Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on the show

today is Joanna Williams. She's a columnist for Spiked, which is an online magazine, and the director

of Keough, an independent think tank based in the UK. She's written a couple of recent web pieces

for Citigernel on the publishing industry and on the gender pay gap, and she's the author

of How Woke One, the elitist movement that threatens democracy, tolerance, and reason.

Joanna, thanks very much for joining us.

It's a real pleasure to be with you. Thank you very much for having me.

So let's begin with your book, which is an entrant in this new discipline, which we might call

Wokeness Studies.

You actually start in a place that I haven't seen anybody else start in 1920s African-American

culture in which to be woke was to possess a kind of political consciousness attuned to the very real oppression

that blacks then faced in America. But over time, you write in the book, the concept changed.

So we might say in contemporary woke parlance that it was appropriated by a very different group of people

and put in the service of entirely different and dubious ends.

So why don't you just give us the short history and evolution of wokeness as you see it

and as you describe it in the book?

Yeah, I think you've done a really good job of summing up, if you like,

the first 80 or so years of the history of the word woke there.

And really up until the late 1990s, early 2000s, that's exactly where we're at,

that transition that you've just described of a word that was really African-American

street parlance, not even terribly political. I think to stay woke was really to, in a very

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