Tired of hearing conservatives go on and on about “wokeness”? Me too. So I have a cunning plan: let’s establish a moratorium on people throwing around the word “woke”, one of the most used and abused terms in recent memory, until we have all agreed on a precise definition of it.
Before the right co-opted the term and used it to describe everything from BlackRock to Disney World, “woke” had an actual meaning. The term comes from African American Vernacular English and, originally, was broadly defined as being “alert to racial prejudice and discrimination”. Americans who aren’t suffering from Fox News-induced brain worms still understand that to be its meaning. According to a recent USA Today/Ipsos Poll, 56% of Americans surveyed say they think that being woke means “to be informed, educated on, and aware of social injustices”. Thirty-nine per cent of people surveyed (and 56% of people who identified as Republican), meanwhile, said it meant “to be overly politically correct and police others’ words”.
