Language Matters: Pioneering an Informed and Responsible ESG Vocabulary

Woke gained traction in the 1940s, pioneered by African American activists to encourage the Black community not to become complacent to the mistreatment and racial injustice of the African American experience. It is a statement against a white supremacist worldview that seeks to erase the African American identity and foster a system that “deems the negro a non-entity,” as Carter Godwin Woodson wrote in the 1933 book The Mis-Education of the Negro.

Using woke, an otherwise empowering term as explained above, in conjunction with ESG misappropriates and misapplies the term to something it was never intended to describe.