The origins of "woke"

What the word means and how it evolved

Today let me share remarks I made online about the etymology of the word “woke.” This morning while browsing the app formerly known as Twitter, I saw this comment:

• Wokeness is nothing. It was a word used by the black community to ask people to stay vigilant towards society’s systemic racism (“stay woke”). And then some people in Twitter started to use it, and conservatives transformed into a full moral panic. Nothing else

I replied:

• Polysemy is something. That’s the term for when words have more than one meaning. Rather than deny a meaning when it obviously exists and is widely in use why not explore how it evolved?

• I think the etymology of “woke” is particularly interesting because it’s a contronym. That’s the term for when a word is its own opposite, and there is almost always a good story when this happens to a word.

• What I notice is that some of the people who say “woke” is not a thing because you cannot just change a word’s definition are also the same people who say definitions always change and that’s just how language works so “racism” means something else now.

• I prefer to maintain and use both definitions of “racism” and “woke” depending on the context, because I find both very useful, and this is what I do with all words that have multiple meanings and naturally most other folks do this too.

• So the reason “woke” changed is not because people on Twitter used it and conservatives had a moral panic, but because “stay woke” was used not only to urge awareness but also to signal one’s own awareness and the unawareness of those who were not woke.

• The problem of course is that many of the things that came to signal being woke were increasingly absurd, like for example you’re not woke if you roll your eyes when people claim brown paper lunch bags are racist.

• So you had a group of people going around calling themselves woke, which is essentially synonymous with morally enlightened in terms of racial justice, though not only racial justice, and telling others to get with it while also shaming others for not getting with it.

• So as the signals became more absurd, the claim to moral enlightenment became more absurd, and of course any group saying silly things and calling themselves enlightened is inevitably going to have their opponents call them “enlightened” in jest.

• So people started out by saying “stay woke” and keep alert to racial injustice but eventually ended up saying “you aren’t woke because you don’t realize wearing latex gloves is racist” and at that point the pushback response was, oh yeah you’re real “woke.”

• So this is why “woke” means 1. awareness of injustice, particularly racial injustice, and 2. the absurd claims made in the name of such injustice.

  P.S. Arguing that the second definition does not exist or is racist is an example of the second definition.

By the way, the two examples of racism above are real examples. In 2020, it was recommended that the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at UC-Davis stop calling its lunchtime seminars “brown bag lunches” because the term “brown bag” is racist. The “brown paper bag test,” in which black people compare other black people’s skin to the color of a brown paper bag, is problematic—but brown paper bags are not and the suggestion is stupid. And in 2017, a beauty queen was accused of being racist for wearing latex gloves while volunteering at an orphanage.

A different user responded to my comments above:

• You’re ignoring the catalyst of the so-called evolution of the word. “Woke” didn’t naturally evolve in the manner of language rather, there was a deliberate co-opting of the word by those in favor of social injustice in order to diffuse its original meaning.

My reply:

• It was deliberate mockery yes, which is what I said, but I don’t agree that it was an anti-justice thing—partly sure, but mostly it was people sick of being lectured at by insufferable unenlightened types self-describing themselves as enlightened.

Him:

• That’s a misunderstanding of the original definition. “Stay Woke” was NEVER pontification in the “BLACK” community. The insufferable, unenlightened version was born in the “White” liberal community...waaaay later. “White” America is ALWAYS late when it comes to “Black” language.

Me:

• No, the insufferable version was born in the black community after the 2014 Ferguson unrest when BLM activists began using “stay woke” to mean agreement with everything BLM said and to attack whatever they defined as “whiteness.”

As

Chloé’s Newsletter

author Chloé Valdary has noted about the use of “woke” in the black community, “In some posts they’ve used it to mean staying alert against police brutality. In others, they use it as a catchall term to signal their objection to ‘whiteness,’ broadly defined.”

This etymology matters because I am seeing greater and greater frequency of the talking point that the second definition of “woke” is not real or that it is racist. But before I go, let’s dig a little deeper into the etymology for a second.

Probably the earliest use of “stay woke” was when the black folk singer Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter used it at the end of a 1938 recording of “Scottsboro Boys,” which is about nine black teens and young men who were falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama in 1931. He says, “I advise everybody, be a little careful when they go along through there (Scottsboro). Best stay woke, keep their eyes open.”

The phrase was then widely popularized when Erykah Badu used it in her 2008 song “Master Teacher,” which has the refrain, “I stay woke.”

Finally, as noted above, the second definition evolved after the shooting of Michael Brown in 2014 and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson, Missouri and nationwide.

That’s all for today. And remember, there’s a lot of political nonsense out there. Stay woke.