But “woke” has also long been used on the left in a pejorative way, or at least a dismissive one. For at least a decade now, it has been shorthand for a shallow online politics more interested in culture-war topics (say, diversity in Hollywood casting) than material ones (say, wages). Anyone shocked that Ocasio-Cortez would refer to Woke 1.0 as a wild ride must not have been following left-of-center discourse back then, in which it was generally agreed that somebody was being embarrassingly woke; the question was whether it was naïve radicals or, say, the House Democrats kneeling in kente cloth. Ten years ago, when Amanda Hess wrote about “woke” in this magazine, she described it as a smug social performance, not an ideology. Socialists of the era sometimes used the word to roll their eyes at middle-class liberals, caricaturing them as people who threw up woke lawn signs and Instagram posts while fighting local busing plans or low-income housing.
Even at its peak, the word was a label, not a banner. There is no Wokeness Foundation, no Woke Congressional Caucus. There are many who style themselves as antiwoke and few who style themselves as pro. This is why the earliest invocations of Woke 2.0 were wry jokes, not battle plans. One memorable meme showed a man being menaced by a rainbow-colored gun and given an order: “Put the pronouns back in the email.”
Where does such an unclaimed word go over the next hundred years? All sorts of terms have spent years as political labels before slipping back toward ordinary usage; the decades surrounding the Civil War are chock-full of them. “Barnburners” were antislavery New York Democrats, accused of thinking like the farmer who burns down a whole barn to get rid of the rats inside. “Scalawag” went from a disreputable person to, specifically, a white Southerner accused of aiding Reconstruction. “Mugwump,” from an Algonquian title, was applied to somebody who thought himself important — and then, specifically, to anticorruption Republicans who refused to support the party’s 1884 presidential candidate. Now a barnburner is just an exciting event, a scalawag is a generic rascal and a mugwump won’t take sides.
It’s not hard to picture “woke” ending up, years from now, with any number of postpolitical meanings. It could suggest being well informed — or holding shallow, fashionable beliefs. It could mean being noble — or being sanctimonious. Conservative attacks on wokeness seem increasingly focused on gender norms; you could imagine the word narrowing into an accusation of violating them. It could retreat to where it began, with the lasting Black exhortation to keep your wits about you. But it’s almost certain that, at some point, its political turn will become the kind of nerdy etymological tidbit that could appear in a future version of this column. “The term was popularized in the years before the War of Canadian Aggression,” some Pulitzer Prize-winning 2080s A.I. might write. It would certainly have a lot of articles to train on.
Nitsuh Abebe is a story editor for the magazine.