The Real Origin of Woke

Shining some light on the great political question of our time.

Is there any political word that sounds more embarrassing being said seriously by a grown adult than “woke?” A past tense verb crowbarred awkwardly into doing the job of either a noun or an adjective depending on who or what it’s complaining about at the time. It only really started hitting the mainstream political discourse over the past few years, striking us hard and sudden like the pandemic did, but not only did conservative politicians and pundits all over the western world consider woke to be a more dangerous and immediate concern than Covid, they were also faster to act on it, and with greater ferocity.

And with good reason: Effective and accessible public healthcare is one example of something that is woke. At least, depending on who you ask.

And that’s the problem with woke. For something all of the biggest assholes in the world want desperately to destroy before it kills us all, they sure do stumble when someone asks them what it actually is. It’s the Jason Bourne of political concepts, basically.

Music credit: Flight of the Passing Fancy- Squirrel Nut Zippers

So let’s finally get to the bottom of this, shall we? Let’s lift the lid. What is woke?

The political essayist and Richard Spencer understudy Richard Hanania titled his breakout bestseller The Origins of Woke, so it makes sense to start here. As expected, Hanania defines woke early on in the first chapter, describing it as having three central pillars:

The belief that disparities equal discrimination: Practically any disparity that appears to favour men over women, or whites over non-whites, is caused by some combination of past and present discrimination. Disparities that favour women over men or non-whites over whites are either ignored or celebrated. This includes not only material outcomes like differences in income or representation in high-status professions but “disparities in thought,” or stereotypes about different groups.

Speech restrictions: In the interest of overcoming such problematic disparities, speech needs to be restricted, particularly speech that suggests that they are caused by factors other than discrimination or that stereotypes are true.

Human resources (HR) bureaucracy: In the interest of overcoming disparities and regulating speech, a full-time bureaucracy is needed to enforce correct thought and action.

[Hanania, R. The Origins of Woke, 2023]

Hanania goes on to explain his reasoning about how he pins it down this way—why, for example, banning blasphemous speech isn’t woke because it satisfies the second pillar but not the first. So this is actually a decent definition. It leans strongly on the “compelled speech” aspect that so upsets the likes of Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson.

Neither of these people has ever waited for someone to compel them to speak

I wanted to see how well this definition lined up with that of other social scientists, so I next consulted Woke Capitalism: How Corporate Morality is Sabotaging Democracy by University of Technology Sydney Professor of Organization Studies Carl Rhodes.

Rhodes begins his first chapter by mentioning the word’s origins in Black American vernacular, and describes how the meaning of the word shifted from a positive connotation to a negative over time, similar to the word “jive.” But in describing the meaning of “woke” now, Rhodes takes a curious turn from what we just heard from Hanania:

Today a conventional use of the term ‘woke’ does not only mean being alert to social justice. Instead, it refers to a person who affects a fake, superficial and politically correct morality. Think, for example, of mega-rich celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio and Katy Perry. They fly by private jet to a climate summit at a luxury resort in Sicily funded by Google. It is difficult not to be cynical about the authenticity, or at least consistency, of their politics. Such cynicism leads to the view that to be woke is merely an ethical fashion statement that is in favour of apparently radical political causes as they relate to, for example, movements against sexism, racism, and other forms of discrimination and oppression. Other supposedly woke causes are environmentalism, mental health awareness, LGBTQI+ rights, and economic inequality.

[Rhodes, C. Woke Capitalism: How Corporate Morality is Sabotaging Democracy, 2022]

Hold your horses, though. None of that has anything to do with any of Richard Hanania’s three core pillars. Most notably there’s no speech caveat. What Rhodes is describing is liberal hypocrisy. 

This isn’t an aside, it’s central to his definition. His two pillars are hypocrisy and incompetence:

Crucially, the negative use of the term ‘woke’ proposes that those people who support progressive political causes are insincere as well as ineffective in their politics. If someone disparages you as a ‘woketard’ or a member of the ‘wokerati’ then you are accused of being obsessed with appearing ethically right-on on issues ranging from environmental protection to identity politics. You are also being accused on taking on ‘wokeness’ because you think it is a fashionable thing to do.

[Rhodes, C. Woke Capitalism: How Corporate Morality is Sabotaging Democracy, 2022]

So which is it? Both of these authors are professional academics, even if referring to Hanania as such is an act of generosity.

Perhaps we’ll find a tiebreaker in a third source. Let’s try Bethany Mandel, who notoriously flubbed this question when put on the spot but assured that she defines it at length in her book Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation. In the beginning chapter, she defines “wokeness” as:

a new version of leftism that is directly aimed at your child. Wokeness has infected everything. The right way of looking at wokeness and woke culture is as a set of deeply toxic ideas that are force-fed to the populace, in particular to children.

[Mandel, B. Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation, 2023]

Here’s something else from Bethany Mandel’s back catalogue, as an aside.

Throughout the book Mandel uses “wokeness” as something essentially interchangeable with what the right refers to as “grooming,” which is the conspiracy theory that LGBTQ individuals are molesting children simply by existing. This is something else again when it comes to defining wokeness. It’s now a child indoctrination and sexual brainwashing thing. This has nothing to do with compelled speech. It has nothing to do with your office HR department. It has nothing to do with environmentalism or Hollywood celebs lying about their passion for saving the koala.

Let’s make a game of it: As soon as we find two people with a matching definition, even a ballpark similar one, we stop and call the matter resolved. Doctor of Education Dr Kevin Donnelly wrote The Dictionary of Woke, and immediately on the cover we see three incongruous references: A Black Lives Matter logo, a hammer and sickle, and references to Orwell.

Wokeness is communism, then? Not so fast. That might simply have been the liberty taken by the cover artist, because it plays no part in Donnelly’s definition, which is barely a definition at all so much as a broad scattershot of topics like throwing darts at an encyclopedia: The gays, book bans, MeToo, and the rebranding of Aunt Jemima. The closest he gets to a definition is to say that it derives from the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Cultural critic Freddie DeBoer pulled no punches in 2021 with a short article he titled Please Just Fucking Tell Me What Term I Am Allowed to Use for the Sweeping Social and Political Changes You Demand, arguing that pretending we don’t all know what this word means is “weak and pathetic” but his net is wide. It’s Critical Race Theory, it’s defunding the police, it’s Black Lives Matter. Bill Maher was similarly upset at the dismissal of the word, demanding “What word would you like us to use for the plainly insane excesses of the Left, that are not Liberalism, but something completely different?”

It's… you know, the Left! Broadly, but  yet clearly distinct from it, on specific occasions when it goes too far, except when it’s environmentalism just in general, or it’s Sean Penn sipping brandy after cleaning exactly one oil slicked penguin. And there’s a drag queen involved.

This goes on and fucking on. Nikki Haley was asked to define woke during a town hall session in her presidential campaign. She responded by saying “it’s a lot of things” but then named only three things—all of them specifically pertaining to transgender people. Transgenderism, taken as a whole, seems to be woke, and according to some definitions, encompasses it entirely.

During Jim Banks and Chaya Raichik’s April 1 talk at Indiana University, they defined woke as simply anti-Americanism, and attacks on the American way of life. When a student asked whether that means Al Qaida is woke, Banks said yes.

Just because it’s difficult to pin down a definition of something doesn’t mean that a definition doesn’t exist—it could, of course, mean that most people are simply wrong. Most people are wrong about how black holes work. But the problem here is that, unlike black holes, there’s no authority on wokeness to consult. Everyone who has an opinion about what it means is really as good as anyone else.

Interestingly, every single source I investigated that made a serious attempt to define wokeness correctly identified where it came from and roughly how it was originally used. Details may differ, but it was an African-American term meaning something like awareness of systemic injustice. Research is easy. That’s a job for Google. Every time a wokeness-definer starts off by going into the Original Meaning I can’t help picturing them acting thrilled to have discovered it, like an archaeologist finding a long hidden passageway in the Great Pyramid, running off to tell the others what they’ve just learned. Really earning their researcher cred.

But that’s where everyone just goes utterly off the rails. So how can a word that used to have a solid definition that everyone agrees on suddenly evolve into a word that nobody can agree on, even when they’re all in the same class comparing notes?

What if I told you that the word “woke” actually didn’t evolve from that term? At least not in the way that you’ve been led to believe. It wears the mask, certainly, but the two versions of “woke” don’t share a history.

Around 2015, coinciding roughly with the early presidential campaign of Donald Trump, a number of very loosely connected media fandom communities were experiencing a surge of right wing political interest. There was no one inciting factor that can account for it. I have been developing a theory that it was fueled by years of encroaching influence of the Men’s Rights and sexual game theory communities onto broader hobbyist culture, and the fire sparked by a number of things like the fracturing of skeptic communities as far back as the Iraq War.

I won’t rehash too much of that here. My point is that during the bubbling rise of this subculture on internet forums and social media platforms, primarily 4chan and its clones and Reddit, new terminologies started to enter the lexicon to describe people in sometimes favourable but mostly unfavourable ways. Words like “based,” “cuck,” and later, “soyboy.” A disproportionate amount of this terminology was used as a type of masculinity rating.

This guy was the Chief Justice of Masculinity for a time.

One of the phrases that caught on more than most was “social justice warrior,” primarily abbreviated as “SJW.” It was a term that everyone thought they knew what it referred to, but nobody knew what it meant.

The sci-fi writer Will Shetterly denied that he coined the term “social justice warrior” but he wrote the first book about it: 2014’s How to Make a Social Justice Warrior. In it, he criticises many familiar targets such as Critical Race Theory, intersectionality and language policing, and defines “social justice warrior” thus:

The social justice warrior is the internet’s name for outraged people who excuse their behavior by citing social justice. But no one should confuse social justice warriors with social justice workers. In theory and practice, they’re very different:
• Social justice workers work in the world; social justice warriors rant on the web.
• Social justice workers focus on poverty; social justice warriors focus on privilege.
• Social justice workers treat everyone with respect; social justice warriors reject civility.

[Shetterly, W. How to Make a Social Justice Warrior, 2014]

For a definition this doesn’t give us a whole lot to go on, but it’s something. Shetterly insists that he’s always been a progressive leftist and fights for those causes, but doesn’t agree with what progressive activism looks like in the internet era. The etymology of “social justice warrior” is unclear but, from Shetterly’s definition, we can surmise it likely came from the sarcastic phrase “keyboard warrior”—someone who only pays lip service to causes while staying safe behind a computer screen.

Again, though, we have the problem of consensus. It didn’t seem to matter. The science fiction writer Theodore Beale, who writes under the pseudonym Vox Day, wrote a book on the topic of social justice warriors titled SJWs Always Lie, but although they form the entire subject and substance of the book, Beale has no patience for definitions and specifically says that he’s opting not to define them. He says it’s because it doesn’t matter, but I surmise it’s because he can’t:

Now, many authors might devote a chapter or two to defining what SJWs are, or attempting to explain why they are what they are, or trying to determine why they behave the way they do. I'm not going to do that because it simply isn't relevant to the point of this book. Knowing everything there is to know about shark DNA or what fish grizzly bears prefer to eat doesn't do you any good when you find yourself nose to nose with a hungry one. In like manner, whatever went into making the SJW with whom you are acquainted probably happened decades before you ever met him and there is absolutely no way you are going to undo the consequences of years of psychological aberrancy by reasoning with them or lending a sympathetic ear. The SJWs are what they are. They are who they are. It doesn't matter why.

[Day, V. SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police, 2015]

But if the decision to forego the definition is, as so many say, because it’s redundant to define what everyone already knows, then you can’t in this case fall back on what Will Shetterly says—Beale, elsewhere in the book, positions all transgender people under the umbrella of SJWs. There is nothing “keyboard warrior” about being transgender. Somebody is either wrong or everyone is.

Through the early 2010s, the phrase became extremely popular online, thrown about at anyone who would say anything political in a realm reserved for geeks or hobbyists. In time it began to leak out of niche online communities into the world proper. Public figures got their hands on it. The filmmaker Eli Roth, in promotions for his horror film The Green Inferno, about a group of conservationists who get captured by cannibals in the jungle, said that the movie was his response to SJWs: “the SJW culture has gotten so out of control.”

But these weren’t Will Shetterly’s SJWs. These activists on the run from savage cannibals weren’t keyboard warriors chowing down on Doritos and calling video games racist. Eli Roth wasn’t concerned with that or anything like it—he was annoyed by environmentalism.

It became a favourite turn of phrase for Richard Dawkins, who had some random takes about it.

But the term wasn’t useful because it described something specifically, it was useful because it didn’t. It served a purpose, but its purpose wasn’t description. It was a kind of virtue signal, or a mark to identify not its targets but its users to one another.

What it seemed to be used for was a way to kind of reconcile a very traditional right wing opposition to social justice with a movement that didn’t entirely consider itself right wing. It was, by all accounts, politically confused. Young men, geeks and hobbyists, who knew the Right as something that crusty old out of touch religious people belonged to (and who, more often than not, were the mortal enemy of their free enjoyment of their hobbies) suddenly found themselves agreeing with many of their precepts in opposition to feminism and race issues. It was a qualifying statement, a way of defining themselves as not being opposed to social justice per se. Just opposed to the SJWs.

But “SJW” resisted definition because defining it reduced both its power and its utility.

What an SJW was didn’t matter. What mattered was what an Anti-SJW was. It wasn’t the conservatism of the old guard Republicans who wanted to ban violent video games and Satanic tabletop RPGs and deliver you to Jesus. It wasn’t stuffed-shirt conservatism. It was a way for people, predominantly young men, to reject meddling feminism and irritating social justice and environmental politics in a way that respected secularism, libertarianism, and entertainment.

There is a long story well beyond the scope of this column today about how the Anti-SJW movement was funnelled, deliberately and insidiously, into the Trump movement by Steve Bannon and his operatives. That is the subject of a much longer and more in depth series of pieces I’m writing called The Bitter Files. Those are for paid subscribers, so please upgrade your subscription if you want to check it out. Hell, you can drop five bucks for a one month deal and turn off renewals if you want.

I’m sure you can see by now where this story is leading.

If you want to know the origin of woke—the real origin, I mean, not the specific versions of it that people like Richard Hanania and Bethany Mandel tell you about, which are as numerous and distinct from one another as dragon legends—then really all you need to do is look at this chart:

This is the Google Trends search popularity of “SJWs” and “Wokeness” from 2012 to now. In 2012, neither word existed. The peak of SJW that you see on the left was November 2016 during the election of Donald Trump. The peak of wokeness on the right is the first few months of 2021, just after the election of Joe Biden. The phrases were equally popular only once and very briefly, in 2019 just before Covid, when Woke started shooting up for the first time and SJW high fived it on the way down. Nobody who started paying attention to politics during the October 6 capital attack has ever heard of an SJW.

It's because they’re the same word.

“Woke,” the way that it is used by basically everybody you hear using it, is literally a rebranded and re-pitched “Social Justice Warrior.” It is a political rebrand the same as any other slogan. Back when Steve Bannon and his campaign operatives were attempting to tap youth internet culture for the next generation of Republicans, they nurtured a term that was already an ill-defined catch-all into a powerful and invisible boogeyman.

When Trump was successful, his people stopped pushing the phrase so aggressively, but it remained a background threat until it spiked again during the 2018 midterms.

But this time, it didn’t work. The Republicans lost the House. The hobbyist culture wars had run out of steam the year prior and there was nothing propping up the term “SJW” except the GOP’s youth outreach. The moment they lost those elections was the moment they dropped it and started looking for a replacement.

“Social Justice Warrior” is too videogamey. It’s a cumbersome phrase and it’s not versatile. You can’t make an -ism out of it. “SJWism” is a hideous mouthful that looks like shit on the page and sounds like you’re juggling marbles with your tongue when you try to say it. It was a phrase absent of meaning but it had an important utility. They needed a replacement.

That’s all it is and all it ever was. What does woke mean? It doesn’t. It’s not that kind of word. It’s a word in the sense that “yay” is a word. Don’t get me wrong—a word spelled with the letters w-o-k-e meant something to the black community, but that word was killed and something else is wearing its face as a mask now, and that thing is a hollow shape you can fill with anything you like.

Wokeism is not an ideology. Nobody claims to be woke like nobody ever claimed to be a social justice warrior. The real thing, the thing that people do identity as, is anti-woke, the same as anti-SJW. But that is also not an ideology, it’s a band shirt. It’s a bumper sticker. It’s “Let’s Go Mets.”

If you use it, you’ve fallen for a slogan. And when the word loses its pizazz and old tumour-faced assholes come up with a new and snappy word that means exactly the same thing—or, more likely, steal one—that’s the incessant bleating we’ll hear over and over and over for the next political cycle. And people will say “but what does it mean?” and they’ll reply “You already know.”