What does woke mean today?
“Woke” as a term has trickled its way down into popular culture over the past few years.
The word, simply means the past tense of “to wake”, i.e. to stop sleeping.
However, chiefly wrought on by imported US slang, it has come to refer to people or organisations: as “having or marked by an active awareness of systemic injustices and prejudices, especially those related to civil and human rights.”
Origins of the term woke
The phrase “stay woke” had emerged in African-American dialects by the 1930s.
In the 1938 protest song “Scottsboro Boys”, the African-American blues musician Huddie Ledbetter, warns black people that they must “best stay woke, keep their eyes open”, when travelling through Alabama.
The ballad tells the tragic real story of nine African American teenagers falsely accused of sexually assaulting two white women on an Alabama train in 1931.
The term is also sometimes traced to the 1962 “If you’re woke you dig it” New York Times essay by novelist William Melvin Kelley.
The term “woke” was also contextualized in Garvey Lives, a 1972 play by Barry Beckham. It included the phrase, “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.”
More recently, the widespread American (and eventually global) popularity of the term “woke” erupted in the wake of the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
The word was subsequently further popularised by the Black Lives Matter movement, particularly after the shooting of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020. The term gained traction in part due to its usage on social media, especially through Twitter activism.
Woke has since come to refer to perceived progressive or left-wing stances beyond police brutality, including feminism, LGBTQ rights, and other issues of racial discrimination, systemic injustice, and cultural equality.
Engulved in the wider debate around cancel culture, identity politics, and the concept of a culture war, woke has though come to mean different things to different people.
Woke as an insult?
In some, often more right-leaning, circles the term has become a pejorative, similar to “political correctness”.
Florida’s Republican-majority state legislature is currently considering a “Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act,” or “Stop W.O.K.E.” act to restrict the use of perceived “woke” teaching and training on racial topics in education and workplaces.
In 2018, British journalist Andrew Sullivan complained that “the “Great Awokening” was one of America’s new religions, describing “woke” as a “cult of social justice on the left, a religion whose followers show the same zeal as any born-again Evangelical,” in New York Magazine.
The term has also been deployed in a more ironic sense. In 2019 comedian Andrew Doyle published Woke, a satirical narrative written from the first-person perspective of Titania McGrath, the character he has used to parody progressive activists via Twitter.
Many progressive commentators have also questioned the term and what it has come to represent.
In 2016, social-justice scholars Tehama Lopez Bunyasi and Candis Watts Smith argued against the perceived “Woker-than-Thou” approach. In ‘Stay Woke: A People’s Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter’, they said, “Striving to be educated around issues of social justice is laudable and moral, but striving to be recognized by others as a woke individual is self-serving and misguided”.
Even the British royal family have become involved in discussions about woke. In July 2022 the historian David Starkey brande Prince William as “William the Woke”. Meanwhile the royal biographer Angela Levin has also claimed that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are trying to run a ‘woke alternate Royal family’.
How many people in the UK are woke?
According to a May 2021 poll by YouGov, most Britons (59 per cent) don’t know what “woke” means, half of whom (30 per cent) have never heard the term being used in the first place.
The same study found that 12 per cent of UK adults consider themselves woke, while 15 per cent think being woke is a bad thing.
A joint King’s College London Policy Institute and Ipsos MORI study, also completed last year, found that of British politicians, the “woke” label is most likely to be applied to Jeremy Corbyn, with 34 per cent of those polled identifying him as such. His successor Sir Keir Starmer meanwhile, was seen as “woke” by just 17 per cent.
Just 2 per cent who said they understand the term’s meaning said that Boris Johnson is woke, but 22 per cent said that while he is not woke he likely holds some “woke” opinions.
The data also found that Labour supporters (36 per cent) are three times as likely as Conservatives (12 per cent) to report they’d think it a compliment if they were described as “woke”. The divide between Remainers (37 per cent) and Leavers (13 per cent) is similar.
Nevertheless, almost a quarter (24 per cent) of Labour supporters and one in five (21 per cent) of Remainers say they consider the term an insult.
Younger people are more likely to view the term as a woke as a compliment, with 52 per cent of 16- to 24-year-olds saying “woke” is a compliment, compared to just 13 per cent of people aged 55 and above.
Notable Quotes
“BREAKING: Oscars ratings crash to an all-time low, down a staggering 58% on last year’s Awards (which was also an all-time low.) As I feared, the woke brigade may have now destroyed the biggest, glitziest event in show business.” – Piers Morgan, British broadcaster
“And so the young adherents of the Great Awokening exhibit the zeal of the Great Awakening […] they punish heresy by banishing sinners from society or coercing them to public demonstrations of shame […] We have the cult of social justice on the left, a religion whose followers show the same zeal as any born-again Evangelical.” – Andrew Sullivan, British journalist
“Criticising ‘woke culture’ has become a way of claiming victim status for yourself rather than acknowledging that more deserving others hold that status. It has gone from a virtue signal to a dog whistle. The language has been successfully co-opted – but as long as the underlying injustices remain, new words will emerge to describe them.” – Steve Rose, British Journalist
