Where 'woke' came from and why marketers should think twice before jumping on the social activism...

Black Americans in their ongoing fight against racism and social injustice have used the term “woke” at key moments of history.

In literal terms, being woke refers to being awake and not asleep. One Urban Dictionary contributor defines woke as “being aware of the truth behind things ‘the man’ doesn’t want you to know”. Meanwhile, a concurrent definition signals a shift in meaning to “the act of being very pretentious about how much you care about a social issue”.

The Oxford dictionary expanded its definition of the word “woke” in 2017 to add it as an adjective meaning “alert to injustice in society, especially racism”.

In the 1942 first volume of Negro Digest, J. Saunders Redding used the term in an article about labor unions. Twenty years later, a 1962 New York Times article was titled: If You’re Woke You Dig It: No mickey mouse can be expected to follow today’s Negro idiom without a hip assist.

On June 14, 1965, Martin Luther King Jr, gave a commencement address called Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution at Oberlin College...