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Richard Hanania on the Legal Origins of Woke Culture
We are joined by author Richard Hanania to discuss his controversial new book "The Origins of Woke." Richard argues that modern woke ideology stems directly from changes to civil rights law in the 60s and 70s, not broader cultural shifts. He traces how pursuing equality of outcomes rather than opportunity put quotas and disparate impact front and center, leading to impacts on testing, HR, and more. We debate whether wokeness may also have religious origins. Richard details the role of government in racial classification, Title IX, and mandating practices at universities. We discuss potential government action to combat wokeness, and whether running for office with an unorthodox approach could drive change.
Simone Collins: [00:00:00]
Hi, today we are joined by a very special guest, the author on Substack and Twitter, Richard Hanania. Really awesome work. We love following him and we love talking with him even more.
So we're so excited he's coming on the podcast .
Malcolm Collins: Well, so an interesting thing is, is. with our audience, you're hitting an audience. It's going to be great for your book. The origins of woke. But it great in an interesting way because we are so interested in the same type of stuff.
We actually are going to have persistent disagreements about the types of questions that normal people have literally no vested interest in. Exactly. I am so interested. And I know our audience are interested. Here your theory on the origins of woke presented in like the short version that will get them excited for the book.
Would you like to know more?
Malcolm Collins: Yeah.
Richard Hanania: So the, the basic argument, if you're going to send up, you know, you're going to sum it up in a sentence is that wokeness is caused by government policy through via [00:01:00] civil rights law. And it's a strong claim and it's not, you know, it's a very, it's a claim that can you know, it could be misinterpreted and of course it doesn't explain literally every single thing that ever happened.
Like, it doesn't explain like Z's or pronouns or, or whatever, but the basic outline of like, all policy is racist. If it has like a disparate impact, how we classify race in this country. You know, the fact that our institutions have HR departments that and DEI offices that are obsessed with race. It's like, That is ultimately traceable to law.
There's a fascinating history there and it can potentially be undone by law too.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Oh, so I mean, you've gotten fairly in the weeds in your book into like how this first was introduced into law and why it wasn't stopped as it was happening. Can you talk a little to that?
Richard Hanania: Yeah, so this is a history book.
I mean, I want to say origins of woke. I mean, my background is in political science. I'm trying to like, meet the standards of like, a good social science argument of like, how we got here. And so that requires a lot of history. And yeah, I mean, the civil rights movement. I [00:02:00] mean, that's the basically every school children know about it.
It's, you know, the idea that, you know, there was there was a sort of this moral sort of wave in reaction to Jim Crow laws in America in the 1960s that culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And what happened after that is that the people, you know, who were involved in that movement didn't just pack up and go home and embrace that she wasn't solved overnight.
There was, you know, pretty much immediately within, you know, within You know, within literally years there was a move towards equality of outcome rather than equality of results. And what happened, what happened from there was you had to start pushing, you know, quotas or quasi quotas onto private institutions.
You had to start going after standardized t
Published on 2 years, 2 months ago