There was this kind of rapid spike in talking about all forms of prejudice and discrimination.

The word woke is being used almost daily.

A black trans lives matter march.

Racism, police brutality, inequality.

Racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia.

It's just all at once.

They say they're speaking on behalf of racial minorities.

The people who work in the knowledge professions, we think that our perspective should count more than the people checking us out at the grocery store.

Hello, I'm Fraser Myers, Deputy Editor of Spikes, and I am delighted to be joined by Musa Al Garby.

Musa, you're the author of a brilliant book.

We Have Never Been Woke.

Probably one of the best timed books in history.

It came out just before the US presidential election,

and everyone would probably describe it as prescient.

The way you describe it is that we're in the middle of a, or we're

at the tail end of a fourth great awakening. What were the other awakenings?

Sure. Yeah. So an awokening is a period of rapid change and how people talk and think about social justice,

how they engage in political activity, and so on.

What I show in the book is that you can actually measure these changes in kind of concrete

empirical ways using a whole bunch of sociological tools.

And when you do this, yeah, you can see that this kind of shifting we saw after 2010 is a case

of something. And so the previous ones, you know what's funny, I'll just say, we actually have a colloquial

...