Woke is a specific ideology that it places every individual into a strict hierarchy of oppressor/oppressed according to group racial and sexual identity. It rose to prominence in American culture from around 2012, starting in universities. It revolves around a set of core concepts including privilege, marginalization, oppression, and equity.
Now that we've defined what woke is, I hope we can move on from this 'you can't define woke' canard I keep seeing.
Woke is no more difficult to define than any religion or ideology, except in that it deliberately pretends not to exist ("just basic decency", "just basic human rights") in order to be a more slippery target.
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*Side note to ward off the deliberate ignorance of people who are trying to find a way to misunderstand - I've attached some notes on how words work:
1- Often, things in the world we want to talk about have many characteristics and variants.
2- Words usually have fuzzy boundaries in what they refer to.
3- Despite the above, we can and do productively refer to such things using words.
4- We can define a thing by mentioning its most prominent feature(s).
-- The above does NOT mean that the definition must encapsulate ALL features of the thing to be valid.
-- The above does NOT mean that a thing with features outside the definition is not what the word refers to.
5- Attempting to shut down discussion by deliberately misunderstanding words or how they work is a sign of an inability to make productive valid points about reality.