In 1938, African American writer J. Saunders Redding told of a Black laborer warning a companion to “stay woke”—a call for vigilance against racial injustice. The phrase carried weight, urging awareness of oppression. It echoed through the Civil Rights Movement, in Lead Belly’s warning about the Scottsboro Boys—nine Black teenagers falsely accused of rape. It lived in whispered reminders that injustice lurked in courthouses, police stops, and voter rolls.
Today, critics have hijacked woke, stretching, ridiculing, and weaponizing it beyond its original call for racial justice. Now, critics claim it means everything from opposing police brutality to endorsing gender-neutral pronouns for pets. By redefining woke as an absurd, shapeshifting threat, conservatives have discredited not only frivolous social trends but the very movements that fight racial and economic inequality.
The Hijacking of Woke
The corruption of woke wasn’t accidental. As Black Lives Matter gained prominence in the 2010s, the term entered mainstream discourse—and conservative pundits saw an opening. Originally about racial awareness, woke became a catch-all for every progressive policy they opposed.
By the late 2010s, critics had stretched woke beyond systemic racism, linking it to corporate diversity programs, gender identity, leftist academia, and even environmental activism. This shift allowed critics to link serious issues like police brutality to trivial controversies over Halloween costumes or university speech codes. The goal? To make woke synonymous with irrational excess, so the entire movement could be dismissed.
Once, woke meant knowing a Black man in Jim Crow America could be lynched on a false accusation. Now, critics mock it as nothing more than warning labels on violent films or PETA pressuring Nabisco to remove the cages on a box of animal crackers. By shoving the profound and the trivial into the same bucket, opponents have made it easier to reject both.
The Political Playbook: Dilute, Mock, Dismiss
This strategy follows a familiar pattern:
- Expand the definition of a movement beyond its core meaning. Woke no longer means racial awareness—it means everything from anti-racism to climate activism to replacing Mother’s Day with “Birthing Person Day.”
- Highlight the most absurd outlier cases. Don’t debate police brutality; focus on eliminating the word “felon” in favor of “justice-involved person”.
- Use that absurdity to discredit everything under the woke umbrella. If woke includes both fighting racism and demanding more diverse video game characters, critics can attack the whole thing as unserious overreach.
This tactic works. Today, very few politicians and pundits debate racial justice. Instead, they attack wokeness—a faceless, fluid enemy that lets them discredit progressive policies without engaging in real discussions.
By making woke a cultural boogeyman, conservatives have built a coalition that spans traditional right-wing voters and moderates uncomfortable with rapid social change. They present themselves as defenders of common sense, even when their policies do little to address actual societal problems.
A Smokescreen for the Powerful
The anti-woke crusade isn’t just a culture war—it’s a distraction. While debates rage over whether Hollywood is too woke, corporate elites lobby against worker protections, wage increases, and healthcare reform. Media cycles consumed by woke outrage leave little room for discussions about economic justice.
The Fallout: Silencing Social Justice
The weaponization of woke has real consequences:
- It shuts down conversations about racial justice. If opponents mock every mention of systemic racism as woke nonsense, they make reform impossible.
- It fuels reactionary politics. The anti-woke banner unites conservatives against progressive causes while allowing them to sidestep real policy debates.
- It stifles broader social progress. Opposition to woke fuels not just resistance to racial justice but attacks on LGBTQ+ rights, climate policy, and diversity efforts. The more critics demonize woke, the easier they make it to dismiss even moderate inclusion efforts as radicalism.
Reclaiming the Narrative
To fight back, we must expose the strategy behind the hijacking of woke. We must not forget the term’s origins in resistance to injustice. Progressives must also push back against bad-faith attempts to derail the conversation with trivial woke controversies. The real issue isn’t whether wokeness has gone too far—it’s whether we allow a manufactured moral hysteria to silence movements for justice.
The war on woke isn’t about fairness, reason, or honest disagreement. It’s a deliberate ploy to keep us fighting over cultural idiosyncrasies while the powerful tighten their grip. Every time they mock wokeness, they’re not just ridiculing pronouns or protest slogans; they’re silencing conversations about racism, inequality, and injustice. They don’t fear woke. They fear accountability. And as long as we keep chasing their distractions, we will remain sheep, herded by tyrants.