Wokeness. How a concept became a political battleground
Notes for a discussion
Spoken and written by Tudor Rickards
January 13, 2025
The widespread use of the term Woke has been attributed to the American folk and blues singer Huddie William Ledbetter (1888-2049), better known as Lead Belly.
In his performances to people of colour, he popularised the injunction ‘Stay woke’, (stay awake) to those injustices imposed on them.
The term returned in the vocabulary of civil rights activists in America in the 2010s. A tipping point was its use in the rise of the protest movement Black Lives Matter, in 2014 after the shooting of Michael Brown, by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Brown’s killing and the subsequent events became a national controversy touching on much larger national issues of race, justice, and police violence.
