Here’s my review of Richard Hanania’s new book, The Origins of Woke, in Taki’s Magazine:
Steve Sailer
September 20, 2023What causes wokeness? Richard Hanania writes in his highly useful new book, The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics, that:
Conservatives have blamed wokeness on entities as diverse as capitalists, the education system, recently arrived immigrants, financiers, Hollywood, the United Nations, “globalists,” the mainstream media, the Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Jazeera, the upper middle class, and the Chinese Communist Party.
But Hanania makes a strong case that the main reason has been the past half century of government regulation of the workplace in the name of civil rights.
As Willie Sutton replied when asked why he robs banks, that’s where the money is. For the ever-growing numbers of people paid to micromanage diversity and shut down potentially offensive free speech at work, it’s a living. It may not seem like a lot of money to Silicon Valley titans, but to many soft-major college grads it’s more than they could make doing anything else. To update Upton Sinclair’s famous quote, “It is not difficult to get a woman to believe something when her HR staffer salary depends upon it.”
Read the whole thing there.
