I am still trying to figure out the word ‘Woke’ used in the article.
“I am still trying to figure out the word ‘Woke’ used in the article.”
It’s what “social justice warriors”, radical feminists, and other Left activists use to describe people who have converted to their causes.
Stems - I’m guessing - from the 1960s concept of “false consciousness”, which was invidiously promoted by the New Left to describe average-American middle class types who lived in their sheltered little world, unaware of the terrible crimes, injustices, oppression, and exploitation being perpetrated against the poor, on “indigenous peoples,” on African-Americans, on women, etc by First World imperialist nations - especially by the United States.
Radical Left feminists used it heavily to stir up housewives. The snide, condescending implication was that people who actually thought life was good and that the US was a force for goodness were dreaming. The New Left bent itself to the task of waking them up.
Pop culture has exploited the notion of an entire alternate reality, which the average person does not suspect the existence of: the Matrix films leaned heavily on the idea, and the Wachowski siblings used it in their more recent film Jupiter Ascending (they may have used it in Cloud Atlas too, but I’ve yet to make sense of that film).
“woke” in preference to “awakened” has connotations of ghetto slang, which meshes well with modern victimology.
Current targets of false-consciousness indoctrination are college students, who are browbeaten into believing they have to “wake up” and learn the “true nature” of the world around them, which they’ve been blissfully unaware of - asleep as they have been during their (unjustly privileged) upbringing.