Woke is an adjective derived from African-American English used since the 1930s or earlier to refer to awareness of racial prejudice and discrimination, often in the construction stay woke. The term acquired political connotations by the 1970s and gained further popularity in the 2010s with the hashtag #staywoke. Over time, woke came to be used to refer to a broader awareness of social inequalities such as sexism and denial of LGBTQ rights. Woke has also been used as shorthand for some ideas of the American Left involving identity politics and social justice, such as white privilege and reparations for slavery in the United States.
During the 2014 Ferguson protests, the phrase stay woke was popularized by Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists seeking to raise awareness about police shootings of African Americans. After being used on Black Twitter, the term woke was increasingly adopted by white people to signal their support for Progressivism causes. The term became popular with millennials and members of Generation Z. As its use spread beyond the United States, woke was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2017.
By 2019, the term was widely being used sarcastically as a pejorative among many on the political right and some centrism to disparage leftist and progressive movements as superficial and insincere performative activism. Some leftists criticize wokeness as interfering with working class solidarity. The terms woke-washing and woke capitalism later emerged to criticize businesses and brands who use politically progressive messaging for financial gain.
While it is not known when being awake was first used as a metaphor for political engagement and activism, one early example in the United States was the paramilitary youth organization the Wide Awakes, which formed in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1860 to support the Republican candidate in the 1860 presidential election, Abraham Lincoln. Local chapters of the group spread rapidly across northern cities in the ensuing months and "triggered massive popular enthusiasm" around the election. The political militancy of the group also alarmed many southerners, who saw in the Wide Awakes confirmation of their fears of northern, Republican political aggression. The support among the Wide Awakes for abolition, as well as the participation of a number of black men in a Wide Awakes parade in Massachusetts, likely contributed to such anxiety.
A 1923 collection of aphorisms, ideas, and other writing by Garvey also adopts this metaphor in the following epigram: "Wake up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa! Let us work towards the one glorious end of a free, redeemed and mighty nation. Let Africa be a bright star among the constellation of nations."
Black American folk singer-songwriter Huddie Ledbetter, Lead Belly, used the phrase "stay woke" as part of a spoken afterword to a 1938 recording of his song "Scottsboro Boys", which tells the story of Scottsboro Boys in Alabama in 1931. In the recording, Lead Belly says he met with the defendant's lawyer and the young men themselves, and "I advise everybody, be a little careful when they go along through there (Scottsboro)best stay woke, keep their eyes open." Aja Romano writes at Vox that this usage reflects "black Americans' need to be aware of racially motivated threats and the potential dangers of white America."
By the mid-20th century, woke had come to mean 'well-informed' or 'aware',
Woke had gained more political connotations by 1971 when the play Garvey Lives! by Barry Beckham included the line: "I been sleeping all my life. And now that Mr. Garvey done woke me up, I'm gon' stay woke. And I'm gon help him wake up other black folk."
This usage was popularized by soul singer Erykah Badu's 2008 song "Master Teacher", via the song's refrain, "I stay woke". Merriam-Webster defines the expression stay woke in Badu's song as meaning, "self-aware, questioning the dominant paradigm and striving for something better"; and, although within the context of the song, it did not yet have a specific connection to justice issues, Merriam-Webster credits the phrase's use in the song with its later connection to these issues.
Songwriter Georgia Anne Muldrow, who composed "Master Teacher" in 2005, told Okayplayer news and culture editor Elijah Watson that while she was studying jazz at New York University, she learned the invocation Stay woke from Harlem alto saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin, who used the expression in the meaning of trying to "stay woke" because of tiredness or boredom, "talking about how she was trying to stay uplike literally not pass out". In homage, Muldrow wrote stay woke in marker on a T-shirt, which over time became suggestive of engaging in the process of the search for herself (as distinct from, for example, merely personal productivity).
According to The Economist, as the term woke and the #Staywoke hashtag began to spread online, the term "began to signify a progressive outlook on a host of issues as well as on race". In a tweet mentioning the Russian feminist rock group Pussy Riot, whose members had been imprisoned in 2012, Badu wrote: "Truth requires no belief. Stay woke. Watch closely. #FreePussyRiot". This has been cited by Know Your Meme as one of the first examples of the #Staywoke hashtag.
The term woke became increasingly common on Black Twitter, the community of African American users of the social media platform Twitter. André Brock, a professor of black digital studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology, suggested that the term proved popular on Twitter because its brevity suited the platform's 140-character limit. According to Charles Pulliam-Moore, the term began crossing over into general internet usage as early as 2015. The phrase stay woke became an Internet meme, with searches for woke on Google surging in 2015.
The term has gained popularity amid an increasing leftward turn on various issues among the American Left; this has partly been a reaction to the right-wing politics of U.S. President Donald Trump, who was elected in 2016, but also to a growing awareness regarding the extent of historical discrimination faced by African Americans. According to Perry Bacon Jr., ideas that have come to be associated with "wokeness" include a rejection of American exceptionalism; a belief that the United States has never been a true democracy; that people of color suffer from Systemic racism and institutional racism; that white Americans experience white privilege; that African Americans deserve reparations for slavery and post-enslavement discrimination; that disparities among racial groups, for instance in certain professions or industries, are automatic evidence of discrimination; that U.S. law enforcement agencies are designed to discriminate against people of color and so should be defunded, disbanded, or heavily reformed; that women suffer from systemic sexism; that individuals should be able to identify with any gender or none; that U.S. capitalism is deeply flawed; and that Trump's election to the presidency was not an aberration but a reflection of the prejudices about people of color held by large parts of the U.S. population. Although increasingly accepted across much of the American Left, many of these ideas were nevertheless unpopular among the U.S. population as a whole and among other, especially more centrist, parts of the Democratic Party.
The term increasingly came to be identified with millennials and members of Generation Z. Generation Z: The Woke Generation , The Chronicle of Higher Education. Les Echos lists woke among several terms adopted by Generation Z that indicate "a societal turning point" in France. In May 2016, MTV News identified woke as being among ten words teenagers "should know in 2016". The American Dialect Society voted woke the slang word of the year in 2017. In the same year, the term was included as an entry in Oxford English Dictionary. By 2019, the term woke was increasingly being used in an ironic sense, as reflected in the books Woke by comedian Andrew Doyle (using the pen name Titania McGrath) and Anti-Woke by columnist Brendan O'Neill. By 2022, usage of the term had spread beyond the United States, attracting criticism by right-wing political figures in Europe.
Among the uses by Republicans is the Stop WOKE Act, a law that limits discussion of racism in Florida schools. A program of eliminating books by LGBT and black authors from schools was conducted by the Florida government and by Vigilantism calling themselves "woke busters". Florida governor and former presidential candidate Ron DeSantis has frequently used the term, referring to his state as a place "where woke goes to die."
Former U.S. President Barack Obama has criticized aspects of woke culture, warning against public shaming and ideological rigidity. At the Obama Foundation Summit in October 2019, he argued that activism should go beyond calling people out on social media, emphasizing that meaningful change requires engagement and recognizing human flaws.
Linguist and social critic John McWhorter argues that the history of woke is similar to that of politically correct, another term once used self-descriptively by the left which was appropriated by the right as an insult, in a process similar to the euphemism treadmill. Romano compares woke to canceled as a term for political correctness' gone awry" among the American right wing. Attacking the idea of wokeness, along with other ideas such as cancel culture and critical race theory, became a large part of Republican Party electoral strategy. Beginning in the first presidency of Donald Trump, commentators from the alt-right, religious right, moderate liberals, and libertarians have attacked "woke" ideas and the " ", a phrase popularized by Elon Musk, as existential threats to American society. Trump stated in 2021 that the Biden administration was "destroying" the country "with woke", and Republican Missouri senator Josh Hawley used the term to promote his upcoming book by saying the "woke mob" was trying to suppress it. According to USA Today, the term woke has been "co-opted by GOP activists".
In Switzerland, politicians from and supporters of the right-wing Swiss People's Party criticized Swiss bank UBS for woke culture.
According to French sociologist and political scientist , woke originated from African American communities to describe awareness of Discrimination and has been used pejoratively by French politicians from the former republican left, the right and the far right to label individuals engaged in anti-racist, feminist, LGBTQ movements, and environmental movements. This derogatory usage gave rise to the noun wokisme, suggesting a homogeneous political movement propagating an alleged woke ideology.
French philosopher Pierre-Henri Tavoillot characterizes wokeism as a corpus of theories revolving around "identity, gender and race", with the core principle of "revealing and condemning concealed forms of domination", positing that all aspects of society can be reduced to a "dynamic of oppressor and oppressed", with those oblivious to this notion deemed "Complicity", while the "awakened ( woke)" advocate for the "abolition (cancel) of anything perceived to sustain such oppression", resulting in practical implementations such as adopting inclusive language, Education reform or deconstructing .
The term woke is often used as a pejorative by conservative figures. During the run-up to the 2024 general election, the governing Conservative Party attracted criticism for attempting to create a culture war based on the woke concept. While promoting her book The Abuse of Power in 2023, former Conservative prime minister Theresa May declared herself to be woke, in the sense of "somebody who recognizes that discrimination takes place".
In a survey by YouGov, 73% of Britons who used the term said they did so in a disapproving way, 11% in an approving way and 14% neither used it in an approving or disapproving way. Columnist Zoe Williams writes in The Guardian that public discourse around cycling has become "the perfect microcosm of the wokeness split in all its forms", with anti-cycling voices portraying cyclists as a "lunatic fringe".
Peter Dutton, former Opposition Leader and leader of the Coalition, has also used the term several times before.
Members of minor right-wing parties, especially Pauline Hanson's One Nation and the United Australia Party, also frequently use the term.
In the 2025 Australian federal election campaign opposition leader Dutton stated that he wanted to rid the schooling and university system of "woke" policies.
In New Zealand, former deputy prime minister and leader of the New Zealand First Party, Winston Peters, referred to the government led by Jacinda Ardern and the New Zealand Labour Party as a "woke guilt industry". Thenopposition leader Judith Collins also referred to Ardern as "woke".
Writer and activist Chloé Valdary has stated that the concept of being woke is a "double-edged sword" that can "alert people to systemic injustice" while also being "an aggressive, performative take on progressive politics that only makes things worse". Social-justice scholars Tehama Lopez Bunyasi and Candis Watts Smith, in their 2019 book Stay Woke: A People's Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter, argue against what they term as "Woker-than-Thou-itis: Striving to be educated around issues of social justice is laudable and moral, but striving to be recognized by others as a woke individual is self-serving and misguided."
Linguist Ben Zimmer writes that, with mainstream currency, the term's "original grounding in African-American political consciousness has been obscured". The Economist states that as the term came to be used more to describe white people active on social media, black activists "criticised the performatively woke for being more concerned with internet point-scoring than systemic change". Journalist Amanda Hess says social media accelerated the word's cultural appropriation, writing, "The conundrum is built in. When white people aspire to get points for consciousness, they walk right into the cross hairs between allyship and appropriation." Hess describes woke as "the inverse of 'politically correct' ... It means wanting to be considered correct, and wanting everyone to know just how correct you are".
The impact of woke sentiment on society has been criticised from various perspectives. In 2018, the British political commentator Andrew Sullivan described the "Great Awokening", describing it as a "cult of social justice on the left, a religion whose followers show the same zeal as any born-again Evangelical Christian" and who "punish heresy by banishing sinners from society or coercing them to public demonstrations of shame". In 2021, the British filmmaker and DJ Don Letts suggested that "in a world so woke you can't make a joke", it was difficult for young artists to make protest music without being accused of cultural appropriation.
The term woke capitalism was coined by writer Ross Douthat for brands that used politically progressive messaging as a substitute for genuine reform. According to The Economist, examples of "woke capitalism" include advertising campaigns designed to appeal to millennials, who often hold more socially liberal views than earlier generations. These campaigns were often perceived by customers as insincere and inauthentic and provoked a backlash summarized by the phrase "get woke, go broke".
Cultural scientists Akane Kanai and Rosalind Gill describe "woke capitalism" as the "dramatically intensifying" trend to include historically marginalized groups (currently primarily in terms of race, gender, and religion) as in advertisement with a message of empowerment to signal progressive values. On the one hand, Kanai and Gill argue that this creates an individualized and depoliticized idea of social justice, reducing it to an increase in self-confidence; on the other hand, the omnipresent visibility in advertising can also amplify a backlash against the equality of precisely these minorities. These would become mascots not only of the companies using them, but of the unchallenged Neoliberalism economic system with its socially unjust order itself. For the economically weak, the equality of these minorities would thus become indispensable to the maintenance of this economic system; the minorities would be seen responsible for the losses of this system.
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