These kinds of social movements always arouse the armchair anthropologist in me. This one in particular, because I think it has to do a lot with the rise of social media.
My theory is, what people might refer to as a "woke discourse" has been going on forever in left and progressive activist spaces, like certain parts of academia, political organizations and so on. Within those subcultures, there has for a long time been a strong emphasis on fairness, which is often enforced through a set of cultural and linguistic tools which have evolved over the years to identify and correct words and actions which fall outside the boundaries of what is considered acceptable or desirable in those communities.
So then came social medial platforms. Now you have forums like Twitter where suddenly everyone's conversations are out in the open. Now instead of pointing out perceived social problems and inequities over a lunch table at Oberlin, members of these subcultures are having that conversation in view of the whole world. And instead of reacting only to their own communities and media environment, they're also responding directly to problematic phrasing from some guy in rural Nebraska which left-wing students at elite universities polished out of their language years ago.
So you have this confluence of a social technology which had been developed for ages, and a communications technology which happened to be a very effective vehicle for what was probably quite a minority viewpoint to have a vastly outsized impact on society.
I actually think this concept of having one big conversation that everyone can be a part of is something we haven't even really began to wrap our arms around, and it will be interesting to see what online discourse looks like in a few decades.