ONE OF THE early uses of the word was by Lead Belly, who sang about the Scottsboro boys, nine young African-Americans in Scottsboro, Alabama, who were wrongly accused in 1931 of raping two white women. They got an unfair trial; all nine later had their convictions overturned or were pardoned. In a recording in 1938, Lead Belly warns black Americans travelling through Alabama to stay “woke”, lest they be accused of something similar. Even the most committed anti-woke warrior would grant that the man had a point.
But in the past decade, a form of wokeness has arisen on the illiberal left which is characterised by extreme pessimism about America and its capacity to make progress, especially on race. According to this view, all the country’s problems are systemic or structural, and the solutions to them are illiberal, including censorship and positive discrimination by race. This wokeness defines people as members of groups in a rigid hierarchy of victims and oppressors. Like the Puritans of old, adherents focus less on workable ideas for reducing discrimination than on publicly rooting out sinful attitudes in themselves and others (especially others).
The Economist has analysed how influential these ideas are today by looking at public opinion, the media, publishing, higher education and the corporate world. Using a host of measures, we found that woke peaked in 2021-22 and has since receded. For example, polling by Gallup found that the share of people who worry a great deal about race relations climbed from 17% in 2014 to 48% in 2021, but has since fallen to 35%. Likewise, the term “white privilege” was used 2.5 times for every 1m words written by the New York Times in 2020. Last year it was used 0.4 times per 1m words. That timing is no coincidence. Many people assume that wokeness took off after the murder of George Floyd in 2020; in fact the inflection point was in 2015, as Donald Trump ran for president.
Mr Trump’s victory had a profound effect on the American left. It strengthened those who said America is racist and sexist and undermined those who said that progress is possible and that persuasion beats cancellation. As those on the centre-left cowered for fear of being cancelled themselves, woke ideas spread from sociology departments to the rest of the university, and from there to company boardrooms. On campus, controversial speakers were prevented from addressing students. In corporate America managers were rewarded partly for hiring to meet targets based on diversity, equity and inclusion.
The backlash has been led by right-leaning activists and mainline liberals who disagree about many other things. And the Democratic Party has realised that woke ideas and policies are both unpopular with voters and electorally reckless in a party that relies on a multiracial coalition to win. Towards the end of her acceptance speech in Chicago, Kamala Harris talked about “the awesome responsibility that comes with the greatest privilege on Earth—the privilege and pride of being an American”. It would have been hard for a front-line Democrat to say that between 2016 and 2021.
The lesson is not that wokeness is over, still less that it achieved nothing good. The cycle of overreaction and counter-reaction can lead to progress. Companies still care about diversity; universities still disdain hateful rhetoric. But as the left and their critics on the right score points off each other, the fight increasingly feels stagey and artificial, like professional wrestling. The hope now is that race and sex will once again be discussed as questions of public policy, where compromise is possible, rather than of identity, where it is not.
© 2024, The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved. From The Economist, published under licence. The original content can be found on www.economist.com
