It started as most digital transgressions do: a harmless joke meant to poke fun at an overarching societal behavior. When TikTok creator Michelle.ok made her viral “Friend that’s too woke” clip, there was no way she could have predicted her funny video would become a quoteable fixture in our digital lexicon. Her video was a satirical portrayal of that one person in the friend group known for bringing the vibe down with unwanted hits of reality.
The video quickly went viral, and the creator became the face of the “Friend that’s too woke” archetype online. It started as a funny joke that meant no harm, but the plot was quickly lost once the term spread to wide-ranging communities. Soon, valid critiques were being dubbed as “Too Woke” and nearly every video and comment representing a reasonable response to bigotry was prefaced with “Not to be the friend that’s too woke” as if”woke” was a nefarious concept. Don’t want to hear R. Kelly at a party? Too woke. Icked out by the idea of attending an abuser’s concert? Too woke.
The distortion of social-forward language
This perversion of the term woke is especially insidious when we consider the word’s origin. Woke’s origins trace all the way back to the 1930s with Lead Belly’s “Scottsboro Boys” song, which advises users to stay woke. Erykah Badu used the term in her 2008 song “Master Teacher.” The 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and the proliferation of the Black Lives Matter movement inspired widespread usage of the term as a way to categorize social justice awareness.
Digital gentrification
But thanks to the digital gentrification of social media, the intended weight of the term has been watered down and memeified beyond recognition.
The term canceled experienced a similar phenomenon, as it was originally used to describe individuals being held accountable for instances of sexual assault during the #MeToo movement.
“Swagger,” “Unc,” and “Slay” experienced similar fates: Popularized by marginalized communities, then bastardized by the masses and effectively reduced to a banal cliché and devoid of any real meaning.