In the year 2023, former President Donald Trump decided he was fed up with the term “woke.” At a rally in June, he said, “I don’t like the term ‘woke,’ because I hear woke, woke, woke. You know it’s like just a term they use, half the people can’t even define it. They don’t know what it is.” It was a striking admission from a demagogue who had long used the term to whip up reactionary fury over a supposed social revolution. Given that Trump doesn’t back away from language because it’s unclear or tainted by bad faith usage, his lament hinted at exhaustion, the realization that so-called “wokeness” can’t be milked for fearmongering the way it once could.
This is not a prediction that “woke” is about to disappear from the popular lexicon. Merely hours after Trump decried the overuse of woke, he used it in a town hall to criticize U.S. military readiness. Even so, Trump’s complaint about woke is a useful signpost for understanding the decline of a contentious term.
The term “woke” has been broken.
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…
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