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The term came out of Black activism and music in the early 20th century, with the phrase “stay woke” signifying elevated consciousness or an admonition to be vigilant in response to the insidiousness of white supremacy. In the 2010s it gained broader use, with the term related to but distinct from the criminal justice reform movement that gripped America from the mid-2010s through 2020. The protest movements and associated commentators sometimes used “#staywoke” as a slogan to refer to alertness to systemic racism and other systems of oppression. After the murder of George Floyd, the concept was metabolized by the mainstream. First it was taken up by white liberals and corporate America, who saw it as a call to take bigotry more seriously. Shortly thereafter there was a right-wing backlash, and eventually woke became almost exclusively used by people on the right who deployed it as a slur designating the excesses of the left and a bogeyman to organize reactionary energy. Today some people on the right still use the word, but Trump’s fatigue hints at a growing sense that overuse has degraded its power as a term of derision.

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