Wokeness

Book excerpt: University Press returns with another short and captivating book - a brief history of wokeness. In 2018, Peter Boghossian, a professor of philosophy at Portland State University, set about proving there was something wrong with academia. He and two other authors wrote and tried to publish 20 fake papers in various peer-reviewed journals. One paper criticized "imperialist astronomy," suggesting that physics departments should study interpretive dance. Another paper discussed "queer performativity" in urban dog parks - a paper on rap culture among dogs that included nonsensical phrases like "because of my own situatedness as a human, rather than as a dog." Seven of the 20 fake papers were duly published before Peter Boghossian and his co-authors exposed them as fake. In 2021, Boghossian, a renowned atheist and champion of critical thinking and moral reasoning, resigned from the university, stating that the university had been changed from "a bastion of free inquiry into a Social Justice factory whose only inputs were race, gender, and victimhood, and whose only outputs were grievance and division." But the question remained: How could seven fake papers get published in peer-reviewed journals? Had the journals been blinded by wokeness? According to the Cambridge Dictionary, wokeness is a state of being aware, especially of social problems such as racism and inequality. Nothing too controversial about that. So how did wokeness become so controversial? This short book provides the fair, balanced, captivating history of wokeness that will help you better understand today's dynamic marketplace of ideas - a history that you can read in about an hour.