I'm about as far from woke or PC as you could imagine, but that's an incredibly inaccurate comparison.
Reading some developer scorn or arrogance, no matter how unfortunate or annoying, shares no common features with an actual lynching.
It is almost like you've had an awakening and realise that it is important to understand how important it is to behave in a politically savvy way.
If only we had some words for that...
Around these here parts, the term means many many things, and it involves anything from anti-vaccination & homeopathy and far further medical fringes (Crystals and essential oils for everything up to and including cancer or covid etc), through vast conspiracy theories up to and including Illuminati and Templars and Masons and everything else, impractical and frequently random / fashionable food choices and restrictions, and so on and so worth. "Sensitive", "Aware", "Liberal" or "Emotionally Intelligent" are not part of local definition of "Woke" anymore. In general, "Woke" and "Science/Fact-oriented" are fairly mutually exclusive here - while that's an unfair generalization, that's exactly the problem - the term has diffused and has a lot of negative in addition to perhaps some positive meanings; but mostly it's used by any given fanatical group to indicate their superiority compared to its antonym, "Sheeple".
If you meant a different word, noting it explicitly would be helpful :)
Mass murder with no judicial punishment resembles people being mean to you at work? Black people were disemboweled and burned alive by gangs of people who did it for fun. This is the most ridiculous comparison I think I have ever seen on this forum.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws
It seems you are confusing Jim Crow for the various riots and racial violence that occurred during that time period. It serves no benefit to falsely intertwine similar but separate historical concepts solely to write some vague hyperbole.
The reason people aren't as interested in side projects is that most aspects of professional software development are optional in side projects. The vast majority of side projects are done alone, and for a very narrow purpose: write a command line utility to learn Rust, write a web app to work through a design idea for it, write a game for the sake of implementing a pathing algorithm.
As a result, in most cases programmers rightly neglect 95% of the work that it would require to produce a version for public consumption, and on top of that, they don't have to communicate with product, QA, or other developers. Building something that is fit for purpose is usually orders of magnitude easier when the purpose is to learn something, satisfy curiosity, or solve the narrow version of a problem that you are personally facing.
Because of this, interviewers have very low initial assumptions about what it means when you say you did something as a side project, and you'll have to show them.
I've been in charge of hiring many times, and not once have I looked at grades. I don't even bother looking at the "education" portion of resumes (except when looking at the rare candidate who has no work experience).
Don't brand yourself as that, because you subject yourself to the cultural baggage that comes with it, including the hiring practices and aesthetics (if you can call them that).
"But I program mostly for the web!" No, you don't program _just_ for the web, you program more holistically than your peers, you said it yourself:
> my peers tend to fear data structures...and present an extreme fear of original code
And we really need more people like that.