59% of Britons don’t know what the term ‘woke’ means, YouGov survey finds

A YouGov survey has found that 59 per cent of Britons don’t know what the term “woke” means, with only 12 per cent actually considering themselves to be “woke.”

The term “woke” is a word that means to be “alert to injustice in society, especially racism and has been popularised within the political and cultural landscape in recent years.

It comes from the United States and, as with a lot of expressions from the US, “woke” originated from the Black community before being co-opted and distorted by mainstream white people.

Although the word now plays a significant role in discourse, 59% of Britons survey do not know what the word means, with half (30%) saying they have never heard term being used in the first place.

This leaves 41% of Britons who say they have heard “woke” being used and believe they know what it means.

Here is a breakdown of what policies are seen as woke by both those who consider themselves to be woke and those who consider themselves not woke.

Results show that so-called woke Britons are more likely to support Black Lives Matter and policies on climate change, while Britons who don’t consider themselves as woke are more likely to think that opposing certain people from giving public lectures or appearing on TV, supporting the removal of statues linked to the slave trade and having a negative view of the British Empire are what constitues being “woke”.

Despite Black Lives Matter protests taking place all across the country last summer, maybe our society isn’t as “woke” as it appears to be.

Since, out of those who understand what woke is, only three in ten (29%) consider themselves to be woke meanwhile more than half (56%) do not.

Though it seems that the British public cannot conclusively decide whether the term is a good or bad thing.

One in four consider being woke to be a good thing (26%), while slightly more than a third (37%) think it a bad thing. Another third (33%) say wokeness is neither good nor bad.

However, it becomes a little bit clearer when looking at the opinions of supporters across the UK’s two main political parties.

Three quarters of 2019 Conservative voters who understand the term see wokeness as a bad thing (74%), while Labour voters are divided, with 42% seeing it as good, and another 43% seeing it as neither good nor bad.

Often people associated woke culture with a particular political figure and YouGov asked Britons both woke and non-woke to say whether they think following leaders are woke.

Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn ranks as the highest by both groups while woke people didn’t rank current Labour leader Keir Starmer as high as their non-woke counterparts did.

The results definitely reflect how we exist in own our echo chambers, in terms of what news and media were are exposed to.

You can find the full report here.