Woke and it’s Effect on Humanity
Let’s start with what nobody on the right wants you to know.
“Woke” is not a liberal invention. It is not a product of university gender studies departments, Silicon Valley diversity consultants, or coastal elites trying to make you feel bad about yourself. It is a Black American survival term that is at least a hundred years old. It was born in communities that needed a word for paying attention — because not paying attention could get you killed.
The people currently declaring war on it didn’t invent it. They hijacked it, distorted it, and then built a political movement around opposing the version they created.
That is worth understanding clearly before you take a single side in this debate.
Where It Actually Came From
In 1923, Jamaican Black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey stood before his people and said: “Wake up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa!“ It wasn’t a metaphor about morning routines. It was a call to consciousness — see what’s being done to you, understand the system you’re living inside, don’t sleepwalk through your own oppression.
By 1924, “stay woke” was already appearing in Black American newspapers. In 1940, Negro mine workers fighting discriminatory pay declared: “We were asleep. But we will stay woke from now on.” These were not radicals trying to tear down civilization. They were workers asking to be paid the same as their white colleagues.
In 1962, Harlem-based writer William Melvin Kelley wrote an essay for the New York Times called “If You’re Woke, You Dig It” — documenting the specific phenomenon of white culture appropriating Black slang, distorting its meaning, until the original creators abandoned it entirely. He was writing prophetically about something that wouldn’t fully happen for another six decades.
Stokely Carmichael used it in his 1967 Black Power speech. Ida B. Wells embodied it. W.E.B. Du Bois, in The Souls of Black Folk, named the same underlying truth without the word: that Black Americans were required to carry a double consciousness — always seeing themselves through both their own eyes and the eyes of a society that considered them lesser.
“Woke” was the shorthand for all of that. Stay alert. Know the system. Don’t get caught off guard by a world designed to disadvantage you.
That is the word’s entire heritage. A century of Black Americans using language to survive.
The Hijacking
The word surfaced again in 2014, carried by the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s death and the Ferguson uprising. It spread beyond Black communities into mainstream discourse, and for a brief window, it meant roughly what it always had: awareness of racial injustice, an intention to pay attention.
Then the right got hold of it.
What followed was a masterclass in political rebranding. Suddenly, “woke” meant, depending on which conservative you asked, Marxism, cancel culture, reverse racism, the erasure of white history, the indoctrination of children, the destruction of merit, or the end of free speech. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis literally built legislation around opposing it, creating the “Stop Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act” — a backronym so tortured it tells you everything about the effort required to make “woke” sound sinister.
His own federal judges, including two appointed by Donald Trump, called that law unconstitutional. A federal judge reviewing it opened his ruling with the first line of George Orwell’s 1984. He wrote: “But it cannot win the argument by muzzling its opponents.”
Even the courts recognized what was happening.
DeSantis isn’t alone in performing this particular trick. Closer to home, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith stood before the Canada Strong and Free Network conference in Ottawa on May 8, 2026 — a gathering billed as the largest convention of Canadian conservatives — and listed ending “the era of woke-ism” among her government’s greatest achievements. She received appreciative cheers as she declared it proof that “when you get the fundamentals right and stay true to conservative values, the results will follow.” Lethbridge Herald
Let that land for a moment. My Premier — the leader of the province I live in — stood in front of a room full of political allies and declared victory over a word. Not over poverty. Not over Alberta’s youth unemployment crisis. Not over a healthcare system groaning under pressure. Not over the separatist movement actively circulating petitions to break this province away from the country. She declared victory over a word — a word that, as we’ve established, originated as a Black American tool for survival — and the room gave her a standing ovation. This is what passes for governance on the Canadian right. This is what they consider an achievement worth celebrating. When your biggest win is that you made awareness unfashionable, you might want to examine what exactly you’ve been doing with power.
What They’re Actually Rejecting
Here is the thing that needs to be said plainly.
When someone tells you they are “anti-woke,” they are not opposing an ideology. They are opposing awareness itself. They say, ‘I don’t want to know.’ I don’t want my children to know. I don’t want the people around me to talk about it. The existence of systemic disadvantage makes me uncomfortable, and my discomfort is more important than the reality of people who live inside that system.
That is not a political position. That is wilful blindness dressed up as courage.
The right took a word that meant pay attention and turned it into a slur for anyone who does.
Think about that for a moment. The actual thing they are opposing — when you strip away the culture war performance — is the idea that awareness of injustice is a civic virtue. That knowing history matters. That the conditions people are born into shape their outcomes. That a society can examine itself honestly without that examination being an attack on the people doing the examining.
They didn’t just steal the word. They inverted its meaning and declared war on the original.
Why Language Matters This Much
William Melvin Kelley saw it coming in 1962. When Black slang gets appropriated and distorted by mainstream culture, the original creators eventually abandon it. The word becomes unusable — contaminated by the distortion, weaponized against its origins.
That is happening in real time with “woke.” And it matters, not because a word is precious, but because what’s being erased is the history attached to the word. Strip “woke” of its roots and you strip it of the century of Black Americans who built it out of necessity. You take a survival tool and turn it into a punchline.
The NAACP has formally called for reclaiming “woke” as part of African American cultural heritage — not because they’re sentimental about slang, but because they understand that controlling the definition of a word is a form of controlling the conversation.
What ‘Ending Woke-ism’ Actually Looks Like in Alberta
So what does ending woke-ism look like in practice, here in this province? Let’s be specific, because Smith has been busy.
Under the banner of protecting children and conservative values, her government passed legislation banning gender-affirming care for minors, restricting name and pronoun changes in schools for children 15 and under, and gutting comprehensive sex education — moving it to an opt-in basis. The restrictions on gender-affirming care were condemned by the Canadian Medical Association, the Canadian Pediatric Society, the Alberta Medical Association, and more than 80 other organizations across Canada. When courts pushed back, Smith invoked the notwithstanding clause — the constitutional override designed as a last resort — not once, but repeatedly, specifically to shield this legislation from Charter scrutiny. An Alberta court that granted an injunction noted that trans youth “will suffer irreparable harm,” including interference with their autonomy, unwanted permanent physical development, and serious psychological distress. The government proceeded anyway. Egale Canada + 2
Smith’s attack on sex education will deprive children of knowledge on anatomy and consent — knowledge they need to recognize and report sexual harassment and violence. Trans youth in Alberta already face the highest rates of verbal harassment of any province in the country, with 90% of trans students reporting being verbally harassed based on their gender or sexual identity. These are not abstract statistics. These are children going to school in Calgary, in Edmonton, in Lethbridge — children whose safety just got measurably worse in the name of fighting wokism. Meanwhile, the economy is struggling, healthcare is under-resourced, and the education system is being dismantled — but Smith is in Ottawa collecting standing ovations for declaring victory over a word. The Conversation + 2
This is the poison. Not the word. Not the awareness. The poison is a government that uses manufactured culture war outrage as a distraction from its actual failures, and calls that governance.
And then there are the books. In May 2025, Smith’s government entered what one writer accurately called “the book-banning business,” issuing a ministerial order directing schools to remove library materials deemed sexually explicit. The four books initially targeted — Gender Queer, Fun Home, Blankets, and Flamer — were quickly pulled from Calgary and Edmonton school shelves. When The Tyee pointed out that three of the four featured LGBTQ+ narratives, the Education Minister called that observation “frankly” offensive. The order ballooned. Edmonton Public Schools assembled a removal list of over 200 titles, including Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
When the list leaked publicly and caused national outrage, Smith didn’t apologize for the policy; she accused the school board of “vicious compliance.” Margaret Atwood responded by writing a short story she described as “suitable for 17-year-olds in Alberta schools,” in which Danielle Smith loses her job and becomes a commander’s wife. It made international headlines.
Teachers across the province had already removed or given away books they’d purchased with their own money before the government rewrote the order. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association put it plainly: “The banning of books is a hallmark of censorship, not democracy.” The Walrus + 2
This is the same government that stood in Ottawa two days ago and took a standing ovation for ending woke-ism. What they actually ended — or tried to — was I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings on an Alberta school shelf. Maya Angelou, writing about surviving racism and sexual violence as a Black girl in the American South, apparently poses a threat to Alberta’s children. The birds that sing in caged places, it turns out, make our Premier nervous.
The Bottom Line
The next time someone tells you they’re against “woke” ideology, ask them one question: Aware of what, exactly, do you not want people to be?
Because that’s the real question, not whether the word has been misused, expanded, or become a rhetorical blunt instrument in certain progressive circles — it has, and those are legitimate conversations. But underneath all of it, the original meaning remains.
Stay woke meant: pay attention, the world is not neutral, knowing the truth about your circumstances is the beginning of changing them. A hundred years of Black Americans built that meaning with their lives.
The right didn’t reject woke ideology. They rejected the people who needed the word in the first place, and then dared to act like they were the ones under attack.
I am woke. I have been woke my entire adult life, and I wear that without apology. I believe in human dignity — not as a political talking point, but as a non-negotiable baseline for how a society treats its most vulnerable members. I believe that a trans teenager in Red Deer deserves to go to school without being harassed, that a Black girl’s story of surviving violence belongs on a library shelf, and that a gay kid in Medicine Hat deserves to see his family reflected in his classroom. I believe that social injustice — here in Alberta, across this country, and beyond — does not fix itself through silence, and that awareness is not the enemy of progress; it is the prerequisite for it. Call that woke if you want. The word was built by people who refused to look away from hard truths, and I am proud to stand in that lineage. The only thing I am not, is asleep. When you call me woke, it’s not the flex you think it is. You are just telling me that you are ignorant.
Stay fierce | The world will adjust.
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