Language, like land, is never safe from colonization. If there’s something white folks—especially white conservatives—can’t help but do, it’s take something that isn’t theirs, plant a flag in it, and redefine it until it loses all connection to its roots.

Case in point: the word woke.

This week, I found myself digging through an article from the Legal Defense Fund titled HOW WOKE WENT FROM “BLACK” TO “BAD,” and it’s worth your time, especially if you’re tempted to throw the word around without knowing where it came from or how it got here.

To summarize: woke is a Black word. It has its roots in Black consciousness, in Black resistance, in Black survival. Long before it was a buzzword for Fox News, it was a shorthand reminder in Black communities to “stay woke”—to stay alert to systemic racism, to police violence, to exploitation, to all the ways the world is set up to crush Black bodies while pretending it’s just keeping law and order.

It wasn’t a hashtag. It wasn’t a punchline. It was a warning. A lifeline. A love note passed from one generation to the next: Don’t fall asleep to the danger around you. And then, predictably, white folks got ahold of it.

Not all white folks. Not the ones who know how to shut up and listen. But white conservatives in particular—those who see racial justice not as a sacred calling but as a threat to their place atop the social pyramid—grabbed the word woke, gutted it, and turned it into a curse. Now, when they say it, it’s with an eye-roll. A sneer. A knowing chuckle on talk radio. It’s shorthand for everything they hate: diversity, equity, gender inclusion, climate responsibility, honest history, queer existence, Black joy, Indigenous sovereignty, all of it.

They took a term of praise and turned it into a slur, which, if we’re honest, is exactly what colonizers do.

But what really drives this home for me is how opposite this whole process is from what Black folks did with the N-word. That word—originally a slur used to dehumanize—was reclaimed and remixed into something used among Black people as a form of solidarity, kinship, even love. That reclamation wasn’t permission for white people to jump in. It was a wall. A boundary. You don’t get to use this word. Because you don’t carry the history that comes with it. Because you don’t wear the wounds it left. Because it’s not yours.

Woke, on the other hand, started as something beautiful. A beacon. A sign that someone saw the matrix for what it was and refused to play along. And white America couldn’t stomach that kind of clarity in the hands of the oppressed. So they took the word, scrubbed it of its soul, and made it a weapon.

And now, every time they spit it out—”woke corporations,” “woke agenda,” “woke mobs”—they’re doing the same thing they’ve always done: robbing a people of their language, their culture, their dignity, and acting like they invented irony.

It’s colonization. Not of land. But of meaning.

And before any white readers start with “Well I’m just using it ironically,” or “Isn’t it fair game now that it’s in the mainstream?”—no. It’s not. Because mainstream doesn’t mean ours. Some things aren’t meant for us to co-opt. Especially when the very act of co-opting reinforces the systems we claim to oppose.

So what do we do?

We shut up and listen (something I’ve personally had to do). We honor the word by using it correctly, if we use it at all. We refuse to play into the mockery. And we call out the bullshit when someone uses woke as a slur in our presence.

I’m not Black, so I won’t pretend to speak with authority here. But I am person who cares deeply about justice and who has been raising a child to love the world and all its people, and I believe part of that work is unlearning the reflex to take what isn’t ours and twist it into something else.

Woke is not a joke. It’s not a brand. It’s not a dog whistle. It’s a word with a lineage. It has ancestors. It has blood in it.

So let’s treat it with the respect it deserves, or step aside and let those who know how to carry it do so in peace.

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