In 2020, woke became a four-letter word almost overnight. It went from being a badge of honour among left-leaning liberals, proud to be aware of racial discrimination and other forms of oppression and injustice, to being a dirty word, a weapon used by the right, even—incredibly—a sign of everything that’s wrong with the National Trust.
Signs of change occurred in October 2019, when Barack Obama of all people used the word to call out young people and cancel culture. “This idea of purity and you’re never compromised, and you’re always politically woke and all that stuff, you should get over that quickly. The world is messy. There are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff, have flaws… I do get a sense sometimes now among certain young people, and this is accelerated by social media, there is this sense sometimes that the way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people and that’s enough… then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself because man, you see how woke I was? I called you out!... You know, that’s not activism. That’s not bringing about change.”
You might think that a clip of Obama calling out wokeness would go viral on right-wing platforms, but it was initially spread by left-wing media. It took the right more than six months to catch up. When they did, the backlash was devastating. Obama’s words had created a monster.
We can pinpoint the moment the meaning of woke changed: July 2020. Phrases such as “stay woke,” “be woke,” “woke people,” “woke culture,” “woke af (as fuck)” (as in “the best thing about having a lesbian grandma is that she is woke af”) were now replaced by the markedly negative “woke agenda,” “woke mob,” “woke ideology,” “woke brigade,” “woke police.” New negative derivatives such as wokeness, wokeism, wokester and wokery began to circulate. As the meaning of woke changed, the word became far more heavily used. From January 2020 to January 2021, it became four times more popular on the internet and in newspapers.
So who exactly took control of woke in July 2020, and how did they turn it into a four-letter word? Digging into big data tells us. If one analyses the billions of words of web-based news produced at the time, the top five news sites responsible for woke as a term of abuse in summer 2020 were (in order): the Daily Mail, USSA News, Breitbart, The Hill and Fox News. Only six months earlier, the word was being used in an overwhelmingly positive sense and the top five sites were (in order): Vox, the Guardian, Metro, the Ghanaian news site Yen.com.gh and vibe.com.
Every week now, there’s a new woke target. Harry and Meghan are too woke for royalists. Feminist fairytales are too woke for the Mail. The National Trust is too woke for Andrew Neil because it is researching its historic ties to slavery. Businesses supporting Pride or Black Lives Matter are warned by their anti-woke customers #gowokegobroke. Even anti-vaxxer, evangelical Christians have created memes of Woke Jesus saying things like “I’m sorry but I only minister to people who have their vaccine passport. Please stand six feet away.”
If we look back over the decades to much earlier meanings of woke, we see how usage can change, sometimes dramatically and rapidly. BLM brought woke to wider attention and use in the mid-2010s, but woke has a much longer history. It first emerged in black American culture in the 1940s and 1950s and it meant “well-informed, up-to-date.” The expression “Man, I’m woke!” appeared in the New York Times in 1962, when the African-American writer William Melvin Kelley included it in a list of words and phrases from Harlem, a black area of New York City. Other words included grays, white people; jive, to exaggerate; and jump salty, to become angry or resentful. Generation Zers (those born since the mid-1990s) have recently embraced the word “salty” as slang.
Civil rights activists, and later Black Lives Matter activists, used woke to refer to someone who is alert to racial and social injustice. The catchphrase “stay woke” appeared in the 1970s, and was later popularised by neo-soul singer Erykah Badu in her song “Master Teacher” (2008). More recently, its meaning was extended to include someone who is alert to racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or other forms of inequality and intolerance.
If language is the key to culture, then shifts in word usage reveal changes in our society. The flip in the meaning of woke signals a conservative backlash in the last 18 months.
But the story of woke also reminds us that language changes over time. The word sad originally meant “satisfied, content” and the word pretty originally meant “sly, cunning.” Those changes took centuries, but now with social media, language change is both fast-tracked and trackable in real time.
We do not know where woke will end up, but if current trends signal anything, the word may be reclaimed. We are already seeing the hashtag #reclaimwoke trending. People who are proud of their social conscience may succeed in redefining the word. It worked for queer, nerd and geek. It may work for woke.
