woke

Woke is the Black American English past participle used as an adjective. The forms of the verb  wake in that dialect are wake, woke, woke.

The baby is woke means ‘the baby is awake’. We would say the baby has woken.

I be woke means ‘I am now awake’.

In 1962  woke took on the figurative meaning of ‘with it’ or ‘well-informed’.  Cool people were woke. 

A decade later it had an extra political tinge in the context of Black Rights and came to mean ‘alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice’. That definition is from the OED which provides the following citation:

1972    B. Beckham Garvey Lives! (typescript, Univ. of Virginia) Prol. 1   I been sleeping all my life. And now that Mr. Garvey done woke me up, I'm gon stay woke. And I'm gon help him wake up other black folk.

Being woke was the same as having your consciousness raised, but a lot easier to say.  Consciousness raising was also a term of the early 70s.

So now we come to the sneering use of woke.

It has replaced PC as the weapon that the conservative right wing uses to denigrate the left.

So when Anthony Albanese gave an interview in which he worked perhaps too hard to present himself as middle-of-the-road and centrist in his views, it was summed up by the Daily Telegraph as Albanese claiming “I am not WOKE!’ This was promptly followed by Morrison claiming to be even more woke. It all became a bit ridiculous — except that it is all deadly serious. 

Woke people can fight back with humour.  In April 2021 Alex Chaise PhD posted the following on Twitter: ‘After spending my life abstaining from “fairy” bread, I have been fed up for too long. The term “fairy” is offensive and outdated, and should not be used to refer to classic Australian food.’

She set up the petition on change.org and waited for the reaction. Various people in the media, notably in News, responded with outrage. Then it was revealed that Alex Chaise PhD was the creation of The Chaser.