Origin Story: Woke

“Woke” began as a word of vigilance — and of care.
Rooted in African American Vernacular English, it originally meant being awake to injustice, especially racism and oppression. One of the earliest uses came in 1938, when blues singer Lead Belly warned listeners to “stay woke” to racial danger after singing The Scottsboro Boys.

In the 1960s, “woke” deepened into a form of moral awareness. To be woke wasn’t just to see injustice — it was to feel it. Novelist William Melvin Kelley used it to describe the consciousness shaping the civil rights era: a refusal to be numbed by inequality. Decades later, artists like Erykah Badu revived the phrase, and the Black Lives Matter movement carried it forward as a call for empathy in action — for noticing, listening, and standing with those who suffer harm.

But as the word entered mainstream politics, it became distorted. Critics weaponized “woke” as a slur to dismiss compassion as extremism. Yet its original power remains: a reminder that social awareness means little without emotional awareness — that seeing each other clearly is the first step toward justice.

True wokeness is empathy.