As others have mentioned, the term has its origins in African American English, basically meaning “stay aware of the systemic forces that oppress us.” According to another user here, apparently this word was in use since the 1930s.

However, I never heard it until about 15 years ago or so, when I started noticing it filtering in on the more left wing spaces on reddit. Initally, I was mostly confused by why anyone would mangle english so much - but through more exposure, I realized that the word wasn’t being used to communicate information, so much as signal cultural affiliation. And the word’s transition from use in black american culture to reddit, where I found it, became obvious. Like so many other things in black culture, it had been coopted by white people - in this case, 14 year old Tumblr feminists.

Bill Burr has a great bit on this change, where he points out that “woke”, in its traditional black usage, sounds very cool. But, coopted by white people, immediately becomes uncool. And it’s uncool not because of the word itself, but because of the people who use it - white people trying to boost their social capital among their peers by demonstrating their familiarity with black culture. And thus, the term takes on a negative connotation - the connotation of “ugh, fuck, here we go - another lecture.”

In pockets of liberal/left wing culture, “woke” may retain its original meaning to those who use it. But among the vast majority of the population, self-describing as “woke” is cringy. It is basically outing yourself as being terminally online, basing your self esteem on how much of a good person other people think you are, and feeling holier-than-thou.

Hence, conservatives identified a natural slur against their enemies, and started tossing it around as much as possible. This works for them because, even if their takes are as dumb as possible (and lord knows they try), no one wants to defend “woke people”, because woke people are cringe.

It’s from the 30s, actually.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke

Implies waking up to the systemic violence and oppression and beginning to do something about it.

Then it began being used as a bad thing because people were understanding systemic harm and those in power did not like it.

Overuse the word, make it mean nothing, remove its power, push the people back into oppression.

It’s from African-American English, from the 1930s! And it’s always had more or less the same meaning – originally “being awake to (aware of) racial discrimination”, but now it’s obviously grown to cover discrimination and inequalities in general.

Would that imply that things that are not “woke” or are “anti-woke” are “asleep”?

Yep! 👍 But don’t forget, these people are also against Antifa, i.e. “anti anti-fascist”. They don’t care how bad the labels sound, as long as they’re making people’s lives miserable.

Do not look too deep into Political catch phrases for meaning. It is all very stupid.

Woke came to be associated with overly politically correct people that like to falsely accuse people of bigotry, by design the right wing Media made sure those people that suck were associated with it, and so it was used as a catch-all phrase to target anything they want to change. It really is as simple as that.

As others already wrote, the original meaning has been specific to awareness of racial discrimination, later broadened to general discrimination topics.

But that is just the US, and e.g. in Germany these roots (and also the connection to wake/asleep) are mostly missing.

So it is just a normal imported word, with no clear antonym existing.

Also because of this only recent import of the term, it is less connected to its original meaning, but often only associated with a well-intended, but superficial kind of activism.
E.g. it is heavily associated with a generally not very popular over-gendering going on in official and news texts, which leads to a broken kind of the German language. (German is heavily gendered, but a word’s gender often has nothing to do with the sexual gender).

So the term had a somewhat negative connotation to begin with, even in more progressive circles.
Doesn’t hinder the far right from doing anti-woke campaigns nonetheless, wokism is just such a nice (but actually in the broader population none-existent) opponent. And they use the term “Anti-Woke”, because it just makes sense for an imported word.

More time is required to type the word woke than is spent thinking about what it means by people who use it as a pejorative

It’s a buzzword for anything the fascists don’t like.

Where I’m from, “woke” is a generic code word used by white racists to refer to anything which doesn’t align to their principles. Any disagreement with their belief is simply labeled as “woke” because they cannot actually define and defend their use of the word, or directly name “the thing” (hard n----R word) out loud in public.

“They” don’t like the term “woke” because like all good music it has Afro-American origins. It started off as describing somebody who was aware of racial discrimination and over the decades broadened in meaning to include a host of other social issues. And then it was thrown into the culture war meat grinder.

I like the parallel to the “wake up, sheeple, do your own research” crowd. I hadn’t noticed it before. It’s funny how two uses of this inoccuous verb that can probably be traced all the way back to the Proto-Indoeuropean language have ended up on opposite sides of the aforementioned meat grinder.

It means they dislike the people that brand themselves as woke.

It’s like asking anti-AI people their opinion on support vector machines - you’ll rarely get an informed answer.

It seems “woke” come from groups of activists uniting in the belives that as long as their will be some kind of discriminations they will all be in a threat.

Therefore, all discriminated (including those who were, and those who could become) should unit and oppose, both to that discrimination and to the principle of discrimination.

Just as you may or not be actualy victim of some type of racism, but if you have some origines that could become discriminated some day. And the woke view is that you should refuse and oppose all kind of discrimination based on race or origines, because as long as one is seen as acceptable, yours could become (remain, or become back) at threat.

This as made a big union of groups opposed to conservative views. So feminist would also fight against racism, etc.

So by extension and out of fear, “woke” is the union of all type of those who do not fully follow the actual system ; at least for those who fully follow it.

The man stopped and asked, “My friend, what are you? Are you a celestial being or a god?”

“No,” said the Buddha.

“Well, then are you some kind of magician or wizard?”

Again the Buddha answered, “No.”

“Are you a man?”

“No.”

“Well, my friend, then what are you?”

The Buddha replied, “I am woke.”