From a 2020 interview:
Jennifer Grossman [24:40]: Another term that could have some help unpacking is the Woke culture. What does that mean? Where did it come from?
Stephen Hicks: That’s a much broader concept. It comes out of the Left politically. Interestingly on the Right politically too—if we can use these labels—they’re obviously Left and Right, both problematic. But on the Right there’s the concept of the red pill, which comes from the movie The Matrix. So the idea then is that in some sense one is in a coma, perhaps a chemically induced coma. But if you take a pill, the red pill, then suddenly the coma goes away, you wake up, and you see reality as it really is. And everything is quite different. So the Left version of this comes out of the “False Consciousness” tradition, to say that the way we are all raised is we are conditioned into a false narrative that says that America is about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and justice and freedom for all and so forth. But that is a fake cover story that has been conditioned into all of us. And what we need to do is raise our consciousness—and in some cases get slapped upside the head—so that we wake up and look around and realize that we really are oppressed. And that’s a kind of awakening, to see the world as it as it really is. So woke is just a slang-y way of saying that I’ve woken up, and now I can really see that this childhood naïve story about what a wonderful culture we’re living in is false, and that one has become sensitized, and now buys into the narrative of oppression and exploitation.
Jennifer Grossman: Wow, I see that I hadn’t thought of it that way, in terms of contrasting the blue pill, red pill, versus Woke, but now I can see the connections.
The full interview is here:
Related: Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, in the Philosophers Explained series.