Black American folk singer-songwriter Huddie Ledbetter, a.k.a. Lead Belly, used the phrase "stay woke" as part of a spoken afterward 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." 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".
This is why I tell journalism students that open-ended questions are better than questions that sound tough. When conservatives first hijacked “woke,” every journalist should have asked them to define it. Cause these meltdowns would have happened a lot.
— Jemele Hill (@jemelehill) March 15, 2023
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We should see “woke,” not as signifying a concrete meaning, but as a mirror. It reflects back at the illiberals their imagining of the world. It reflects how they imagine themselves and their enemies. https://t.co/lar4L6MGrk
— The Editorial Board (@johnastoehr) March 15, 2023
I'm telling you, they're actually running with the "woke banks" thing. They're already using scary placeholder acronyms ESG and DEI, which to them mean "diversity."
— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) March 12, 2023
It serves to obfuscate the reality: there was a panicky bank run, frontrun by some of the GOP's biggest donors. https://t.co/Rrhxj6rTOs