Woke

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, recorded since at least 1924. 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, Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists seeking to raise awareness about police shootings of African Americans popularized the phrase stay woke. After being used on Black Twitter, the term woke was increasingly adopted by white people to signal their support for progressive causes. The term became popular with millennials and members of Generation Z. As its use spread beyond the United States, the Oxford English Dictionary recorded the use of "wokery" as a disparaging characterization of "[p]rogressive or left-wing attitudes or practices" from 2016 and added the word woke in this sense in 2017. By 2019, the term was widely being used sarcastically as a pejorative by conservatives, as a way to disparage socially liberal movements as superficial and insincere performative activism. In the mid-2020s, a number of political commentators also announced the appearance of a "woke right", meaning supporters of right-wing views using cancel culture and similar tactics used by left-wing activists to enforce conservative beliefs. The terms woke-washing and woke capitalism later emerged to criticize businesses and brands who use politically progressive messaging for financial gain.