It originally meant “awake” in English, kept that meaning in the American black community after it fell out of use among whites (e.g. “I was having trouble staying woke on the drive”), and was repurposed as slang. The slang meaning was “to be aware of prejudice or racism”, with the implication that many blacks were “asleep”, i.e. accepted excuses for racist systems, believed that racism wasn’t a big deal anymore etc.
I’m not sure whether the word was adopted seriously by leftists generally before the right, or immediately became a catch-all label on the right, but either way, it’s become the latter.
Conservatives and some left-critical leftists now use it as a broad term that refers to things like DEI initiatives, anything trans, etc.
The term as it is defined today was invented by a militant black terrorist group called the Nuwabian Nation, a subsect of the Moors (sovereign citizens focused on their African heritage).
The word has been used by black Americans for at least a century as a synonym form"awake", but its definition as a political concept was first used publicly by the founder of the nuwabians, Dwight York.
The word “woke” as a political term predates that group- York started trying to found a group in 1967, and “woke” was first used to warn black men of threats from racially motivated whites in 1931, by a singer named Lead Belly, then even more directly as a political term in 1971 in a play called “Garvey Lives!”
Whether York used it that way or not, it’s clear that he didn’t invent the usage.
I’m pulling most of this info from Wikipedia and Google to save anyone else reading the effort.
Thanks for this, I had no idea it was an acronym. I thought it had to do with the phrase, “wake up sheeple.”
It’s not an acronym.
It originally meant “awake” in English, kept that meaning in the American black community after it fell out of use among whites (e.g. “I was having trouble staying woke on the drive”), and was repurposed as slang. The slang meaning was “to be aware of prejudice or racism”, with the implication that many blacks were “asleep”, i.e. accepted excuses for racist systems, believed that racism wasn’t a big deal anymore etc.
I’m not sure whether the word was adopted seriously by leftists generally before the right, or immediately became a catch-all label on the right, but either way, it’s become the latter.
Conservatives and some left-critical leftists now use it as a broad term that refers to things like DEI initiatives, anything trans, etc.
The term as it is defined today was invented by a militant black terrorist group called the Nuwabian Nation, a subsect of the Moors (sovereign citizens focused on their African heritage).
The word has been used by black Americans for at least a century as a synonym form"awake", but its definition as a political concept was first used publicly by the founder of the nuwabians, Dwight York.
This is not correct.
The word “woke” as a political term predates that group- York started trying to found a group in 1967, and “woke” was first used to warn black men of threats from racially motivated whites in 1931, by a singer named Lead Belly, then even more directly as a political term in 1971 in a play called “Garvey Lives!”
Whether York used it that way or not, it’s clear that he didn’t invent the usage.
I’m pulling most of this info from Wikipedia and Google to save anyone else reading the effort.