A 7 July 2016 protest over the police shooting of Philando Castile, a Black man, during a routine traffic stop the previous day. Two women among a crowd of protesters hold up a sign that reads “#JusticeForPhilando” and has an image of a fist rising out the state of Minnesota.
31 May 2021
Woke is an adjective, originating in Black slang, meaning being alert to racism and racial discrimination. It has been circulating for decades, but in recent years it has been taken up by white speakers, and the contexts in which it is used has expanded to other areas of injustice and discrimination. This adjectival use of woke is clearly documented from the early 1960s, but it is possible that it is older in oral use.
The adjective comes, of course, from the past participle of the verb to wake. The verb can be traced back to the Old English verb wæcnan. Originally in Black English, the adjective was used literally, to mean awake, as opposed to being asleep. The earliest example I can find is in the 1891 Joel Chandler Harris’s short story “Balaam and His Master”:
An’ den, when I git my belly full, I sot in de sun an’ went right fast ter sleep. I ’spec’ I tuck a right smart nap, kaze when some un hollered at me an’ woke me up de sun wuz gwine down de hill right smartly. I jumped up on my feet, I did, an’ I say, ‘Who dat callin’ me?’ Somebody ’low, ‘Yo’marster want you.’ Den I bawl out, ‘Is Marse Berry come?’ De n[——]s all laugh, an’ one un ‘em say, Dat n[——] man dreamin’, mon. He ain’t woke good yit.’
Harris was, of course, white and recording/imitating Black speech. I cannot find an early example by a Black writer. The search is complicated because relatively few outlets of the day published Black slang, and sifting out the slang adjectival uses from the much more common uses of the verb is an almost hopeless task.
This literal sense of the adjective woke appears in a 19 April 1928 piece syndicated to white newspapers. Its inclusion in a gossip column about the goings-on in Manhattan is, perhaps, intended to make fun of Black dialect. The usage is literal in that the event goes on all night long and the attendees literally stay awake, but one wonders if it also reflects a metaphorical sense that may have been current in slang at the time:
The Harlem Black Belt this week offered gaudy posters reading: The Stay Woke Ball—open from 5 o'clock p.m. until 5 a.m. the next morning.
The transition from the literal to the metaphorical meaning can be seen in this 13 March 1943 article in the Norfolk Journal and Guide that quotes Black writer and educator J. Saunders Redding. Redding’s use here is a deliberate metaphor, likening becoming aware of racism and white supremacy to that of waking from sleep. Again, this is not quite the adjectival use, but it is either a precursor to that or Redding could be reflecting an existing slang usage in more a formal style:
These lessons mean that the Negro is coming to have “a faith in organized labor as a force for social justice. They mean what a United Mine Workers official in West Virginia told me in 1940: Let me tell you buddy, Waking up is a damn sight harder than going to sleep, but we’ll stay woke up longer,” he said.
Clear use of the metaphorical woke itself is recorded by Black novelist William Melvin Kelley in the New York Times on 20 May 1962. Kelley wrote an article on Black slang with the title “If You’re Woke You Dig It.” Accompanying the article is a short glossary of slang terms that includes this entry:
woke (adj.): well-informed, up-to-date (“Man, I’m woke”).
Kelley didn’t explicitly define woke in terms of injustice or racism, but one can certainly infer that is the intended context.
Ten years later, the connection of woke to racial injustice is clear when Black playwright Barry Beckham includes this line in the prologue to his 1972 play Garvey Lives!:
I been sleeping all my life. And now that Mr. Garvey done woke me up, I'm gon stay woke. And I'm gon help him wake up other black folk.
Woke moves out of the province of American Black speech and starts appearing with great frequency in English-language publications around 2015. And it is around this time that the word starts being used in contexts other than racism in the United States. For example, this passage appears in the South African Mail & Guardian Thought Leader in a 23 October 2015 article about women protesting increases in university tuition and fees:
This time around women are woke to this (as the cool kids say) and refuse to be silenced, refuse history to repeat itself. At Wits women who were told they could not lead the songs, went and sang their own. And online, women were challenging the “behind-the-scenes” narrative with hashtags such as #MbokodoLead.
Sources:
“Deep Changes in Thinking Bringing Dread to White South—Redding.” Journal and Guide (Norfolk, Virginia), 13 March 1943, A9. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, s.v. woke, adj.
Harris, Joel Chandler. “Balaam and His Master.” Balaam and His Master and Other Sketches and Stories. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1891, 34. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Kelley, William Melvin. “If You’re Woke You Dig It.” New York Times Magazine, 20 May 1962, SM45. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
———. “‘Saying Something Lexicon.’” New York Times Magazine, 20 May 1962, SM45. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
McIntyre, O.O. “New York Day By Day.” Portsmouth Daily Times, 19 April 1928, 20. NewspaperArchive.com.
Mugo, Kagure. “#FeesMustFall: You Cannot Ask Women to Be Vocal in Public and Silent in Private.” Mail & Guardian Thought Leader, 23 October 2015.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2019, s.v. woke, adj.2.
Photo credit: Fibonacci Blue, 2016. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.