In Tuesday’s joint address of Congress, President Donald Trump said there was one bogeyman he wanted America to stand against: Being “woke.”
“We’ve ended the tyranny of so-called diversity, equity and inclusion policies all across the entire federal government,” he declared. “Our country will be woke no longer.”
Trump’s rally against wokeness is just the latest way this four-letter word has been co-opted by Republicans to mean the worst of humanity and to criticize progressive policies. Trump has previously said he doesn’t like the term “woke,” believing that most people “can’t even define it.”
But can he? Can you?
If you’re confused about what exactly Trump means, you’re not alone. The search result of “What does woke mean?” spiked +3,750% during Trump’s address, according to Google.
Although it is now a rallying cry for the GOP of what not to be, it had much more positive origins in America ― and many often get it wrong.
What ‘Woke’ Really Means
Long before “woke” became a pejorative word by Republicans like Trump, the word had positive connotations that originated in Black vernacular.
Wokeness has been used to protest injustice since the early 1900s. In one of the earliest uses, Blues musician Lead Belly evoked the phrase in his song “Scottsboro Boys” that was about Black teens who were falsely accused of raping white women in Scottsboro, Alabama. In the song, musician Lead Belly warns of the South, “I advise everybody to be a little careful when they go down there. Stay woke. Keep your eyes open.”
Most recently, during the Black Lives Matter movement of the 2010s, young Black people online popularized the hashtag #staywoke as a rallying cry to stay politically aware of systemic injustices and to protest police killing Black people.
Elaine Richardson, an Ohio State University literacy professor who specializes in African diaspora literacy studies, co-authored a 2018 paper that traced the history of the word.
“The Black word woke, in referring specifically to a political consciousness type of being awake, is an excellent example of how Black people develop African American language by imbuing it with concepts needing to be expressed efficiently ― in one word,” Richardson and her co-author Alice Ragland wrote in the paper.
Clearly, the way Trump has used it to stoke political division is a long ways from the word’s Black solidarity origins.
“‘Woke’ has definitely been co-opted and stripped of its Black cultural roots and meaning,” Richardson told HuffPost. “It has been used to manipulate white fear and to promote hate, by people who do not want equity for Black people and other marginalized groups.”
Trump’s Version Of ‘Woke’ Is In The Minority
Trump’s broadly negative meaning of woke might also be by design. In his speech to Congress, Trump made the claim that because the country would be woke no longer, professionals like doctors and accountants will now “be hired and promoted based on skill and competence, not race or gender.”
It’s a claim that pits diversity, equity, and inclusion against meritocracy ― a false divide, many DEI experts stress, because DEI is actually what is necessary for a fair playing field in the workplace to be possible.
Under the status quo, multiple studies show that white men are the most likely to get job and education opportunities that are not based in merit.
But according to Republicans, “wokeness” needs to be rooted out. Similar to Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis also frequently campaigned against the horrors of “woke mob” and signed legislation known as the “Stop WOKE Act” to ban instruction in schools or jobs that suggest a person is privileged or oppressed because of their race, sex or national origin ― and had enforcement provisions that were later blocked by a federal judge.
When asked in a federal court, DeSantis’ general counsel said the term referred to “the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.”
Davey Shlasko, CEO and Founder of Think Again Training & Consulting, said Trump’s definition might be similar to what DeSantis’ lawyer said when he was asked to define “woke.”
“I think that is actually what Trump and others are talking about when they’re against wokeness ― they don’t want people to acknowledge, understand or work against systemic injustice,” Shlasko said.
At the same time, Shlasko said others may connect Trump’s version of wokeness to other things Trump has said that are more explicitly racist “and hear it as a condemnation of people who aren’t like them, or as permission to see people who aren’t like them as less than human.”
But if you hear woke as a bad word, that might say more about you than the person you are ridiculing, according to experts.
“Maybe some of the people who make fun of people for being woke are secretly jealous that those people seem to have something going for them, whether it be clarity of analysis, or solidarity … or the ability to succeed in spite of systemic inequality,” Shlasko said.
The truth is, Trump’s view of wokeness is in the shrinking minority. In a 2023 USA TODAY/Ipsos poll, a majority of Americans said the word had a more positive definition.
In the survey, 56% said the term means “to be informed, educated on and aware of social injustices.” This group included not just three in four Democrats who believed this statement ― but also more than a third of Republicans.
Recently, two-time Oscar winner and political activist Jane Fonda said, “‘Woke’ just means you give a damn about other people.” And, as Shlasko put it, if you follow the original meaning of the word, being woke is not a bad thing.
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“It is waking up to the reality that the system is unfair, and that collectively we can do something about it,” Shlasko said.