The phrase has deep roots. In a 1938 recording of his song about the Scottsboro Boys, blues musician Lead Belly told listeners to "stay woke" in the South. In 1962, writer William Melvin Kelley titled a New York Times Magazine essay "If You're Woke You Dig It." Erykah Badu's 2008 song "Master Teacher" brought the phrase to a new generation, and Black Lives Matter activists used "stay woke" after Ferguson in 2014.
As the word spread online, it moved away from its Black origins. Conservatives began using it to mock or condemn progressive positions on race, gender and history. In 2022, Florida passed the Stop WOKE Act, limiting how race could be discussed in schools and workplaces. A federal appeals court blocked its workplace provisions in 2024 as a violation of free speech.
Users of "woke" as an insult argue it describes excessive focus on identity. ARD reads the shift as a common pattern: a term coined by Black people for survival gets taken over and turned against the ideas it described. The original meaning remains a call to pay attention.