Hey everybody, it's James Lindsay.

You're listening to the new Discourses podcast, and we are going to read from what I call the book of woke.

So a lot of you will have heard the podcast where I did kind of woke for dummies,

and I read from this book by Robin DiAngelo and her writing partner,

or what is it, something, Osloom Sensoi some time ago, is everyone really equal?

And in that podcast I mentioned, there is a book that I refer to as the book of woke.

So that's the baby version to tell people what

woke is and maybe we'll do more episodes about it later. But then there's the big boy version.

So I'll tell you a story first and then I'm going to dive into the book. I'm going to read to you

from the first chapter of this book a bit. It's a very tedious and long book. It's actually,

it's relatively short in number of pages, but every page takes a toll on you to read, so it feels

very long, even though, again, Woke has always written kind of, although there's lots of

specialized jargon with lots of syllables.

It's always kind of written like they're writing to children or intellectually undeveloped people.

But at any rate, this book is called Critical Constructivism, and it's by Joe L. Kinchelow, who was, he died 15 years ago or so. He was a critical

pedagogist or pedagogue. In other words, he was critical education theory. And he was, I think,

at McGill University in Canada doing his critical education theory.

So he's downstream from Paulo Frady and Henry Drew to place him.

And it is my opinion, and this is a story I'll tell you in a second, that he actually is the one.

And this book is the book where woke was originally codified.

So the thing that we call woke, what is woke?

I don't use woke glibly, although I do use it somewhat casually in conversation.

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