touched on the feeling in 1965 during a commencement address at Oberlin College: “There is nothing more tragic than to sleep through a revolution. In 1962 Black novelist William Melon Kelley wrote about white beatniks appropriating African American slang in an article for the New York Times Magazine titled, 'If You're Woke You Dig It.' The word eventually spread outside the Black community along with other African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) slang. In Black communities in the early to mid-20th Century as the Ku Klux Klan re-emerged, mob justice and lynchings were not uncommon, and segregation and Jim Crow laws were often harshly - or fatally - enforced, 'stay woke' came to mean to stay vigilant in a world stacked against you.

'Fight for your own liberation': From Jamaica's Marcus Garvey came an African vision of freedomĪ few years later, in a recorded spoken afterword to the 1938 song 'Scottsboro Boys' by blues musician Lead Belly (Huddie Ledbetter) about nine Black teenagers accused of raping two white women, he says, 'I advise everybody, be a little careful when they go along through there – best stay woke, keep their eyes open.' The earliest recorded usage of wokeness that can be interpreted to mean stay aware, rather than wake up, is in a collection by Jamaican philosopher and Harlem activist leader Marcus Garvey in 1923 which included the call, 'Wake up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa' in a plea for Black people across the world to open their eyes to racial subjugation and get involved in politics. 'It can be hard to trace slang back to its origins since slang’s origins are usually spoken,' Merriam-Webster's update says, 'and it can be particularly difficult to trace a slang word that has its origins in a dialect.' 'Woke' has been around for much, much longer than that in Black communities.

What is the opposite of woke