Here’s my reading of it. “Woke” starts off as slang associated with the Black Lives Matter movement around 2014 (well it actually has a long history before this but I’m gonna start in 2014 bc it makes sense). As everything does, it gets co opted by white people and becomes the cool new slang for a while. Then usage drops off by the time trump is elected (or at least I stopped hearing it so much).

It begins being used as an epithet in 2020. Probably started before that but I think it gained critical mass as an epithet in 2020 after they tried and failed to make “critical race theory” the new right wing boogeyman. It is essentially the rebranded “pc” or “sjw,” but much wider in scope. To attempt a definition, it’s essentially just referring to late 2010s-style progressivism, what we might call radlibs. Though not really because anything vaguely left-wing can be called “woke,” most on the right are not differentiating between Hillary Clinton, Bernie sanders and actual communism.

Anyway the pejorative usage of woke was pretty much spearheaded by the right wing, but much of the liberal pundit class also hated the new left wing politics. So there was a lot of ceding ground to the right as the Biden era goes on, and with the election of trump in 2024 they all declare the end of woke, probably why they’re all so excited to roll out the red carpet for the maga folks in like 2024/2025. Of course trump pretty much immediately reminds everyone why they all hated him, and especially at the start of this year with the murders of those folks in Minneapolis, the abduction of Maduro and the Iran war, the same liberal pundit class that was so excited to be saved from “woke” looks back and goes, “well maybe some of that woke stuff had a point.”

So essentially “woke 1” becomes the excesses and what they see as the distasteful parts of 2010s progressivism (I say 2010s but really these people are remembering like 2020 and a couple years following that). Everything from pronouns, land back and queer culture to prison abolition, Palestine solidarity and most especially socialism. What they’d like to see is a renaissance of woke without all these distasteful parts. Essentially left of center anti-trump politics led by whoever is the new Hillary Clinton.

Je suis Woke 1.0

Like all “definitions” of woke, it depends on who you’re talking to, the most common but in no way the plurality of the meanings, it’s become a stand-in for centrist cooption or ‘radlib’, Pelosi in the kente cloth being the most common example given

But thanks to AOC’s garbage quip on ABC a few days ago it’s now starting to morph into the general anti-woke definition that chuds and centrists have been using for years

Personally I’d like it to mean ‘Progressive Except for Palestine’, but that’s cause I remember during 2019 the only time I ever got downvoted into the hundreds back on the old sub was when I defended a Palestinian women from accusations of racism because she told an Israeli gooner to fuck off on a dating app

That to me exemplifies everything wrong with “Woke 1.0”

‘PoC are people and the gays can get married’

my opinion on this is that you guys just have to stop misuing the word woke if youre not gonna use it in its original way. im black and ive never stopped using it in the original meaning

It’s the basic progressive demands (defund the police, abolish ICE, BLM, metoo) that all the socdems decided to abandon in order to… idk, better appeal to the democratic party I guess?

The way I’ve been seeing it used is “all the good and correct positions from BLM and MeToo that liberals clutch their pearls about”

I just run pacman -Syu woke to get the latest patch

Definition depends on who you are talking to.

I think in some circles it meant liberal identity politics when discussed by leftists but by now I think it’s been co-opted to mean “the stuff I don’t like” by YouTube talking heads etc

I won’t even get started on what chuds might start to think it means once they see libs using it and apply their famous literary skills to decode it via context. Fuck that’s gonna suck to behold. Like watching two blindfolded kids swinging at the same piñata and hitting each other.

it means to be aware of oppression, specifically anti-blackness

however chuds use this to mean “anything i don’t like” including “has a woman in it”

a “joke” by the ken klippensteins of the internet about stuff like land acknowledgements and that was really pervasive in 2016-2020. While I agree with some of the “yeah woke 1 was weird with the whole ‘getting a woman fired from her cooking column at the NYT because she called Chrissy Teigen’s instagram page a content farm’” jokes, in general it is just punching leftwards like another comment said below and ultimately will just provide cover for various online left-of-center personalities shifting towards fascism lol

They’re talking about the original meaning of “Being aware of racial disparity and injustice”

As opposed to the chud rebranding of “thing what makes me angry”

I know the term originated from Black Feminist Identity Politics in 1977

It’s misued a lot now.