Woke. How do you react to this four-letter word? With an eye roll? Cynicism? Or the exhaustion that comes with checking your privilege ceaselessly when everything is a potential culture war and the world teeters further to the right?

As someone who has been writing a column that claims to be wide awoke, let me tell you this: a year ago I loathed the word. Woke was like a badge that people seemed suspiciously keen to pin to themselves. It said: look at me and the work I’ve done on myself!

By the time we got our heads round what woke was – in essence a pledge to stay vigilant to oppression that rose alongside the #BlackLivesMatter movement – it felt as if it had already been co-opted. Pepsi ads, woke guides to Christmas, on and on. By the time we hit peak woke it felt like it was going to end up as the political-correctness-gone-mad it was supposed to counter.

Over the past year I’ve changed my mind. I find myself defending the word. The more woke is used as a slur, joke or shorthand to mock the hypersensitivity of the left, the more we need it. We need it to keep debating subjects in shutdown. We need it to remind ourselves that debates shut down in the first place because they don’t start on an equal footing: one person’s intellectual exploration is another’s marginalised life. We need it to understand the subtle difference between being an ally and speaking on behalf of others. We need it to shut up and try listening. And we need it to fight oppression, injustice and racism.

When I was a girl there were no words for any of this, but the micro-aggressions, triggering and misogynoir went on regardless. I talked about none of it for decades. I am only just starting to voice my own experiences of race and racism in this column, which ends today, and beyond its boundaries. And it is because of the invention of terms such as woke and movements such as #MeToo (both started by black activists) that I, and so many others, have started speaking. I will not stop. And I will not stop trying to do the right thing ... or, if you prefer, #staywoke.