Constance Grady

I tend to think that Woke 1.0 was murdered by the pandemic.

I think we see the idea of wokeness start to mainstream circa roughly 2014 and the Ferguson protests.

This is when...

The idea becomes increasingly mainstream in white liberal circles that systemic racism is an animating force in American culture.

And this language starts to become used increasingly often on social media and in...

center left to left digital outlets, which are at the time gathering a lot of online clout.

That's really, I think, when we see this idea take off.

And also when it becomes trendy enough for a corporation to want to post a black square to Instagram after the death of George Floyd, or for Disney to want to include a token queer character in the

live action Beauty and the Beast remake, right?

These are not gestures that necessarily mean or do anything, but they get coded as woke because there's a sense that there is cultural capital to be had from aligning yourself with this ethos.

That's a really good question.

Um,

After lockdown, there's a pretty clear reactionary turn happening throughout US culture, particularly among young men.

I think that for a lot of people, the idea of lockdowns get conflated with the sort of sense of censoriousness that has come to be associated with the left.

And they all kind of become one thing in people's heads that has to be repudiated and pushed back so that we can all get back to the mythical normal time that came before.

Yeah, what's interesting to me about these sort of boycotts or quasi-boycotts is how much of our conversation about racism

wokeism so-called or about our political beliefs we end up having in the language of consumption of being buyers of products of course voting with your dollar and boycotting is a very time-honored political action but it's as though we seem to have our voices limited in the ways that we can talk about these things as everyday people and so we are limited to

Creating our identities as primarily consumers, we are what we purchase and what we express our values and and how we think of ourselves in those ways.

In a way, it speaks to one of the big issues that people had with Wokeness 1.0, which was that it was an opportunity for corporations to kind of gesture meaninglessly towards these fashionable social actions without actually having to make systemic change.

It's individual solutions to a much bigger problem.