To be woke, past tense, is to be awake, present tense, to a way of perceiving societal matters. Wokeness, as a kind of ideology, has irritated so many because of the tendency for some of its partisans to see those who dissent from their views as disingenuous, antidemocratic and even immoral. One could say that this was simply because of contempt for leftist ideas, even ones relating to improving lives for Black people, but only at risk of oversimplification. It has been refashioned, like “P.C.,” as an insult. Over the past few years, it has become all but impossible to use “woke” neutrally.
In the aftermath of Democrats’ loss in the recent Virginia governor’s race, the veteran Democratic consultant James Carville identified “ stupid wokeness” as the proximate cause. That came on the heels of the Times columnist Maureen Dowd arguing that wokeness “ derails” the Democratic Party. Last week, the Times columnist Bret Stephens argued that wokeness has been “ clobbered” politically. What was once a popular adjective among left-leaning social media cognoscenti as part of the colloquial admonition to “stay woke” to various forms of systemic racism first morphed into a general shorthand denoting today’s left-leaning orthodoxy and then a slur that underscored the overweening, obsessive nature of said orthodoxy. But “woke,” which has a longer etymological history, has only become increasingly common in recent years.
In 2018, the NPR correspondent Sam Sanders made this modest proposal: “It’s time to put woke to sleep” - arguing that the term had passed its sell-by date.