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Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham called for new gun control laws and greater accountability for firearm manufacturers while denouncing recent drive-by shootings of the homes of Democratic lawmakers in Albuquerque in her State of the State address Tuesday at the start of the annual legislative session.

New Mexico's Democratic-led Legislature is preparing to tap a multibillion-dollar budget surplus as it takes on daunting challenges of crime, lagging student achievement in schools and below-average workforce participation during its 60-day legislative session.

The governor and leading Democratic legislators want to expand preschool access, lengthen annual instructional time at public schools, increase public salaries and provide at least $1 billion in tax relief and rebates.

NEW MEXICO POLICE ARREST FAILED GOP HOUSE CANDIDATE IN SHOOTINGS TARGETING DEMOCRATIC POLITICIANS HOMES

But concerns about politically motivated violence loomed over the proceedings after police on Monday arrested a failed Republican candidate in connection with a series of shootings targeting the homes of Democratic lawmakers in Albuquerque.

Addressing a joint session of the state House and Senate, Lujan Grisham condemned what she called "despicable acts of political violence" and a "sickening scourge of gun violence that has infected our nation." She announced proposals to ban assault-style weapons, allow victims of gun violence to bring civil lawsuits against gun manufacturers, and crack down on black-market sales that funnel guns to ineligible buyers.

New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham delivers an address on the opening day of the annual legislative session in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on Jan. 17, 2023. (AP Photo/Andres Leighton)

"We all know that we cannot keep our people safe, we cannot keep our police officers and their families safe, if weapons of war continue to flood our neighborhoods," Lujan Grisham said.

"If we are bold and clear in our knowledge that now is the time to do the right thing, we can save lives and protect futures," Lujan Grisham said. "I'm not going to let up and I know that there will be other ideas and other strategies, and I know that we're going to work together."

Republicans in the legislative minority also condemned the attack on politicians in Albuquerque and said that gun control measures won't make people safer.

"I got concerned, I made sure that my own firearms were really close at hand," said state Sen. Craig Brandt of Rio Rancho. "Putting in more gun-control laws doesn't allow us to protect ourselves."

Republican state legislators hope to reinstate immunity from prosecution for policing agencies and tighten requirements for pretrial release of people charged of crimes.

SEMIAUTOMATIC WEAPONS BAN BECOMES ILLINOIS LAW

Democratic Senate Majority Leader Peter Wirth of Santa Fe says he'll sponsor a bill that bans firearms at all polling locations in response to the fears and frustrations of election workers.

Lujan Grisham staked her reelection heavily on her support for preserving widespread access to abortion as a foundation of womens rights and democracy following the U.S. Supreme Courts decision last year that overturned Roe v. Wade and left legalization up to the states.

Leading Democratic legislators hope to send her a bill that would prohibit restrictions on abortion by local governments and shield patients and abortion doctors from harassment by out-of-state interests.

New Mexico also is grappling with the aftermath of catastrophic 2022 wildfires linked to climate change and drought.

State legislators want to make the state more resilient to climate-related disasters by speeding up the delivery of federal disaster aid and allowing small water districts to band together as they rebuild from wildfires.

Lujan Grisham hopes to fund the first New Mexico-based corps of elite smokejumper firefighters to ensure a rapid response to future fires. On Tuesday, she proposed the creation of a $75 million trust fund to address root causes of water scarcity and climate change.

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State government income is forecast to reach new heights $12 billion in revenue during the fiscal year that runs from July 2023 though June 2024. Thats about $3.6 billion in excess of current annual spending commitments.

Lujan Grisham urged legislators to tap that windfall to back her "cradle-to-career" strategy of expanding free public education, with new investments this year in daycare, preschool and tuition-free college as enrollments swell at public universities.

"Our commitment to making education accessible and affordable is lifting families out of poverty," Lujan Grisham said.

Legislators in the Republican minority say more public spending hasn't translated into greater student achievement on Lujan Grisham's watch. They want greater competition among K-12 schools, wider options for students with public funding of private and parochial schools.

"I think more choice for families ... to have that power back in the hands of parents, to chose where their children will get the best quality education, is where we have to go," Brandt said.

The governor and leading legislators are proposing a pay raise for state workers and public school educators of at least 4%. Taxpayers would pay for educators' individual health care premiums under a proposal from the governor.

Lawmakers also hope to sock away billions of dollars into specialized trust funds, and use future investment earnings to underwrite programs ranging from smoking cessation to highway construction.

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NM Gov. Grisham calls for new gun control laws, citing recent ...

Provided by The Mary Sue WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND - JUNE 14: Protestors march down Willis Street during a protest in support of the Black Lives Matter movement on June 14, 2020 in Wellington, New Zealand. The event in Wellington was organised in solidarity with protests in the United States following the killing of an unarmed black man George Floyd at the hands of a police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Photo by Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)

Every quarter, researchers at the Oxford English Dictionary survey the landscape and add new words to what is considered the standard dictionary by which we should abide. One of the words added in recent years is woke, which youre no doubt familiar with, but lets talk about what it really means and where it came from.

The latest OED update occurred in September of 2022, when terms like side hustlen.U.S.colloquial(originally in African-American usage) a part-time job or occupation undertaken in addition to ones main job in order to earn extra income)were added, and updates to words like influencern. A well-known or prominent person who uses the internet or social media to promote or generate interest in products, often for paymentwere implemented.

While there are many conflicting ideas as to whether or not slang belongs in the official dictionary, there is a clear process for how these words are added. The vigorous vetting process can see hundreds to thousands of words considered every quarter, and the underlying criteria are usage and consensusbut we have to remain cognizant of usage by whom.

Side hustle, for example, is a term thats been used in the Black community for decades, but was only added to the dictionary this year. Is that an inherent problem on its own? No, but it must be noted that when other communities besides Black people started using the term, only then was it deemed valid enough. This comes on the heels of people misappropriating African American Vernacular English (AAVE), as internet slang on TikTok to the point where Henry Louis Gates Jr. will be tackling an Official AAVE Dictionary With Oxford Dictionary.

Interesting, but were here to talk about woke.

woke, adjective: Originally: well-informed, up-to-date. Now chiefly: alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice; frequently instay woke.

Though created nearly 100 hundred years ago by Black Americans to warn each other about racist violence, the word is now mainly used derisively by conservative voices who oppose the emancipation of marginalized groups.

Woke was one of the words added to the OED in 2017, and you would think that being alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice would be a good thing, but conservatives and Republicans have not had a good nights rest since. I would, in turn, make the argument that the word itself has undergone such an intense shift since 2017 that its due to for an update.

Prior to 2014, if you asked a person outside of the Black community what that word meant, theyd have no clue. Woke, as a political concept, came into mainstream consciousness in 2014, largely connected to Ferguson and the killing of Mike Brown. In that instance, stay woke become linked to the Black Lives Matter Movement and police brutality, but in actuality, the word has been used to refer to some level of Black consciousness since the 20th century.

The earliest documented contemporary reference comes from Jamaican political activist and philosopher Marcus Garvey, in 1923, through a collection of ideas in which he urged the black diaspora to Wake Up! and have a degree of social and political awareness Garvey. The word then popped back up in a 1938 song called Scottsboro Boys by Blues musician Lead Belly. It described how a group of nine Black teenagers where accused of raping two white women in 1931. In the song, Belly directly uses stay woke as an call for Black Americans to be aware of white supremacists amongst them.

The term emerged once again in a 1962 piece published by The New York Times, written by William Melvin Kelly, entitled If Youre Woke You Dig It; No mickey mouse can be expected to follow todays Negro idiom without a hip assist. If Youre Woke You Dig It. The piece does not not give a definition of woke but rather examines the role language plays in the discourse.

The piece speaks to the ever shifting nature of Black vernacular, and being woke must include gatekeeping Black English from white audiences that would choose to exploit itand so said so done. An AAVE dictionary might sound like a good idea in theory, but with the amount of people that often misuse and appropriate it on social media, they might have to put a bit more thought into that one, because not everything should be accessible to the masses.

In one of his seminars, Kelly said, I would say there were two languages that were created by African Americans. One that is being created so that African people could communicate with European people and another language for African people to communicate with other African people. I imagine that at that point, English was the common language that we were using. So, OK, we would use English words, but we use them in an African way. That process takes a long time Its a question that African Americans will have to answer. Do we let it die out and learn standard English, or do we keep them both and develop a language and literature in both?

Though the loose idea can be traced back to Garvey, its contemporary usage stems from Kelly, which is why in 2014 the OED credited him with the coining of the term as its used today. According to Kelly, Black Americans have always had to engage with coded language since slavery to protect themselves and to communicate with one another. If your master did not know what you were talking about, he could not punish you, and you could maintain your ignorance and innocence.

With the advent of social media and speed at which information travels, it seems like this mindset is on its way to being obsolete.

The the most literal form of the wordslang for trying not to sleepspread through Black jazz music in the 60s, but its political meaning was once again brought to the forefront by Erykha Badus rendition of Master Teacher, originally sung by Georgia Anne Muldrow.

Even if yo baby aint got no money

To support ya baby, you

(I stay woke)

Even when the preacher tell you some lies

And cheatin on ya mama, you stay woke

(I stay woke)

Even though you go through struggle and strife

To keep a healthy life, I stay woke

(I stay woke)

Everybody knows a black or white, theres

Creatures in every shape and size

(I stay woke)

Thus began its use on social media, as #staywoke in conjunction with #blacklivesmatter.

The term blew into the mainstream mainstream with Jordan Peeles Get Out, the opening of which features the hit Redbone by Childish Gambino. On the surface, the song references a cheating partner, but when played in the context of a film like Get Out, where the main character has to literally stay awake in order to mitigate white violence, the track harkens back to the political side of the coin.

As with many things, when something starts to gain popularity, its detractors will be waiting in the wings. Once presented to a white audience, it wasnt long before critics began to take shots at woke culture and misrepresenting a term that originated from the protection of Black people into cancel culture. Some people viewed the term as performative, nothing but a Twitter hashtag that had no real bearing on the outsidean uninformed opinion, but one that spread like wildfire, as they often do.

Before long, cries about the woke mob (a leftist entity designed to tear down the lives of conservativessarcasm, if you didnt catch it) began to overshadow the original meaning. Suddenly, people everywhere were petrified of being canceled by said mob, which leads me to a tangent.

Cancel, another Black term that was co-opted, bastardized, and turned into a culture, is wokes fraternal twin. Cancel Culture generally refers to the ending of ones career through people getting angry on Twitter. (Theres that sarcasm again.) This usually happens when some aspect of said persons personality is brought to light, e.g. racism, homophobia, or transphobia. Im pretty sure youve already heard it, but if not, heres for the people in the back: Cancel Culture doesnt exist.

Someone getting rightfully called out for bigoted comments isnt canceling them; its holding them accountable and, in most cases, it doesnt mean anything. J.K. Rowling comes out every two business days to remind us of how transphobic she is, and shes still a billionaire and able to publish books just fine, and Netflix told us how they feel about Dave Chapelles transphobia, as well. If anything, its the marginalized communities that speak up who end up loosing things.

And when it comes to powerful people that have been actually canceled with the help of social media, its only some sexual predators, i.e. Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby. Why would you want either of those people back?

The battle over the word woke is about more than language or a simple misunderstanding. Its a right-wing dog whistle to stifle discussion about institutional injustice. At the end of the day, all of this leads back to racism and anti-blackness. It was once called PC Culture, but in the contemporary discourse, wokeness has become inextricable from blackness. Therefore, when conservative pundits are fear-mongering over cancel culture and the woke mob, the dog whistles can be heard from a mile away. Today, woke is already seen as cringe by non-Black progressives, while its still being used in some Black communities in the hopes of restoring its original meaningwhile, as Kelly said, theres already something new to replace it.

(featured image via CNN)

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What Does Woke Mean in Politics?

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