I don't recall hearing the word "woke" in this context until just a few years ago, and that was in a negative context, somebody using it to deride somebody else's views as being soft-headed whining pinko etc. Two things always come to mind when I think about this stuff. First is that there appears to be an idea floating around that people have a right not to be offended, which is nonsense, the only way never to give offense is to never say anything at all, so that one's not flying. No doubt there are people who'd take silence as offensive too, believing you should say something in support of them. That one's going nowhere too. Second, not all opinions are legitimate. There appear to me to be three kinds of opinion: informed opinion, uninformed opinion, and lunatic opinion. Somehow the idea's got around that they're all equally legitimate and deserve to be taken seriously. That's also obvious nonsense, only the first needs to be taken seriously, the others deserve no attention at all. It's not always easy to spot the uninformed and lunatic opinions, but usually people give themselves away eventually.
Same kind of discussions happen around questions like "How many genders are there?" You can't have a sensible conversation about that until you know what the questioner thinks gender means, and that's such a fluid and variable thing it's often hard to have a conversation even when you *do* know that. It might be a lunatic opinion, for instance. Political correctness is another such idea, a subject rife with uninformed and lunatic opinions about the right not to be offended. Nobody has a right not to be offended.
"Woke is an adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) meaning "alert to racial prejudice and discrimination".[1][2] Beginning in the 2010s, it came to encompass a broader awareness of social inequalities such as sexism. 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 slavery reparations for African Americans.[3][4][5]
The phrase stay woke has been present in AAVE since the 1930s. In some contexts, it referred to an awareness of social and political issues affecting African Americans. The phrase was uttered in recordings from the mid-20th century by Lead Belly and, post-millennium, by Erykah Badu.
The term woke gained further popularity in the 2010s. Over time, it became increasingly connected to matters beyond race such as gender and other marginalized identities. During the 2014 Ferguson protests, the phrase was popularized by Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists seeking to raise awareness about police shootings of African Americans. After the term was used on Black Twitter, woke was increasingly used by white people, who often used it to signal their support for BLM; some commentators criticized this usage as cultural appropriation. The term became popular with millennials and members of Generation Z. As its use spread internationally, woke was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2017.
By 2020, many on the political right and some in the center in several Western countries began sarcastically using the term as a pejorative for various leftist and progressive movements and ideologies they perceived as overzealous, performative, or insincere. In turn, some commentators came to consider woke an offensive term that disparages persons who promote progressive ideas involving identity and race. Since then, derivative terms such as woke-washing and woke capitalism were coined to describe the conduct of persons or entities who signal support for progressive causes rather than working toward genuine change."
Woke - Wikipedia
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