Letter to the Editor Jan. 2, 2026

Katonah writer says ‘woke” is ‘a badge of extreme honor’

To the Editor:

The two groups, each standing in weekly public resistance to the Trump-MAGA regime, at Katonah Presbyterian Church and at the public buildings in Mount Kisco, have been making joyous and confident public witness for seven months.  

The people involved hold no significant public office or position of broad-based public influence. But they are out there every week. Though better aware than most of what is being wielded against them, they are in weekly, often daily communication regarding two other irrefutable realities.

One is historical: people’s justice-movements, inspired by the Declaration of Independence, bullied and beaten by world-class powers before which their simple presence offered no physical resistance at all,  have become the distinctive characteristic of American history. Toward  these recurring resisters’ America the world’s tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free have flocked. It is this very American distinctive which Trump and his MAGAs are bent on destroying.

The other reality is astonishingly very present: These two tiny local resistance groups are among tens of thousands more or less like them, gathering regularly in similarly seeming futile resistance in every corner of America, rising up together — 80 million at their last national rally — to bring down this travesty soiling our priceless American story.

“Woke!” What resisters are accused of being — and aspire to be. “Woke” is a street-Black word — contraction for “awoke” or “woke-up,” applied to the awareness most Black people have inherited from African languages, the Middle Passage, generations of enslavement, and a century of Jim Crow. Their awareness is of the artificial construct of cruelty imposed on them. “Woke” is also occasionally applied by African Americans to a few of their supporters who came, by some different heritage or other, to a similar awareness. It’s a badge of extreme honor.

George Williamson Katonah