**This video is brought to you by Masterworks. A word that has completely taken over the discourse is woke, which was formerly exclusive to Black communities. Since around 2016, the use of woke has been on the rise, and it’s now impossible to watch the news, listen to politicians, or chat with an uncle without hearing it lobbed as an insult. Why is woke such a political lightning rod? What does it actually mean and how did it become a catch-all term for a certain brand of liberal smugness?
The term woke originated from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), meaning being awake or alert to oppression against black folks. In 1962, writer William Melvin Kelly wrote an article in The New York Times about the term, noting that Black slang is often fluid and some terms like Jive had evolved over time to mean their exact opposite. The most recent era of woke began with Erica Badu’s song Master Teacher in 2008, and stay woke became an increasingly common refrain on Black Twitter. With the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013, woke bubbled to the forefront of the lexicon.** According to scholar Carl Rhodes, woken was initially described as a politically switched on, community-led, and solidarity-based political practice defined by having awareness about and taking action against the oppression of black people, especially by the police. However, like any buzzword that gains popularity online, its meaning quickly collapsed by 2015. BuzzFeed published an article about Orange is the New Black actor Matt McGorry calling him “so bae and so woke”, which made people feel bad. By 2016, linguist Tony Thorne noted that “woke” had developed an ironic meaning to make fun of “latte slurping Prius progressives” who wielded their wokeness to scold and judge others. Right-wing politicians and pundits seized on the term as a way to belittle their opponents. Writer Elijah Wilson summed it up saying, “like anything created by black people, the phrase was appropriated by the masses, transformed into a trend term, before ultimately mutating into a meme and becoming a form of irony”. Even Baidu recently said that the word doesn’t belong to them anymore.
What regained prominence in Baidu’s song and again in 2016 via Childish Gambino has become the go-to response on the right whenever they’re asked to pinpoint the root of all of society’s problems. They are against the “woke” and “wokeness” and pushing the idea of a “woke mind virus”.
To understand how “woke” went from describing black consciousness to describing the oppression of traditional middle class white culture, we need to look to Corporate America, which, as it does with any counter-cultural movement, quickly incorporated “wokeness” into what Rhodes calls “woke capitalism” in his book of the same name. This started in the 1950s when the business world became fixated on corporate responsibility, i.e. answering the question of what do corporations owe society on a moral level. Before we think these were bleeding hearts and suits, it’s important to note that the corporate responsibility movement was, from its earliest days, explicitly about self-interest. Its earliest advocates argued that if businesses behaved morally, the government would be less likely to intervene in or regulate their practices.
The 1980s and 1990s saw the rise of neoliberalism and the guiding ethos of corporate America became the shareholder value movement, which argued that the primary purpose of any business was to maximize profit for its shareholders. It was accompanied by things like corporate rating of smaller companies and soaring pay packages for execs. Interestingly, throughout the 80s and 90s the idea of corporate social responsibility (CSR) took off, but only in so far as acts of social responsibility helped the shareholders’ bottom line.
Thus, what was initially a movement to raise critical awareness of systemic issues has been appropriated by Corporate America and used to generate positive publicity and ward off the threat of socialism. Consequently, “woke” has become a term used to belittle opponents and mock liberal culture.