“Woke 1.0 was crazy,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York said in a recent interview.
The congresswoman, speaking on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, seemed to distance herself from the positions of an era of Democratic politics around 2020, shortly after she rose to prominence. Some on the left now see the rhetoric of that time as ineffective and divisive. There has been a widespread retreat on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts among corporations. And some public officials, including Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York, have walked back their calls to defund the police.
Forgive me for not caring, but I have literally zero idea what “woke 1.0” is supposed to mean.
We as a society really need to move beyond the word “woke”, which as best was teenage slang and never any kind of concrete policy. Democrats would be smart to focus on a simple message driven by economics and human/civil rights.
Woke was a black term about being aware of systemic racial injustice. Just another thing taken out of context by those unaware of its origins and let it get twisted. I knew woke was about racial injustice when I was in high school in 2010. People just dont learn words these days and believe a guy on youtube or a politician over wikipedia.
As with most things, it was stolen from the black community and bastardized in order to attack them