The word woke has been traveling for a long time, carrying its own quiet weather. In the early decades of the 20th century, African American Vernacular English gave it a second sight: not just the fact of being awake, but the state of being attuned to what hides in plain view. By 1938, Lead Belly could sing it into the Scottsboro Boys ballad as both a warning and an act of care, stay woke, because the world is a sharp edged place for Black lives.

In 1962, Harlem writer William Melvin Kelley put the term into print for the New York Times, describing its place in the living lexicon. Through the civil rights era, it moved in the mouths of activists, a compact way of saying you are awake to the machinery of injustice and you will not be lulled back to sleep.

By the time Erykah Badu met it, the word’s roots were deep and its branches wide. On her 2008 album New Amerykah Part One, in the song Master Teacher, she sings, “I stay woke.” Her woke is not only about resistance. It is political, yes, but also spiritual, environmental, domestic. It is knowing what is happening in your neighborhood and your body, in your history and your heart. She credits Georgia Anne Muldrow for first handing her that phrase in its contemporary sense, and she carried it forward.

In 2012, Badu cast it like a stone into the digital pond, tweeting “stay woke” in solidarity with Pussy Riot. The ripples spread. By the mid 2010s, it was a rallying cry in Black Lives Matter protests, shorthand for a refusal to be numbed by repetition or brutality.

Now, in the 2020s, woke is a contested territory. It is worn proudly by some, wielded as an insult by others. In certain hands, the word has become a badge stripped of its roots, brandished less as a compass of values than as a weapon of judgment. The pattern is not new; it echoes how some on the political right have used Christianity as a public emblem, not as a living faith or ethic, but as a shorthand for belonging and a litmus test for worthiness. In both cases, the symbol hardens, becoming less about the deep work it once carried and more about declaring who is in and who is out.

Yet underneath the noise, the through line is still there if you know how to listen. It is a call to remain alive to the patterns beneath the surface, to stay in the long work of paying attention. Like any piece of living language, woke is a migration story, folklore in motion, shifting shape as it moves from one teller to the next. It keeps traveling. It keeps looking back over its shoulder to see who else is still awake.