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The 1938 sense in which it was coin3d is exactly the sense of the 1950s and the sense that got ibcreased attention circa 2000s and catapulted to attention alongside BLM (which itself was a response to the same kind of even that the art in which the phrase was coined for responded to).

The only newer sense is the American Right’s use of the term to replace “political correctness” as an empty epithet for everything and everyone it disagrees with.




Language grows organically, and the American right gets as much as the American left to define what a word means or how proponents of a movement or social fad are seen in practice (besides woke's standard definition is just "awake", if someone insists on the "original meaning")

So, one side could see woke in theory as a noble activist/social consciousness practice, which can not go wrong and helps liberate us all.

The other side might see woke in practice as intolerable virtue signalling and self-aggrandizing whose actions often border on farcical.




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