In the US, in common speech, the word “Asian” has tended to mean East or Southeast Asian. In the UK, the same word more often refers to the Indian subcontinent. Look, I don’t decide these things. It has to do with historic patterns of migration: who went where. It is also liable to change. But it shows that America’s exposure to the world’s largest continent is nothing like Britain’s.
That is the least of the differences. The forebears of a Black Briton probably arrived in the country after 1945, willingly. Those of a Black American might have come centuries ago, forcibly. In America, the settlers’ treatment of people who were already there is recent enough to be a raw topic. As harsh as the Emperor Claudius no doubt was, the displacement of “native” Britons has lost some of its salience over the intervening millennia.
“Woke”, if that means a focus on group identities, has turned out to be a bad fit in the US. But at least it was dreamt up with the US in mind. What possessed people in Britain to think it made sense in their different (which isn’t to say better) context? Or in Europe’s? I’d toast the apparent demise of this dogma but even the crusade against it in Britain has a US flavour — faintly religious, very online — which will unnerve the public in no time.