UK mainstream anti-Blackness via the proxy of "anti-wokeness"
"Woke" originates from Blackness to refer to Black political energisation and radicalisation. Institutions declaring themselves "anti-woke" are declaring themselves opposed to Black liberation, whether they realise it or not. Maybe those institutions think it's merely a trendier way of saying "political correctness", which (again unknown to them because they have zero awareness) is really a more obfuscated way of saying the same thing.
UK mainstream anti-Blackness via the proxy of "anti-wokeness"
It's like: the conversations white reactionaries have using the )co-opted) word "woke" (dismissing and shutting down Black liberation), are the exact same conversations that white reactionaries have used during every struggle for Black liberation in modern history. There is literally no difference here. The central racism is being relitigated by the exact same people using the exact same arguments.
Nazism, UK mainstream anti-Blackness via the proxy of "anti-wokeness"
The irony with cynically expanding the co-opted "woke" into a synonym for "political correctness" is that it becomes an umbrella term that also includes non-Black groups feared by the Right, who have historically been played up as collaborators/enablers of Black liberation (radicals, Jews, queers, etc). The more genericised version is in fact *more* Nazi. It's brought full circle back to the originating "cultural Bolshevism".
UK mainstream anti-Blackness via the proxy of "anti-wokeness"
Keep seeing well-meaning whites proclaiming "hell yeah I'm *woke*! dictionary definition 'awake to racial injustice' etc".
So like obviously 1) "woke" isn't a word we get to "reclaim" because it's not ours and 2) "woke" specifically describes Black people's social and political awareness in relation to the oppressive superstructure of Whiteness - so *white people not being self-aware* is literally the opposite of what it describes.
(side-note), UK mainstream anti-Blackness via the proxy of "anti-wokeness"
I want to clarify when i mentioned "non-Black" groups there that each of those demographics mentioned in parentheses should be prefixed with "non-Black". Word count got the better of me, and I'm worried my initial phrasing might seem exclusionary. The 1st example that came to mind (from my own limited reading) was of the white Jewish communists who collaborated with the ANC/MK during South Africa's anti-apartheid struggle.
Nazism, UK mainstream anti-Blackness via the proxy of "anti-wokeness"
@alex parallel to this, whats also worrying is how music/youth/arts subcultures (particularly in provincial towns like mine) have been once again split up into black/white/East European/straight/queer with considerably less interaction between these groups than I remember in my own teens/young adulthood in 1980s and 1990s when everyone partied together to some extent (and that /did/ make a difference)
UK mainstream anti-Blackness via the proxy of "anti-wokeness"
To take a prominent recent UK culture example: the National Trust (who caretakes historical buildings) was criticised as "woke" by the mainstream press for addressing the colonial histories of many of their buildings. This accusative (mis-)use of "woke" is 100% consistent with historical white supremacy: "drawing attention to the oppression of Black people is 'woke' [appropriated white usage]". There's not even a fresh nuance on it.