Being “Woke”: From protest to pejorative | In Focus
Published 11:00 am Wednesday, September 17, 2025
Do you know the history of the term “Woke”?
The twists and turns of our current time reflect changing attitudes toward race and its use as a political wedge issue.
The term Woke arose from Black culture in the early 1920s and into the 1930s. It referred to racial prejudice and discrimination of that era. Blacks used it as an admonition to “stay woke”—stay aware to racial discrimination. The term grew in popularity in the 1970s after the Civil Rights era. By the 2010s, it was given the hashtag #staywoke. Later, the term grew to “refer to a broader awareness of social inequalities such as sexism and denial of LGBTQ rights” (wikipedia.org).
In 2014, after the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, Black Lives Matter used it as a way to raise awareness of police prejudice toward Blacks. White progressives used it to show their support for progressive causes, not just race, especially among millennials and Gen. Z. The word “woke” first appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary in 2017. (wikipedia.org)
Beginning in 2019, conservatives started using it as a sarcastic pejorative toward all things progressive, especially diversity, equity, and inclusion. Conservatives portrayed the term as “performative activism”, meaning Blacks playing the victim card to create sympathy and produce guilt in white conservatives. Businesses that used D.E.I. were accused of using woke terminology to increase their profits.
According to a January 31, 2025 article by Myron Thompson in the Knoxville News Sentinel entitled, “What Does ‘Woke’ Mean in Politics? How the Term Is Used in the New Trump Era”: President Trump, beginning in 2021, claimed that the Biden administration “was destroying the country ‘with woke’”. In Trump’s second term he issued an executive order entitled: “Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government”. His goal was to forbid the government from using AI to favor diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).
By adding LGBTQ issues, gender-affirming care, DEI, and Critical Race Theory to Wokeism, progressives erred in allowing attention to be diverted from race, poverty, and income inequality. Conservatives have taken advantage of this lumping of Woke to a more amorphous labeling that combines many elements not originally intended in its early definition. This strategy has created a clear agenda that serves the privileges and prerogatives of super wealthy whites at the expense of the middle and lower classes.
The passage of the Big Beautiful Bill shows how effective lumping all these issues together has been in redistribution of national wealth and the oppression of minorities and the poor.
Instead of Wokeism destroying the country as Trump claims, it now seems the country’s democracy is being destroyed to bolster white wealthy male dominance as their population dominance decreases. It will decrease from the majority to a large plurality over the next decade. That seems to be the object of Trump’s policies.
Unconstitutional mid-decade gerrymandering in Texas, Missouri, Florida, and Indiana is an attempt to keep white Republicans in office and to put minorities “in their place” after the 2026 midterm elections, in spite of conservative members of Congress unpopularity among the majority of voters.
Conservatives have begun using anti-woke tactics in other nations: anti-Wokeism has spread to India where Hindu nationalists and activists use it to label anti-Hindu nationalistic ideology and secularity. President Orban uses it in Hungary to label his opponents. Wokeism has suffered the same fate in France as a way of attacking anti-racist and leftist scholarship. It has been equated with being incompatible with French values. The then education minister likened it to “plots against the greatness of a white European civilization” and “political…religion” (Wikipedia).
Conservatives criticize Wokeism in order to oppress others by primarily using race as a method to gain and maintain power in many countries. Our president has shown the right wing how to grab more power using race as leverage.
As my mother used to say to us children, “The pot is calling the kettle black.” Attacking Wokeness has been the diversionary tactic to regain power lost to Blacks and other minorities over the past 100 years.
A skunk by any other name is still a skunk.
