The white women turning to ‘Dark Woke’— They turn private despair into public rage
January 14, 2026
Dark Woke won’t be vanquished. In the wake of Renee Good’s death in Minneapolis, the movement is reasserting itself from the Midwest to the Pacific coast, pushing Democrats to embrace combative cultural stances — and white, Millennial women are its shock troops.
The New York Times defined “Dark Woke” last year as “an attempt to step outside the bounds of the political correctness that Republicans have accused Democrats of establishing”. In the Gray Lady’s telling, it “requires being crass but discerning, rude but only to a point”. Examples range from Gavin Newsom’s meme warfare to Jasmine Crockett’s alliterative insults (“Will a vindictive, vile villain violate voters’ vision?”). GQ, meanwhile, observed that the objective is to “subvert the qualities that people think made wokeness cringe — the virtue policing, the polite ‘when they go low, we go high’ posturing — and go Joker mode to make Democrats cool again”.
