Black American folk singer-songwriter Huddie Ledbetter, a.k.a. Lead Belly, used the phrase “stay woke” as part of a spoken afterword to a 1938 recording of his song “Scottsboro Boys”, which tells the story of nine black teenagers and young men falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama in 1931. In the recording, Lead Belly says he met with the defendant’s lawyer and the young men themselves, and “I advise everybody, be a little careful when they go along through there (Scottsboro) – best stay woke, keep their eyes open.”[4][12] Aja Romano writes at Vox that this usage reflects “black Americans’ need to be aware of racially motivated threats and the potential dangers of white America”.[4]
For conservatives it’s morphed into anything that’s important to others that they don’t like. For most others it has remained a way to describe conscious recognition of the injustices that have been codified into our mores and laws, and which remain as problems that need to be solved.
I don’t care for the word in this context, but only because conservatives have successfully morphed it into a near-slur, the way they twist and ruin just about every other word they use regularly. (For example, the word “patriot” is now forever tainted…)
Woke is an adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) meaning “alert to racial prejudice and discrimination”.[1][2] Beginning in the 2010s, it came to encompass a broader awareness of social inequalities such as racial injustice, sexism, and denial of LGBT rights. Woke has also been used as shorthand for some ideas of the American Left involving identity politics and social justice, such as white privilege and reparations for slavery in the United States.[3][4][5]
The phrase stay woke has been present in AAVE since the 1930s. In some contexts, it referred to an awareness of social and political issues affecting African Americans. The phrase was uttered in recordings from the mid-20th century by Lead Belly and, post-millennium, by Erykah Badu.