It's from the 30s, actually.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke

Implies waking up to the systemic violence and oppression and beginning to do something about it.

Then it began being used as a bad thing because people were understanding systemic harm and those in power did not like it.

Overuse the word, make it mean nothing, remove its power, push the people back into oppression.

It's from African-American English, from the 1930s! And it's always had more or less the same meaning – originally "being awake to (aware of) racial discrimination", but now it's obviously grown to cover discrimination and inequalities in general.

Would that imply that things that are not “woke” or are “anti-woke” are “asleep”?

Yep! 👍 But don't forget, these people are also against Antifa, i.e. "anti anti-fascist". They don't care how bad the labels sound, as long as they're making people's lives miserable.

AFAIK "woke" started being used by woke people as something good.

Then the right stole the term to turn it into something insulting.

"They" don't like the term "woke" because like all good music it has Afro-American origins. It started off as describing somebody who was aware of racial discrimination and over the decades broadened in meaning to include a host of other social issues. And then it was thrown into the culture war meat grinder.

I like the parallel to the "wake up, sheeple, do your own research" crowd. I hadn't noticed it before. It's funny how two uses of this inoccuous verb that can probably be traced all the way back to the Proto-Indoeuropean language have ended up on opposite sides of the aforementioned meat grinder.

As others already wrote, the original meaning has been specific to awareness of racial discrimination, later broadened to general discrimination topics.

But that is just the US, and e.g. in Germany these roots (and also the connection to wake/asleep) are mostly missing.

So it is just a normal imported word, with no clear antonym existing.

Also because of this only recent import of the term, it is less connected to its original meaning, but often only associated with a well-intended, but superficial kind of activism.
E.g. it is heavily associated with a generally not very popular over-gendering going on in official and news texts, which leads to a broken kind of the German language. (German is heavily gendered, but a word's gender often has nothing to do with the sexual gender).

So the term had a somewhat negative connotation to begin with, even in more progressive circles.
Doesn't hinder the far right from doing anti-woke campaigns nonetheless, wokism is just such a nice (but actually in the broader population none-existent) opponent. And they use the term "Anti-Woke", because it just makes sense for an imported word.

Where I'm from, "woke" is a generic code word used by white racists to refer to anything which doesn't align to their principles. Any disagreement with their belief is simply labeled as "woke" because they cannot actually define and defend their use of the word, or directly name "the thing" (hard n----R word) out loud in public.

Anyone using woke or Antifa or liberal or dei as an insult doesn't care about the actual definition. They probably don't even know the definitions at all. It's all just hate and propaganda and racism and bigotry and tribalism.

Surprise, MAGA is what happens when pathological liars and narcissists and abusers and bullies and racist bigots get into politics. And they are non stop DARVO on everything.

It's a buzzword for anything the fascists don't like.

It means they dislike the people that brand themselves as woke.

It's like asking anti-AI people their opinion on support vector machines - you'll rarely get an informed answer.

It seems "woke" come from groups of activists uniting in the belives that as long as their will be some kind of discriminations they will all be in a threat.

Therefore, all discriminated (including those who were, and those who could become) should unit and oppose, both to that discrimination and to the principle of discrimination.

Just as you may or not be actualy victim of some type of racism, but if you have some origines that could become discriminated some day. And the woke view is that you should refuse and oppose all kind of discrimination based on race or origines, because as long as one is seen as acceptable, yours could become (remain, or become back) at threat.

This as made a big union of groups opposed to conservative views. So feminist would also fight against racism, etc.

So by extension and out of fear, "woke" is the union of all type of those who do not fully follow the actual system ; at least for those who fully follow it.

Never understood this as well. During COVID the anti-vax crowd was calling people "sheep" as in being asleep or easy to control and direct.

Somehow that seemed to have morphed to "woke", but woke to me implies that your are "awake" or "thinking". If someone calls me woke I assume it to be a compliment.

see article by linguist: https://www.languagejones.com/blog-1/2020/9/21/on-woke

"Woke" was what some people said they were when they said and did certain things. Then some other people decided they didn't like that first group of people, sometimes for what they said, sometimes for what they did, sometimes just for who they were, and they saw that those people called themselves woke. So they decided that they didn't like woke, and when they saw other things they didn't like that reminded them of the first group, they called that woke too.

There is not necessarily only two groups.

More time is required to type the word woke than is spent thinking about what it means by people who use it as a pejorative