Mostly, though, it’s used as a pejorative. Bill Maher seems to consider wokeness his personal albatross as he’s apparently blind to the paradox of getting paid likely millions of dollars a year to complain about what he believes he’s no longer allowed to say. Progressives have to be careful not to be so woke that we’ll scare moderates into voting for Donald Trump, warn (usually white male) columnists in every major American newspaper.

When the beloved and iconic Deadspin was effectively killed this fall, haters crawled out of the internet’s crevices, cheering the demise of a marriage of sports and wokeness they considered sacrilegious. Even Mr. Obama recently chided wokeness as “not activism,” which, well, is exactly what I’d expect him to say about it now.

Admittedly, woke’s current iteration has been earned. It became a thing you can accessorize like a hoodie. But to be woke, essentially, is to recognize and reject the damage power inflicts on the most vulnerable. And when the president’s only real purpose is to maintain the status of whiteness, he and his supporters have clear incentives for the rest of us to stay asleep.

Today, however, when I turn on the news and attempt to slog through the impeachment inquiry, I’m reminded of some of the inane conspiracy theories my wokest college classmates considered gospel. There was the Tommy Hilfiger one, where we shouldn’t buy his clothes because he went on Oprah and expressed disgust at black people wearing them. There was the Timberland one, where we should stop buying those boots because the emblem (a tree) represented lynchings.

These conspiracies could be debunked with superficial research. (Tommy Hilfiger hadn’t even appeared on Oprah’s show before that rumor circulated, the Timberland rumor apparently came from a poem wrongly attributed to Maya Angelou.) But even as we’d roll our eyes at them for believing these untruths, we knew they weren’t wrong about America. They just had bad information.

Because, well, the Tuskegee experiment did happen. Cointelpro did happen. Redlining did happen. Gerrymandering is happening. Black people were targeted for subprime lending. We are arrested and incarcerated today at wildly disproportionate rates. While the perpetually woke are dismissed, they’re also the canaries in our coal mines, alerting us to dangers we might be too drowsy to see.

Also, while the people who can genuinely be considered woke are increasingly less inclined to use that word to describe themselves, perhaps we’re witnessing it undergo another shift. Like “virtue signaling” and “social justice warrior,” woke now says more about the politics of the speaker than it does about the object. But maybe two years from now the word will change again.