'Anti-intellectual': CNN’s Bakari Sellers rips Nikki Haley’s 'stumbling' definition of 'woke'

05 June 2023

Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley (R) is being criticized for her long-winded reply to CNN's Jake Tapper's challenge to define the word "woke" at the network's Sunday night town hall in Iowa.

"There's a lot of things. I mean, you wanna start with biological boys playing in girls' sports. That's one thing. The fact that we have gender pronoun classes in the military now. I mean, all of these things that are pushing what a small minority want on the majority of Americans. It's too much. It's too much. I mean, the idea that we have biological boys playing in girls' sports, it is the women's issue of our time. My daughter ran track in high school. I don't even know how I would have that conversation with her. How are we supposed to get our girls used to the fact that biological boys are in their locker rooms? And then we wonder why a third of our teenage girls seriously contemplated suicide last year. We should be growing strong girls, confident girls," Haley said.

"Then you go and you talk about building a strong military. How are you gonna build a morale in a strong military when you're doing gender pronoun classes? Why is it that, why is it that you have, you know, kids undergoing critical race theory where if a little girl's in kindergarten, if she's goes into kindergarten, if she's white, you're telling her she's bad. If she's brown or Black, you're telling her she's never gonna be good enough and she's always gonna be a victim. All of these things have gone to where they are pushing, you know, and transgender, the whole issue of the transgender, it's not that people don't think in America, you should live the way you wanna live. I want everybody to live the way they wanna live, but stop pushing your views on everybody else. That's the problem, is they're starting to push everything on the rest of it," Haley added.

On Monday's edition of CNN This Morning, political analyst Bakari Sellers blasted Haley’s boilerplate right-wing response.

"No, I, I, first of all, that's not the definition of woke. Woke has been co-opted by a lot of white folk, a lot of conservatives, debased, and then used to mean you talk about that on Friday show. It's used to mean anything that's, that's not white, that's not straight. And so, oh, so that's just not what it is. And you hear people talk about things like cultural Marxism, that's not the root of the word. In fact, the word started in 1920 for most of America, so that they understand it was about Black folk talking to other Black folks saying, 'stay woke when you're in Mississippi or Alabama. Stay woke politically.' Stay woke philosophically. That is what the word means," Sellers explained.

"Now, to take it and make it mean something and debase it that it does not. And you saw her last night. She was stumbling across the definition," Sellers continued. "It means it means, uh, transgender, uh, girls in a girl's bathroom. Is that what woke means? I mean, what does it mean to you, Nikki Haley? She can't define it. Neither can Ron DeSantis. Most Republicans can't. I really hate the debate cuz it's anti-intellectual, but it's a part of their cultural war that they're trying to wage against."

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