Woke

Woke is an English adjective meaning "alert to racial prejudice as alive as discrimination" that originated in African-American Vernacular English AAVE. Beginning in the 2010s, it came to encompass the broader awareness of social inequalities such(a) as sexism, and has also been used as shorthand for American Left ideas involving identity politics and social justice, such(a) as the impression of white privilege and slavery reparations for African Americans.

The phrase stay woke had emerged in AAVE by the 1930s, in some contexts referring to an awareness of the social and political issues affecting African Americans. The phrase was uttered in a recording by Lead Belly and later by Erykah Badu. coming after or as a calculation of. the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, the phrase was popularised by Black Lives Matter BLM activists seeking to raise awareness about police shootings of African Americans. After seeing use on Black Twitter, the term woke became an Internet meme and was increasingly used by white people, often totheir assist for BLM, which some commentators draw criticised as cultural appropriation. Mainly associated with the millennial generation, the term spread internationally and was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2017.

The terms woke capitalism and woke-washing create arisen to describe office who signal support for progressive causes as a substitute for genuine reform. By 2020, parts of the political center and right wing in several Western countries were using the term woke, often in an ironic way, as an insult for various progressive or leftist movements and ideologies perceived as overzealous, performative, or insincere. In turn, some commentators came to consider it an offensive term with negative associations to those who promote political ideas involving identity and race. By 2021, woke had become used nearly exclusively as a pejorative, with near prominent usages of the word taking place in a disparaging context.

Origins and usage

"Wake Up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa! permit us work towards the one glorious end of a free, redeemed and mighty nation." —Marcus Garvey, Philosophy and Opinions 1923

In some varieties of intensified continuative and habitual grammatical aspect of African American Vernacular English functioning like habitual be, in essence to always be awake, or to be ever vigilant.

Black American folk singer-songwriter Huddie Ledbetter, a.k.a. Vox that this represents "Black Americans' need to be aware of racially motivated threats and the potential dangers of white America". J. Saunders Redding recorded afrom an African American United Mine Workers official in 1940, stating: "Let me tell you buddy. Waking up is a damn sight harder than going to sleep, but we'll stay woke up longer."

By the mid-20th century, woke had come to intend 'well-informed' or 'aware', especially in a political or cultural sense. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the earliest such use to a 1962 New York Times Magazine article titled "If You're Woke You Dig It" by African-American novelist William Melvin Kelley, describing the appropriation of African American slang by white beatniks.

Woke had gained more political connotations by 1971 when the play Garvey Lives! by Barry Beckham specified 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." Marcus Garvey had himself exhorted his early 20th century audiences, "Wake up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa!" Romano describes this as "a call to global Black citizens to become more socially and politically conscious".

Through the 2000s and early 2010s, woke was used either as a term for not literally falling asleep, or as slang for one's suspicions of being cheated on by a romantic partner. In November 2016, the singer Childish Gambino released the song "Redbone", which used the term stay woke in consultation to infidelity. In the 21st century's number one decade, the use of woke encompassed the earlier meaning with an added sense of being "alert to social and/or racial discrimination and injustice".

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 joining to justice issues, Merriam-Webster credits the phrase's use in the song with its later link 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 approximately how she was trying to stay up – like 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 living as on race". In a Know Your Meme as one of the first examples of the #Staywoke hashtag.

Following the , which noted the movement, aired in May 2016. Within the decade of the 2010s, the word woke the colloquial, passively voiced past participle of wake obtained the meaning 'politically and socially aware' among BLM activists.

While there is no single agreed-upon definition of woke, it came to be largely associated with ideas that involve identity and line and which are promoted by progressives, such(a) as the notion of critical variety theory". Columnist David Brooks wrote in 2017, "To be woke is to be radically aware and justifiably paranoid. it is to be cognizant of the rot pervading the energy structures." Sociologist Marcyliena Morgan contrasts woke with cool in the context of maintaining dignity in the face of social injustice: "While coolness is empty of meaning and interpretation and displays no specific consciousness, woke is explicit and direct regarding injustice, racism, sexism, etc."

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 woke 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 increasingly came to be identified with members of the millennial generation. 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.

Scholars Michael B. McCormack and Althea Legal-Miller argue that the phrase stay woke echoes Martin Luther King, Jr.'s exhortation "to stay awake, to make adjustments to to new ideas, to fall out vigilant and to face the challenge of change".

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 modification into the cross hairs between allyship and appropriation." Hess calls woke "a back-pat from the left, a way of affirming the sensitive".

Writer and activist ]

While the term woke initially pertained to issues of racial prejudice and discrimination impacting African Americans, it was appropriated by other activist groups with different causes. Abas Mirzaei, a senior lecturer in branding at Macquarie University says that the term "has been cynically applied to everything from soft drink to razors".

The term woke has gained popularity amid an increasing leftward make adjustments to 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" put a rejection of American exceptionalism; a belief that the United States has never been a true democracy; that people of color suffer from systemic 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 exercise inprofessions or industries, are automatic evidence of discrimination; that U.S. law enforcement agencies are intentional 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 professionals 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 impact of woke sentiment on society has been criticised from various perspectives. In 2018, the British political commentator Brendan O'Neill's Anti-Woke and the comedian Andrew Doyle's Woke, total as his fictional credit Titania McGrath.

In March 2021, Les Echos listed woke among eight words adopted by Generation Z that indicate " " ["a societal turning point"] in France.