Survey Suggests Few Americans Are Embracing the Liberal Left’s ‘Woke’ Vocabulary

Very few Americans are using so-called “woke” terminology such as antiracism, toxic masculinity, critical race theory, and cultural appropriation, a new survey finds, suggesting that far-left politicians and activists pushing such vocabulary could be wildly out of touch with the average American voter. 

The polling, conducted several days after the election by YouGov, asked more than 1,000 adult citizens what their familiarity was with 30 “woke” or social-justice-oriented terms.

A majority of Americans — 55 percent — said they’d never even heard of the word BIPOC, which stands for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. Another 17 percent said they’ve heard of it, but didn’t know what it meant — while 24 percent said they knew what it meant but didn’t regularly use it.

Another 48 percent said they had never heard of “ableism,” while 17 percent said they’d heard the term but didn’t know what it meant. Nearly 60 percent said they either hadn’t heard of the term “Latinx” or didn’t know its meaning.

“While majorities of Americans are familiar with most of the terms in our survey, very few Americans say they use them regularly, including those who voted for Donald Trump or Kamala Harris — though more Harris voters do,” the director of survey data journalism at YouGov, Taylor Orth, told Semafor, which commissioned the study. “We also observed some differences in familiarity based on age, education, and race, but within all groups, regular usage of these terms is rare.”

The survey indicates that only 1 in 5 Americans regularly use the term “safe space,” while even smaller numbers use terms including “lived experience,” “white privilege,” and “body positivity.” Only 13 percent said they regularly use the word “patriarchy,” and 11 percent said the same of “toxic masculinity” and “mansplaining.”

Even fewer – seven percent — said they use terms such as “gender non-binary,” “implicit bias,” “cisgender,” and “microaggression.” 

Coming in last place, with 5 percent or less of Americans saying they use the words regularly, were terms such as “decolonization,” “Latinx,” and “BIPOC.”