Thread by @PolicemanMeme

This is nonsense. Woke doesn’t refer to one being “awaken to the needs of others,” it was specifically in reference to being “woke” to racial injustices and activism of the black community. Its roots are in radical black activism, dating back to Marcus Garvey in the 1920s. 🧵

Woke broke into mainstream culture during the 2014 Ferguson riots, when it became enmeshed with BLM and the #staywoke social media campaign. It was a call to stay focused on black activism, particularly to stay vigilant on police misconduct.

It then morphed into focusing on the plight of all marginalized communities. Woke was no longer limited to BLM. It was in the 2017 Women’s March. It included BIPOC, LGBTQ+ & eventually the broader goals of progressivism. This is when phrases like “white privilege” took off.

Woke ideology viewed history as a struggle between oppressed and oppressors, and attributed all current inequities to structural racism/sexism, etc. To combat this, it sought to group everyone into hierarchies based on their oppressor status (generally based on race and sex).

With this movement came the many whiny, annoying young activists (mostly white) who knew little about anything, but after reading a Teen Vogue article or a Robin DiAngelo book were lecturing everyone about racial inequities and checking your privilege.

Even corporations embraced it, executives would give their pronouns and identify which native tribe the land was stolen from at their conferences. Door Dash had a “black-owned businesses” section, United Airlines announced half their pilots would be women/POC.

It was this quasi-religious wokeness that caused a huge backlash. The right fought back by using the term in a derogatory and mocking way, to great effect. Woke was painted as political correctness reaching absurd new heights, an obsession over identity politics.

The left has recently tried to combat this stigmatization of woke. At first, they claimed woke was a made up bogeyman of the right, a term that no one can even define (nevermind they have no coherent definition of words like racist, late-stage capitalism or woman).

Now they seem to be embracing woke and attempting to redefine it as some generic term meaning nice and sympathetic, wanting what’s best for everyone, even loving science 😂 This is nonsense and never what it meant.