Where did wokeness come from, and what can be done about it? These are the questions that US author and academic Richard Hanania aims to answer in his new book, The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics, published by Harper Collins.
As radical doctrines have burst into Western public life in the past decade, most notably since the BLM riots of 2020, many have wondered how this “Great Awokening” was able to change our culture so far so fast. Hanania argues that the rise of wokeness in America — and, from there, across the world — has been far from a merely organic phenomenon. Much of it has been imposed top-down by the US federal government through the law, chiefly by regulating the American workplace. Driven by ideology, US government bureaucrats, human resources managers and the judiciary have been central to the rise of this new creed. This means that winning the culture war will require not just exposing woke’s many excesses, but also undoing the government power out of which it has grown.
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