August has brought us a referendum on “Woke 1” – a term that reductively brands 2020’s social justice movement – as prominent liberal voices reflect on that time period with disappointing hindsight. During a recent appearance on ABC’s This Week, when asked about 2020-era demands to abolish prisons and police, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the US congresswoman from New York, abandoned her previous support of the “defund the police” movement, and instead joked: “Woke 1 was crazyyyyy.”

Ocasio-Cortez, a democratic socialist, implied that the still-resounding calls for municipalities to reduce police budgets and to divert aid to poor communities were worth advocating for during the 2020 uprising, but are now “crazyyyyy”. In 2020, she noted that “a lot of people cannot fathom what an abolitionist America looks like. Tell them it looks like a suburb. Affluent white communities already live in a world where they choose to fund youth, health, housing more than they fund police.” But she has since backtracked on that idea.

On 9 August, she told This Week co-host Jonathan Karl: “We all share the goals of having as low a crime rate as possible [but] rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today.” Days later, Zohran Mamdani, the progressive New York mayor, echoed her sentiment by surmising: “Sometimes, what you believe can change and develop.” But their reversing course on abolition isn’t development; it’s a devolution.

The backlash to Ocasio-Cortez’s comments was widespread from leftists who felt as if her disavowal of the abolition and “defund the police” movements was an attempt to appease the Democratic establishment at their expense. Others, however, agreed with the assertion that “Woke 1” was defined by overly rigid radicalism, much of which occurred on social media, as with Chi Ossé’s 2021 post on Twitter declaring that “a cis white man should not be the next speaker of the council”. Ossé, a New York City council member, coined the term “Woke 1” after being confronted this past May with his old tweet.

While everyone weighed in on “Woke 1”, though, I was more concerned with why the hell we were using branding co-opted by conservatives to discuss a movement against state-sanctioned killings of Black people. “Woke” has long shifted from Black America’s prideful adjective to a mocking noun that has been weaponized to ridicule Black liberation movements. Progressive liberals now adopting that dismissive language while placing confines on the movement for Black lives is damning.

The term “woke” originated in Black American communities, and was popularized by a 2008 Erykah Badu lyric: “Even though you go through struggle and strife / To keep a healthy life, I stay woke.” The term became popular parlance in the 2010s; to “stay woke” meant you understood the components of white supremacy enough to identify them anywhere, whether in a work of art or a politician’s dog-whistling comments.

But, as with other terms that originated in Black culture (“Blexit”, “Black fatigue”), the phrase was co-opted by rightwingers who claimed that calls for progressive policy were divisive and reactionary. By 2020, as the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor sparked a worldwide uprising, the burning of Minnesota’s third precinct, and widespread calls for radical change, conservatives pushed back by vilifying the word “woke”.

In 2022, Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, introduced the Stop Woke Act (Stop Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act), which tried to restrict schools and businesses from discussing critical race theory, misogyny and other oppressive dynamics. The then minority leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, warned that corporations should stop listening to our calls for equity lest they become “a woke parallel government”. The conservative commentator Ben Shapiro held live events to discuss “how wokeness is destroying America”. And a Santa Barbara Independent op-ed lauded the late far-right podcaster Charlie Kirk for “going into the lion’s den of woke”.

So Ocasio-Cortez and Ossé evoking “woke” with the same pretense as these sectarian conservatives is cringeworthy. And when they do it to scoff at a movement against the police system’s predation of Black people, it’s dangerous. These comments come at the same time that Maga-world is engaged in a full-scale assault on Black people’s past, present and future, including the rollback of diversity measures leading to mass layoffs of Black employees, the systematic erasure of Black history from schools and attempts to repeal our voting rights.

The phrase “Woke 1” is also off-putting because it’s dismissive of the work that abolition advocates and social justice organizations have been doing before and after 2020. What happened at the start of the decade wasn’t momentary advocacy; it’s in lockstep with what freedom fighters have been seeking since the inception of this country. It behooves some Democrats to realize the vitality of grassroots movement work isn’t dependent on photo ops and national headlines. The truest advocates are still on the frontlines, even if the masses have decided it’s no longer trendy.

When Ocasio-Cortez was elected to Congress in 2018, the New Yorker characterized her as “the embodiment of anti-corporate politics”. There was hope she could help shake the party out of its moderate malaise. She initially advocated for like-minded candidates such as Cori Bush. People were excited by Ocasio-Cortez’s people-first platform: Medicare for all, raising the minimum wage to $15, the Green New Deal to mitigate the climate crisis and abolishing ICE (a stance she still holds).

But some of her politics have retreated toward party orthodoxy. Today, she no longer wants to defund the police and controversially endorsed Joe Biden for president in 2024, despite him having a 42% average approval rating at the time and aiding Israel’s genocide in Palestine. And while Ocasio-Cortez still supports certain progressive candidates, she has also stopped endorsing candidates running against Democratic incumbents, helping stagnate any chance of a progressive insurgency. She’s sought to assimilate within the Democratic establishment, where the status quo outnumbers progressive voices. Some surmise that she is being pragmatic to garner more support for a 2028 White House run. But her need to do so exemplifies the hopelessness of electing progressive candidates who have to dilute themselves to rise in the party.

There’s an oft-expressed belief that genuine liberation for Black people can’t come under the two-party system, with the Democratic party fixated on centrist consensus instead of radical policies that will offer marginalized groups a better material reality. For the first time in my lifetime in 2020, however brief, it seemed like Democrats understood that Black people wanted a genuinely equitable country.

Officials such as Ocasio-Cortez aligned with these movements because the social current carried everyone in that direction. What happened to Floyd, Taylor and many others was too heartbreaking, too unjust to ignore. But years later, once swimming upstream became more difficult and supporting radical policy wasn’t good careerism, our demands became a “woke” fever dream to Ocasio-Cortez. I implore her and the rest of the Democrats not to find it “crazyyyyy” when droves of leftists once again express apathy toward the party in 2028.