As an example I think people from the American political left to somewhere(?) in the middle see it as what it has been introduced as, that being looking past the status quo and instead looking at your own values, i.e. the morality of homelessness and not having a disdain for them but empathy for them instead.
and then on the other side it feels like the people on the American political right see it as what this website describes it as “ A self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others.”
I think the divide has originated from taking unlikeable behaviour and labeling that as ‘woke’ (in bad faith of course) and some people have just bonded to that definition so much that they see it as that.
At least that’s what I’ve noticed online over the past few (bonkers) years
Many political groups do this: they identify some aspect of the opposition, preferably one that is easy to ridicule, and then repeat those accusations ad-nauseum. The complaints about, say, LatinX have far surpassed the number of actual proponents of it, which were a small number of people of the left. However, it still brought up again and again because it forms a useful image of what people are fighting against.
The trouble with this is that a groups idea of the “enemy” typically outlasts and often surpasses the actual enemy that idea is based off of. People on the right will write endless articles and videos about wokeness not because there actually exists a problem with wokeness but to try to gain political and social status with their political group.
The problem, of course, is that "Awareness and acknowledgement of the true nature of society" can be interpreted to mean a thousand different things, some of which are more accurate and actionable than others.
This has always struck me as a fatal messaging problem. When you couch the problem as being one of unearned advantages, the obvious implication is that you believe the solution is to take away something from the "privileged" group, which immediately puts many people on the defensive, especially if they feel like they're already having a tough time of things.
The real problem isn't that [men / white people] may indirectly get propped-up when others are artificially held down -- it's that people are being held down. The current (and disastrous) progressive messaging often sounds like "we want to hold you down, too".
It's also radically different from what "privileged" originally means.
In an apolitical context, to have a privilege is to be consciously treated specially, in highly specific and well understood ways; this is because you have done something specific to earn it; and it's mutually understood that this is not an entitlement and it can be revoked at any time if you violate what's expected of you.
Whereas, in the modern sense, to "be privileged" is to be unconsciously treated specially, in vague and nebulous ways, because of nothing you did but rather because of facts of who you are and what you look like; this is just because life isn't fair; and the only way to fix the problem (if you see it as one) is (supposedly) to enact sweeping social change that will indirectly take it away from you.