You’re skeptical, I know, but the clues are piling up.
We are beginning to come back from this moralizing vision of a society of individuals, perceived first and foremost as members of groups, rigidly divided into dominants and dominated.
Woke ideology has especially swept through the media, higher education, private and public organizations, and, to a lesser extent, general opinion.
Setbacks
Here is some data compiled by the journal The Economist (September 21).
In the United States, according to Gallup, the percentage of people “very concerned” about racial issues increased from 17% in 2014 to 48% in 2021, returning to 35% today.
Five words or phrases continually recur in woke discourse: “intersectionality,” “microaggression,” “white privilege,” “transphobia,” and “oppression.”
Researcher David Rozado established that these expressions – ultra-frequent between 2019 and 2021 in the Los Angeles Timesthe Wall Street Journalthe New York Timesthe New York Post and the Washington Post – have been in free fall since, except in the Los Angeles Times.
In the absolute beacon of media wokism, the New York Timesthe phrase “white privilege” was used 2.5 times for every million words in 2020.
In 2023, it was only 0.4 times, six times less often. We see the same trend in television shows.
Same thing when we look for the frequency of these words in scientific articles (or which pass as such) in academic journals listed in JSTOR, the main directory of academic journals.
According to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the number of “canceled” lecturers at American universities has been declining since 2021, the worst year.
The percentage of people who think that you can really change your birth sex is falling.
The percentage of people opposed to a person being able to face opponents of their new gender rather than those of their biological sex in a sporting competition has increased.
The woke infiltration of professional associations is now denounced.
Lots of companies are abandoning their EDI programs.
Books glorifying wokism, like those by Di Angelo or Kendi, sell less.
The Economist presents lots of other figures.
Future
In short, Wokism, in the making for decades, began to surge around 2015, reached a peak around 2021, and has declined since then, more or less quickly depending on the sector.
We wanted to debunk the “system”, “deconstruct the power structures”, and all this is still in place, including real racism, the one which requires in-depth work on public policies and not apocalyptic and guilt-inducing speeches.
None of this allows us to predict the future. Generation Z is the most woke of all. Will she keep her beliefs as she gets older?
Until then, good news from time to time feels good, right?
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