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.
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.