The meaning of the word hasn't changed, it's just being framed as a bad thing now.
Far right extremists use it to attack ideas they don't agree with, just as they do when they refer to those on the left of them as commies, Marxists, and socialists. They don't understand what the words they are using actually mean, but find them useful to label things and people they don't agree with. The word may have originated with the BLM movement, but it was quickly co-opted by the extreme right movement to mean something entirely different, just like "critical race theory", which has NEVER been taught outside the graduate level but which the far right redefined and would have you believe is infecting our elementary schools.
Ron DeSantis rails about "woke ideas" in our schools, so he moves to eliminate the teaching the parts of American history that he's rather people not learn about. So now it's "woke" to teach about slavery and how it affected the initial growth of our country - better to pretend it just never happened. Here in TX, our governor is removing references to slavery AND President Barack Obama from history curricula. So who is it that is rewriting history?
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