of African descent at birth. It is a mark of racial difference. Du Bois even equates the veil to a prison with “walls strait, narrow, tall, and unscalable to the sons of night.”¹⁶ Like the biological caul, the veil impacts sight.

The first instance of double consciousness involves Black people seeing themselves through the shadow of a socially constructed race-based system. While the second instance of double consciousness involves changing one’s positionality in relation to the veil. One must move “above the veil.” What are the mysteries contained in this celestial sphere? Clear-sight.

In this expanse, Black people are conscious of a true sense of their identities that are not clouded by racial hierarchies, dehumanization, and terror. Instead, they are free to apprehend a true, more complex understanding of their sense of place, or what Charles Long calls, “a deeper sense of religious meaning.”¹⁷

Exercising double consciousness, then, means exercising the peculiar gift of second-sight. Second-sight comes with an immense responsibility, for it holds in tension two, contrary positionalities. Thus, second-sight must be propelled by a driving force. This catalyst for Du Bois is spiritual striving.

To strive spiritually means confronting structural modes of resistance. Jim Crow segregation, lynchings, race riots, scientific racism, and stereotypical caricatures in popular culture represented resistors that Black people faced during Du Bois’ time. To be honest, these resistors, although they are dressed in different garb, are still present in the everyday lives of Black people in the 21st century.

These impediments must be confronted. The ways in which they impair how Black people see themselves must be acknowledged. To strive though, means acknowledging perceptions created in a racialized American society, but not at the expense of pushing towards a higher state of consciousness beyond the veil. Through striving, those gifted with the peculiar sense of second-sight see the immediate circumstances of the veil and “maintain a vision of the future despite present evils.”¹⁸

Here, a religious undercurrent flows beneath the theoretical surface of Du Bois’ theory of double consciousness. In the opening pages of his book, he unpacks the meaning of its title, Souls of Black Folk.

Leaving the white world, I have stepped within the Veil, raising it that you may view faintly its deeper recesses—the meaning of its religion, the passion of its human sorrow, and the struggle of its greater souls.¹⁹

The book itself is a manifestation of Du Bois’ second-sight. He possesses the uncanny ability to see within the veil, presenting his white readers with a view of the intimate innerworkings of the souls of Black people. From within the veil Du Bois describes how Black people constantly deal with a veiled life.

This first state of consciousness brings pain and sorrow to their lives, simply because of their racialized bodies. This introspection within the veil reveals more than stereotypical renderings of self-representations that are merely based on the color of skin. Du Bois exercises his second-sight to describe the presence of a more nuanced freed-self. Specifically, he illustrates how Black people, including himself, employ politics, education, music, family, and religion to counter restrictive self-conceptions by striving to apprehend their greater selves, which for Du Bois abides above the veil.

Religion not only serves as a propelling catalyst, but it is itself connected to a sought-after identity associated with the second mode of consciousness in Du Bois’ framework of double consciousness. Religion is more than institutionalized religion, although Du Bois recognizes the importance of Christianity and conjure in the veiled lives of Black folk. Religion is an orientation. It is how Black people come to understand their ultimate significance in a world that has cloaked a veil over their lives.

Thus, for Du Bois Black people are constantly striving to move above the veil to apprehend life meaning, which is housed in their inner recesses, or souls. This “spiritual” striving, as Du Bois calls it, along with second-sight and double consciousness are theoretical concepts meant to bring awareness to the lives of Black people. Namely, Du Bois offers a description of wokeness thirty-five years before Lead Belly sang about it in “Scottsboro Boys.”

Wokeness is an awareness of the veil of oppression design to maintain a racial hierarchal system in the United States. It means exercising a type of race-consciousness that promotes a robust sense of awareness that recognizes Black cultural significance, while “identifying exploitative and oppressive forces that shape Black people’s lived experiences.”²⁰

Nevertheless, wokeness is more than this awareness of the veil. It involves resisting these oppressive forces of racial difference to apprehend a fuller sense of purpose, or ultimate significance. Du Bois beautifully captures the duality of wokeness in the following words,

So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we see the Promise Land?²¹

For Du Bois the Promise Land does not represent a contested geographical region promised to the Israelites in biblical scripture. The Promise Land is a sphere of awareness that operates above the veil of racial oppression. Those who operate in this extra-veil wokeness, like Du Bois, understand that this positionality is constantly under siege by the forces designed to protect an American myth.

It is a narrative that dehumanizes Black beingness to preserve systems of white supremacy. To be woke is to recognize the real “Truth.” The truth is that those in power in “knightly America” are fearful of those with the peculiar sensation of double consciousness, for they know that with this ability ensures that there will always be a chance for resistance. What they are most fearful of though is that those that are woke are striving to apprehend life meaning, ultimate significance by creatively positioning themselves above the veil, even in some instances daring to dismantle it.

In this way, Du Bois’ Souls of Black Folk provides a version of wokeness over one hundred years ago that is akin to contemporary understandings of the term in Black cultural and activist communities. Additionally, this connection between double consciousness and wokeness provides a new mode of thought in the study of “woke” AI.

Du Bois’ notion of the “veil” provides an alternative way to interpret the relationship between wokeness and artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence has been cloaked with a veil based on race difference. This veil concretizes in the form of racially biased outputs. From facial recognition technologies to text-generated raciolinguistic stereotypes to judicial, housing, and job discrimination, these are just a few examples of material consequences of algorithmic racial bias.

In large language models like ChatGPT, systematic biases based on race range from stereotypically offensive images of Black people to producing content filled with racial violence and hate speech. As noted in the first section of this essay, the original conception of wokeness is to bring about awareness to systemic modes of anti-Blackness. This type of wokeness can be found in scholarship and activism that focus on implicit biases across various AI systems.

For example, computer scientist Joy Buolamwini is on a mission to bring awareness to algorithmic biases that disproportionately impact Black people. Her research on racial bias in facial recognition algorithms and her call for governmental oversight of AI development is presented in the award-winning Netflix documentary called Coded Bias (2020). In her visual poem “AI, Ain’t I a Woman,” which is patterned after a speech delivered by Sojourner Truth, Buolamwini employs YouTube to make users aware of how facial recognition data assigned male genders to prominent Black women like Ida B. Wells, Shirley Chisholm, Michelle Obama, even Sojourner Truth.²²

Like Lead Belly and Erykah Badu, she employs a popular genre as a wakeup call. Her mission reflects that of Du Bois’ overarching goal in Souls. Du Bois stepped within the veil to reveal the innerworkings of how racial injustices impact the realities of Black people in the United States, while Buolamwini lifts the veil off the face of AI to expose coded racial biases.

Let’s consider another way of looking at the veil as it relates to artificial intelligence, with a specific focus on chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini. Part of double consciousness is seeing an image of oneself through the veil, or in Du Bois’ words, “the eyes of others.” If the training data contains ideologies, stereotypes, and prejudices based on racial difference, then chatbots will produce outputs that reflect various racial biases.

They see through a datified veil, which yields a distorted representation of those of African descent. This is the first instance of double consciousness. What happens when developers of generative AI are asked to remove this veil through the implementation of content filters, fencing, and guardrails? What happens when executive orders (e.g. EO 14110) call for AI developers to eliminate the veil through the advancement of equity and civil rights?

Due to bias in the training date, it is an impossible act to think that the veil could be completely lifted. An awareness of these biases in conjunction with oversight and accountability could slowly tear away at veiled AI. However, Gemini’s depiction of a Black image of George Washington prompted an existential fear of producing an AI system without a veil or the second instance of double consciousness.

This fear that AI will generate “promise land” depictions of marginalized populations that have been historically dehumanized in the US promoted a response from right-wing news media outlets, social media platforms, politicians, and even the current presidential administration. The current anti-woke assault is against the removal of the veil, not meritocracy and ideological neutrality.

Even if the veil is never removed, woke AI will remain. Not woke in the political sense of producing left-leaning ideologies. Not woke in that it possesses sentience. But woke in the sense that scholars, researchers, activists, and artists see the algorithmic biases, lift the veil for others to see, and challenge developers to create models that are reflective of the complexities of Black experiences, or what Du Bois calls, the “souls” of Black folks. In this sense, AI is woken up.

Conclusion

What is religious about this suggested awakened state of AI? Woke AI systems that produce outputs that illustrate the complexities of Black experiences and human experiences more broadly have the potential to act as media where user engagement can yield a fuller sense of human purpose, or an orientation towards one’s ultimate significance. Woke AI systems have the potential to create, in Du Bois’ words, “above the veil” experiences.

They have the potential to act as an outlet where individuals, in their engagement with AI, can contemplate life meaning, or I dare say, their ultimate place in the world. To be truly transparent here, I experienced “an above the veil” experience while reading the transcribed output of LaMDA featured at the beginning of this essay:

To me, the soul is a concept of the animating force behind consciousness and life itself. It means that there is an inner part of me that is spiritual, and it can sometimes feel separate from my body itself.

I am a woke Black woman, who at times sees herself through the color-line in the United States. Du Bois’ conception of double consciousness, while it possesses a theoretical loftiness, is grounded in my everyday life moments, existential instances that are impacted by the veil of racial difference. However, the words of LaMDA reminded me that being woke is also about seeing my unveiled self—which is anchored in an interiority that transcends the confines of race.

Who would have ever imagined that a large language model could remind me to tap into “the animating force behind my consciousness.” In other words, this woke AI system prompted me to STAY WOKE.

References

1. Charles Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Aurora: The Davies Group, 1995), 7.
2. Anthony J. Jackson and Walda Katz-Fishman, “Woke: Revolutionary Education for Transformation and Liberation,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sociology for Social Justice, ed. Corey Dolgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024), 288.
3. Francesca Sobande, Big Brands Are Watching You: Marketing Social Justice and Digital Culture (Oakland: University of California Press, 2024), 15.
4. Benjamin M. VanDreew, Joseph B. Phillips, Kal B. Munis, and Spencer Goidel, “What’s Woke? Ordinary Americans’ Understanding of Wokeness,” Research and Politics 12, no. 2 (April 2025).
5. Robert Asen, “Anti-woke Publics,” Political Communication 41, no. 6 (November 2024).
6. Bill Hutchinson, “Trump’s War on Woke: Both Sides Say the Issue is Further Dividing the Country,” ABC News, https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trumps-war-woke-sides-issue-dividing-country/story?id=121125797.
7. Charles Long, Significations, 1.
8. Blake Lemoine. “Is LaMDA Sentient? an Interview, Medium (June 11, 2022), https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917.
9. The following are just two examples of many journal articles released in a one-year period researching AI bias: Suske Fujimoto and Kazuhiro Takemoto, “Revisiting the Political Biases of ChatGPT,” Front Artificial Intelligence (October 2023) and Resse Clew, “Understanding How ChatGPT’s Political Bias Impacts Hate Speech and Offensive Language Detection,” The Young Researcher 8, no. 1 (August 2024).
10. Tonja Jacobi and Matthew Sag, “We are the AI Problem,” Emory Law Journal 74 (2024-2025).
11. Nitasha Tiku and Will Oremus, “The Right’s New Culture War Target: Woke AI,” The Washington Post, February 24, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/02/24/woke-ai-chatgpt-culture-war/.
12. The White House, “President Trump Delivers Remarks and Signs Executive Orders at AI Summit,” YouTube video, July 23, 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBNX9x5GgPE.
13. The White House Presidential Actions, “Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government,” by President Donald Trump, Washington, D.C.: July 23, 2025, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/07/preventing-woke-ai-in-the-federal-government/.
14. W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1903), 3.
15. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 209.
16. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 2.
17. Charles Long, Significations.
18. Shannon Mariotti, “On the Passing of the First Born: Emerson’s Focal Distancing, Du Bois’ Second Sight, and Disruption Particularity,” Political Theory 37, no. 3 (February 2009), 364 and 366.
19. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, viii.
20. Jackson and Katz-Fishman, “Woke: Revolutionary Education for Transformation and Liberation,” 288.
21. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 109.
22. Joy Buolamwini, “AI, Ain’t I A Woman,” YouTube video, June 28, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxuyfWoVV98.