The word “woke” has become tribal language.
For some, it represents awareness, consciousness, and a commitment to seeing what others might overlook. For others, it’s become shorthand for everything they find performative, divisive, or exhausting about modern discourse.
We’re not here to adjudicate that battle. We’re here to explore something quieter beneath it.
The word “woke” originally meant being awake to injustice, aware of what’s been hidden or ignored. It meant noticing. Seeing clearly. Recognising struggles that don’t make headlines but shape lives.
So we’re asking: if kindness is about seeing people fully, about recognising dignity even when systems don’t, then is kindness itself a form of being awake?
Or is kindness what happens after awareness, the action we take once we’ve seen clearly?
We believe it might be both.
Language shifts. Words evolve. And sometimes, words get co-opted.
For many, “woke” has come to represent something different now. It’s used to dismiss, to mock, to signal tribal belonging. Some wield it as an insult, implying that caring about marginalised voices is performative virtue signalling. Others embrace it defiantly, reclaiming it as a badge of awareness they refuse to surrender.
The word has been caught in a cultural tug-of-war, stretched so thin that its original meaning struggles to survive.
We’ve watched it become less about what you notice and more about which side you’re on.
That transformation matters, because when words become weapons, they lose their capacity to clarify. They divide instead of illuminate.
When we talk about being “woke” in its truest sense, we’re talking about two distinct but connected things:
The light itself: The awareness that something is wrong, hidden, or unrecognised. The moment of seeing clearly what was previously in shadow.
The action taken: The response to that awareness. What you do once you’ve seen. How you change your behaviour, your language, your understanding.
Both matter.
Awareness without action can become hollow. Action without awareness can become clumsy, even harmful.
Kindness, we believe, lives in the space between them.
If kindness is strength, if it’s practiced rather than performed, if it grows through repetition and intention, then kindness requires awareness.
You cannot communicate with care if you don’t notice how your words land.
You cannot protect someone’s dignity if you don’t recognise when it’s being threatened.
You cannot offer support if you don’t see that someone needs it.
In this sense, kindness is the light. It helps us see what we might otherwise overlook: the impact of our words, the boundaries we didn’t know were there, the struggles people carry silently.
Kindness asks us to stay awake. To notice. To see people fully, not as categories or abstractions, but as human beings carrying experiences we may never live.
But kindness doesn’t stop at awareness.
Once you’ve seen clearly, kindness becomes action.
It’s the pause before you speak, when you realise your words might land more sharply than you intend.
It’s the acknowledgment when someone shares something that doesn’t match your experience, instead of dismissing it because it’s unfamiliar.
It’s the shift in language when you learn that what felt neutral to you felt loaded to someone else.
It’s the boundary held with firmness and care when someone crosses a line, protecting dignity without dehumanising.
It’s the apology offered when you realise you caused harm, even unintentionally.
Kindness doesn’t require perfection. It requires attention. Awareness of impact. Willingness to adjust.
We believe words matter.
When “woke” became a weapon, it stopped serving clarity. It became a shorthand for dismissal, a way to avoid engaging with what someone was actually saying.
But the original meaning, the idea of being awake to what’s often unseen, that still holds value.
Kindness offers a way to reclaim it.
Not by fighting over definitions. Not by insisting everyone use the word the same way. But by embodying what the word originally meant: awareness that leads to care, seeing that leads to action, consciousness that leads to connection.
You don’t have to use the word “woke” to practice this.
You just have to stay awake.
Some will read this and think we’re being too careful, too diplomatic, dancing around something that requires clarity and conviction.
Others will read this and think we’re wading into tribal territory, picking sides in a culture war we claimed to avoid.
We understand both reactions.
This is where kindness gets tested. Because kindness doesn’t mean avoiding difficult topics. It means approaching them without assuming the worst of people, without turning complexity into caricature.
We’re not here to tell you whether to use the word “woke” or avoid it.
We’re here to invite reflection on what it originally meant, and whether the practices it described, awareness and response, might matter more than the label itself.
If you believe that seeing people clearly, noticing what’s been overlooked, and responding with care and dignity are valuable, then you’re already practicing something worth naming.
Call it what you will.
We call it kindness.
Being awake to injustice, to hidden struggles, to patterns others don’t see, that comes with a cost.
It can be exhausting. You can’t unsee what you’ve seen. Once you notice how certain words wound, how certain systems exclude, how certain assumptions harm, you carry that knowledge everywhere.
Some people describe this as a burden. Others describe it as clarity.
Both can be true.
This is why self-kindness matters. It’s a challenge to stay awake to the struggles of others if you’re running yourself into the ground. You may find it difficult to offer care outward if you’re withholding it inward.
Being conscious, truly conscious, of how communication affects others requires emotional resilience. And emotional resilience requires rest, boundaries, and the ability to treat yourself with the same patience you extend to others.
Awareness without self-compassion becomes burnout.
Kindness without self-kindness becomes depletion.
We cannot offer to the world what we withhold from ourselves.
So, is kindness woke?
If “woke” means being aware of struggles that don’t affect you directly, then yes, kindness requires that awareness.
If “woke” means taking action once you’ve seen clearly, then yes, kindness is that response.
If “woke” has become too weaponised, too tribal, too loaded to be useful, then perhaps kindness offers another way forward.
Not as a replacement. As a practice.
We’re not interested in policing language or claiming ownership of terms. We’re interested in what happens when we choose to see people fully and respond with intention.
The practice of staying awake to dignity, to complexity, to the reality that other people’s experiences differ from your own, and then choosing how to respond with care.
Call it woke if that word still holds meaning for you.
Call it consciousness.
Call it awareness.
Or just call it kindness.
The label matters less than the practice.
And the practice, we believe, is worth protecting.