Earlier: TK: Insert "The Unbearable Whiteness of Something" Pun Here
After a decade or more of stagnation, Google has finally updated their Ngram viewer to include all the words in all the books known to Google up through 2019. While academic analysts like David Rozado and Zach Goldberg of trends in journalistic outlets such as the New York Times tend to find hockey-stick graphs of growth of Woke works suddenly turning upward around 2013, Google’s graphs of word usage in books (weighting the most obscure academic book as heavily as the biggest bestseller) often finds longer takeoff runs.
For example, in this database of books published in America, “blackness” had a brief spike in books during the Black Power era around 1970, then slowly ramped up from the end of the 1980s (the first era of political correctness) onward. “Whiteness” was used mostly by polar explorers, interior decorators, and bleach marketers until the late 1990s, when it evidently began to be used more often as the demonic doppelgänger of saintly blackness. Whiteness caught up with blackness, only to fall behind again from 2008 to 2012, then surge back from 2013 onward.
