“We aren’t born woke, something wakes us up“—maybe it’s Twitter, says activist

The Texas Tribune kicked off its weekend symposium by interviewing activist DeRay Mckesson. (credit: Texas Tribune)

AUSTIN, Texas—“We aren't born woke, something wakes us up."

By now, everyone's experienced a newsfeed full of #NoDAPL or long Twitter threads explaining some proposed legislation that threatens a certain cause. With years of social media experience behind us, it's easy for this stuff to feel like white noise. But the next time someone shrugs off any of these posts in the name of social justice as useless, tell them DeRay Mckesson begs to differ. All of it has the ability to help others get "woke," to newly realize there's a problem and a need to combat it. So during his keynote Q&A at the Texas Tribune's weekend symposium on race and policy, the Black Lives Matter activist encouraged everyone to fight toward “equity, justice, and fairness” in the way that works best for them... even if starts as small as a tweet.

For Mckesson, in fact, social media initially proved to be the way of getting involved. Back in August 2014 after the tragic police shooting of unarmed, black teenager Michael Brown, he wanted to go to Ferguson, Missouri, and merely participate in the peaceful response for a weekend. He had no grand plans of country-wide organizing at the time; then the protests spanned 300 days: “I drove nine hours for a weekend, but I guess it's been a long weekend,” Mckesson said of his work since.

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