It has become an unfortunately effective way of dismissing racial, sexual or indeed any minority group concerns in the name of the ‘majority’ who tire of being told to “educate yourself” about whatever injustice is in vogue at the moment by zealous “social justice” warriors in their early twenties whose political consciousness has been forged in the sociology common room not in actual social spaces.
Student and youthful radicalism are, of course, nothing new, nor should it as enquiry into and questioning of received wisdoms and structures of authority represent healthy cognitive and emotional development, provided it is accompanied by the capacity for critical thinking. However it is the lack of the latter quality resulting from the absorption of new orthodoxies, that is one of the defects that many associate with “wokeness.” So how and why as the “w” word become such a swearword; one that attracts the same shorthand contempt as “PC” (Political Correctness) did in recent living memory? How has woke and its synonym “identity politics” with their etymological origins in collective Black (or African) American social struggle become such apparent millstones around the contemporary left and, even more tragically, opened up such possibilities for a “woke” right politics of identity and grievance. I propose that we do not throw the woke baby out with the woketarian bathwater but that a left/progressive politics for the 21st century be refashioned with the human qualities of solidarity and the intellectual heft of the Enlightenment; a concept so grievously trashed by the postmodern pseudophilosphy that has informed the vanguard of the woke.
The origins of the term “woke” date back to the 1930s when Black Americans urged each other to stay “woke” in the face of the dangers of racial violence. The term ‘identity politics’ was coined by the Combahee River Collective, an organisation of American Black feminist thinkers and organisers founded in 1974, who were participating in the anti-racist, feminist, and lesbian struggles of the time. Members included Audre Lorde and Barbara Smith, whose works still represent the basis of Black feminist politics. The Combahee River Collective Statement published in 1977 argued that Black women had been expected to subordinate their own struggles to the liberation of others for far too long. Cognisant of the extent to which misogyny ran rampant in anti-racist and black power movements and refuting the arguments made by some white lesbians for separation, the Collective insisted that back women don’t have the luxury of just cutting themselves off from their male counterparts, as they’re both under attack from racism. While identifying as socialist, The Combahee River Collective warned against viewing the working class as ‘merely raceless, sexless workers since as, Black women, they had personal witnesses to how race and sex exerted a kind of gravitational force on people’s working and economic lives. But although their politics were rooted in the conditions of their own oppression, the Collective also knew that their political work necessitated coalition building with people that were not like them.[1]
On all sides, woke has become shorthand less for a set of widely accepted beliefs than their strident dissemination on online platforms prone to denouncing their opponents as morally evil, beyond the pale of redemption in the manner of Emmanuel Goldstein of 1984, engaging in competitive victimhood and favouring performative protest, sometimes carried out in a manner seemingly to cause the maximum inconvenience and irritation, over practical change.[2]
Arguably the high-water mark of woke/mass social justice activism were the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests which exploded globally in the aftermath of the racist police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in the summer of 2020. The Extinction Rebellion mass protests which spread across the United Kingdom and beyond in 2019 have a good claim to at least the runners-up spot. Both had radicalising effects on key demographics; Black people or people of African origin in the case of BLM and youth in the case of Extinction Rebellion (XR) symbolised by the globally iconic figure of Greta Thunberg. Both spoke to the anger and frustrations of younger generations whose experience of racial injustice in the case of BLM and fears and outrage over the environmental degradation of our planet appeared to be (in their eyes) ignored or side tracked by the older or policy making generations. Both appeared to have delivered significant quick wins; the commitment by governments and municipal authorities to declarations of climate emergencies and the according policy adjustments in the case of XR; initiatives to tackle structural racism, programmes to address unconscious race biases and the global adoption of “taking the knee” as a universal signifier of anti-racism. However, both movements had a really ephemeral quality. The BLM got diverted into wider and distracting ideological concerns and controversies about the probity of its leadership; XR split and spawned a newer and more radical group, Just Stop Oil (JSO), who extended the ER direct action modus operandi from closures of major thoroughfares by mass sit downs to spraying of paint at major art works in galleries and at national sporting events like the All England tennis championships at Wimbledon. This decade has also seen significant pushback against the Net Zero agenda and multiculturalism and immigration by the Alt-Right in both Europe and North America of which the most startling indicator has been the return of Donald Trump to the White House. So, is the “woke left” responsible for the triumphs and triumphalism of the “woke right”?
By 2022, woke was already becoming in the words of the then First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, “a pejorative term of abuse.” The pollsters YouGov that year identified the most visibly woke issue in the eyes of the public – above trans rights, no-platforming people whose opinions you dislike, stronger action on climate change, and BLM itself, was the removal of historical statues associated with slavery like that of Edward Colston, a 17th century slave trader, removed from its plinth in Bristol and rolled into the River Avon by BLM protestors. 61% of those polled cited such actions as most typically woke.[3]
The toppling of Colston provides an interesting and challenging conundrum for social justice activists from any cause. After their successful defence against the criminal charges brought against them over the removal of the Colston statue, the four white protestors argued that Bristol’s then mayor, Marvin Rees, should have done more to remove it legally. Rees – who is of Jamaican heritage - replied by posing the question whether four Black defendants would have been similarly acquitted. If not, 'then what we saw was an exercise in middle-class white privilege, alongside a declaration of anti-racism.” In what goes to the heart of the discursive and strategic purpose of racial and social justice movements, Rees added that while symbolic acts could be catalysts for change, without concrete action:
The origins of the term “woke” date back to the 1930s when Black Americans urged each other to stay “woke” in the face of the dangers of racial violence. The term ‘identity politics’ was coined by the Combahee River Collective, an organisation of American Black feminist thinkers and organisers founded in 1974, who were participating in the anti-racist, feminist, and lesbian struggles of the time. Members included Audre Lorde and Barbara Smith, whose works still represent the basis of Black feminist politics. The Combahee River Collective Statement published in 1977 argued that Black women had been expected to subordinate their own struggles to the liberation of others for far too long. Cognisant of the extent to which misogyny ran rampant in anti-racist and black power movements and refuting the arguments made by some white lesbians for separation, the Collective insisted that back women don’t have the luxury of just cutting themselves off from their male counterparts, as they’re both under attack from racism. While identifying as socialist, The Combahee River Collective warned against viewing the working class as ‘merely raceless, sexless workers since as, Black women, they had personal witnesses to how race and sex exerted a kind of gravitational force on people’s working and economic lives. But although their politics were rooted in the conditions of their own oppression, the Collective also knew that their political work necessitated coalition building with people that were not like them.[1]
On all sides, woke has become shorthand less for a set of widely accepted beliefs than their strident dissemination on online platforms prone to denouncing their opponents as morally evil, beyond the pale of redemption in the manner of Emmanuel Goldstein of 1984, engaging in competitive victimhood and favouring performative protest, sometimes carried out in a manner seemingly to cause the maximum inconvenience and irritation, over practical change.[2]
Arguably the high-water mark of woke/mass social justice activism were the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests which exploded globally in the aftermath of the racist police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in the summer of 2020. The Extinction Rebellion mass protests which spread across the United Kingdom and beyond in 2019 have a good claim to at least the runners-up spot. Both had radicalising effects on key demographics; Black people or people of African origin in the case of BLM and youth in the case of Extinction Rebellion (XR) symbolised by the globally iconic figure of Greta Thunberg. Both spoke to the anger and frustrations of younger generations whose experience of racial injustice in the case of BLM and fears and outrage over the environmental degradation of our planet appeared to be (in their eyes) ignored or side tracked by the older or policy making generations. Both appeared to have delivered significant quick wins; the commitment by governments and municipal authorities to declarations of climate emergencies and the according policy adjustments in the case of XR; initiatives to tackle structural racism, programmes to address unconscious race biases and the global adoption of “taking the knee” as a universal signifier of anti-racism. However, both movements had a really ephemeral quality. The BLM got diverted into wider and distracting ideological concerns and controversies about the probity of its leadership; XR split and spawned a newer and more radical group, Just Stop Oil (JSO), who extended the ER direct action modus operandi from closures of major thoroughfares by mass sit downs to spraying of paint at major art works in galleries and at national sporting events like the All England tennis championships at Wimbledon. This decade has also seen significant pushback against the Net Zero agenda and multiculturalism and immigration by the Alt-Right in both Europe and North America of which the most startling indicator has been the return of Donald Trump to the White House. So, is the “woke left” responsible for the triumphs and triumphalism of the “woke right”?
By 2022, woke was already becoming in the words of the then First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, “a pejorative term of abuse.” The pollsters YouGov that year identified the most visibly woke issue in the eyes of the public – above trans rights, no-platforming people whose opinions you dislike, stronger action on climate change, and BLM itself, was the removal of historical statues associated with slavery like that of Edward Colston, a 17th century slave trader, removed from its plinth in Bristol and rolled into the River Avon by BLM protestors. 61% of those polled cited such actions as most typically woke.[3]
The toppling of Colston provides an interesting and challenging conundrum for social justice activists from any cause. After their successful defence against the criminal charges brought against them over the removal of the Colston statue, the four white protestors argued that Bristol’s then mayor, Marvin Rees, should have done more to remove it legally. Rees – who is of Jamaican heritage - replied by posing the question whether four Black defendants would have been similarly acquitted. If not, 'then what we saw was an exercise in middle-class white privilege, alongside a declaration of anti-racism.” In what goes to the heart of the discursive and strategic purpose of racial and social justice movements, Rees added that while symbolic acts could be catalysts for change, without concrete action:
they can be more about satisfying the immediate emotional needs of members of privileged groups than about changing the actual political and economic status of oppressed groups.[4]
Although the Colston Four were not speaking from this perspective by dint of their skin pigmentation and likely social status, Ash Sarkar in her blunt analysis of how the left has become paralysed by its adoption of identity politics, observes the salience of two of its central tenets – victimhood and its close relative, lived experience. She understands that people want to remedy injustices by giving people from certain communities a boost, a better hearing, a wider audience. But she then cautions about the social perils of victim status. Referencing the ‘white anger’ and the ‘violence’ brought ‘into the space’ by Roger Hallam’s, co-founder of XR and JSO, dismissal of the attendees at an activist meeting in Liverpool (part of the pan leftist The World Transformed event) as ‘a bunch of fucking cunts’, she states that ‘we maintain a comically low threshold for harm and a prohibitively high threshold for trust in other people.’ She further recalls how at the same event, during a discussion on socialism and climate change, one panellist called for the dismantling of ‘all our movements that aren’t majority people of colour’ and the acquiescence of the audience in this call. Quite apart from providing excellent sketch material for the comedy circuit; these vignettes speak to the inner fragility that people caught up in such a milieu internalise. By turning individuals into the anointed representatives for their identity community; by disengaging from other struggles that seem too different from one’s own and by pressing for the most eye-catching, ‘right on’ positions. Social justice warriors thus cease to be comrades but competitors in the race to bottom for recognition in the attention economy in which feelings and competitive grievance are the dominant currencies.[5]
It was not always like this in progressive or left-wing spaces. In the 20th century, the analyses of anti-racists and feminists were grounded in materialist and social scientific approaches. Materialism stresses that consciousness is shaped by actual world conditions, not the reverse process. An understanding of a person or whole communities of people requires knowledge of the distribution of wealth, resources, and access to power. However, this objective approach to viewing the world is now in retreat. Due partly to the mistrust of metanarratives cultivated by postmodern and poststructuralist accounts of language, there is no primacy of the truth, but my truth. Subjective judgements delivered from the temple of victimhood with the imprimatur of “lived experience” are elevated to the status of infallible doctrine. Material truth is now trumped by agreement with whatever is most emotionally and socially convenient.[6]
Somewhat counter-intuitively, core to woke philosophy is sometimes called “systematic thinking”, or the idea that society consists of overlapping systems of oppression, from capitalism to patriarchy, which we are socialised not to notice (through the manufacturing of consent or hegemonic dominance?) and to which we must be aroused to consciousness by uncovering and separating out the power dynamics in everyday interactions between men and women and between people of differing races and ethnicities.[7] A common synonym for this idea is “intersectionality” and on the surface resembles the analysis of the Combahee River Collective Statement. While identifying and explaining undercurrents are very important to progressives; the failure to join the dots or the isolation of one’s favourite cause has led to the pile-ons and point scoring in the bear pit that is contemporary Twitter/X.
To address the pathologies associated with “wokery” and social justice movement and to suggest ways forward, Luke Tryl, Director of the More in Common think tank founded in memory of the murdered MP Jo Cox, published a report co-authored by Ed Hodgson in February 2025 suggesting that progressive zeal is its own worst enemy. For his efforts, he was rewarded with comments such as this gem on the supposedly kinder, gentler social media platform Bluesky “Stop acting like being willing to work with Nazis is a fucking virtue, you creep.” More in Common ‘s polling divides the public into seven political tribes, from Established Liberals (affluent centrists) to Loyal Nationalists (typical “red wall” voters). The subject of the report was the tribe “Progressive Activists” who although only comprising one in ten of the population punch above their weight in national conversations by being well-educated, highly motivated to change the world and, as five times as likely as other groups to say “woke” was beneficial to society, the beating heart of woke. They did make things happen; like advances in women’s and gay rights and reduction in outright racism.[8]
However, the overarching fatal flaw in Progressive Activists’ ideology and practice is that their lack of awareness of how much they are distanced from mainstream public opinion on cultural issues. They’re the only group where a majority thinks that immigration should be as high or higher than it is now, and that protecting people from hate speech. Tryl’s polling finds that Progressive Activists overestimate by a factor of two or three how much others agree with their core beliefs, from abolishing the monarchy to letting children change gender. Accordingly, convinced by their own rectitude, they expend too much energy on mobilising the masses they mistakenly believe to be on their side.at the expense of persuasion of the doubters or uncommitted. Worse still, the purist world view that many Progressive Activists hold to militates against the tactical coalition building that previous generations of social movement activists came to appreciate the value of. Their devotion to woke fundamentalism means a refusal to work with others who are perceived to be ideologically unsound (more than a quarter of Tyrl’s research cohort would not campaign alongside those who believe in Israel’s right to exist and the annual Women’s March on Washington was almost derailed owing to opposition to participation by “Zionist” women, for example) and tend to be dismissive of other people’s smaller, well-meaning efforts.[9]
Today’s activist warriors may well argue that the Suffragettes were ahead of the curve in the 1910s with their militant direct-action tactics like breaking shop windows and disruption of key national events such as the Epsom Derby as were Gay and Lesbian activists in the 1980s with their interruption of primetime TV broadcasts. But the reality is that two-thirds of Britons disapprove of XR/JSO type calling cards such as protestors blocking roads and gluing themselves to railings. Public annoyance is further inflamed by people being delayed on their way to hospital and activists jumping on top of London Underground trains and hectoring about the (undoubted) impacts of the climate crisis just do not cut the mustard with people who perceive essential public services suffering from the stunts of the narcissistic zealotry of the foot soldiers of the woketariat.
A further impediment to the realisation of social justice aims is the complexity and clunkiness of the language deployed in their campaigns. In 2022, the former Labour party press officer Chris Clarke published a report for the think tank Progressive Britain, arguing that the way progressives talk partly explains why liberal, centre-left parties on both sides of the Atlantic keep losing elections. Populists of the Right such as Trump or the Vote Leave campaign under Dominic Cummings use simple, direct, verb-based language (“build a wall, “take back control”) which collapses all nuance and is policy-barren, but which has instant cut-through to the public. Progressive activists, by contrast, use more complex, “systematic” language which does not hit home. Slogans such as “global warming is racism” – on the grounds that emissions from (mostly white) big economies disproportionately harm (mostly non-white) developing countries may make coherent logic to experts in the field but may not connect with the lay person. Minimising jargon really helps. Two-thirds of Britons can’t even confidently define “Net Zero,” according to Tryl. However, support for the policy rises 14 points when it is explained as “balancing emissions”, which sounds more achievable to people who otherwise think they’re being asked to eradicate all carbon use.
Finally, the tragedy of wokeism, in broad bush terms, is the virtual disappearance of class from its terms of reference. Class, as defined by education level rather than occupational status, is now a bigger cleavage in US politics than race, and is a key predictor of Reform UK’s success in Britain where its leader Nigel Farage - privately educated who made his fortune as a metals commodity dealer in the City of London before his successful entry into right-wing populist politics and shock jock broadcasting - is regarded as a tribune politician for blue-collar Britain. Whereas in the past, class was the glue that welded the intersectional elements of the movements of their time which were girded by analyses solid materiality; now it is the ghost of Banquo at the feast of woke word salads. Into this vacuum has leapt the populist, nativist right with its narrative of the dispossession and victimisation of poor, working class, white Indigenous communities at the hands of globalist elites and deracinated cosmopolitanism. The radicals of the past would just have focused on the economic and structural oppression of the working class (sans any racial or cultural divisions).
A left grounded in universalist, humanist ethics and with the ability to articulate the specificity of how racism, misogyny and classism interacted in the Child Sexual Exploitation scandal in Britain spanning over three decades (the racially motivated mass rape and abuse of vulnerable girls from dysfunctional backgrounds and accommodated in the care system by groups of older men of predominantly Pakistani Asian heritage) would have been able to identify the dereliction of duty by local authorities and law enforcement agencies towards girls from poor backgrounds and locate it in sexist and classist assumptions around the ‘lifestyle’ choices of these children. A left thus empowered would hopefully not have been enveloped by the grotesque and criminal spectacle of shielding abusers from justice on faux anti-racism as happened to more than one Labour controlled municipality and perhaps within echelons of the national Labour Party. Never should and never again should the protection of children from mass sex criminality become a cause celebre for the Tommy Robinsons and Rupert Lowes of this world.
[1] Ash Sarkar (2025) Minority Rule. Adventures in the Culture War. London: Bloomsbury pp.29-30
[2] Gaby Hinsliff, 'How Does Woke Start Winning Again?' The Long Read - Guardian 10th June 2025 pp.5-8
[3] Ibid, p.6
[4] Ibid, p.6
[5] Sarkar, pp.23-27
[6] Ibid, pp.27-28
[7] Hinsliff, p.6
[8] Ibid
[9] Ibid
[1] Ash Sarkar (2025) Minority Rule. Adventures in the Culture War. London: Bloomsbury pp.29-30
[2] Gaby Hinsliff, 'How Does Woke Start Winning Again?' The Long Read - Guardian 10th June 2025 pp.5-8
[3] Ibid, p.6
[4] Ibid, p.6
[5] Sarkar, pp.23-27
[6] Ibid, pp.27-28
[7] Hinsliff, p.6
[8] Ibid
[9] Ibid
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.
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