The adjective woke, rooted in African-American English since the 1930s, originally meant awareness of racial prejudice—famously used by Lead Belly in his 1938 song about the Scottsboro Boys. Gaining political traction in the 1970s and surging in the 2010s via the hashtag #staywoke during the Ferguson protests and the Black Lives Matter movement, it expanded to cover broader inequalities like sexism and LGBTQ+ rights, earning an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary in 2017. As it spread to white progressives, millennials, and Gen Z, it became shorthand for left-wing ideas such as white privilege and identity politics. By 2019, however, conservatives frequently used it sarcastically to dismiss socially liberal movements as insincere "performative activism." More recently, commentators have noted the rise of a "woke right" and criticized businesses for "woke-washing" or "woke capitalism" by exploiting progressive messaging for profit. Even earlier antecedents include the 1860 Wide Awakes political groups supporting Abraham Lincoln and Marcus Garvey's 1923 call to "Wake up Ethiopia!"