For the ever-growing numbers of people paid to micromanage diversity and shut down potentially offensive free speech at work, it’s a living. It may not seem like a lot of money to Silicon Valley titans, but to many soft-major college grads it’s more than they could make doing anything else. To update Upton Sinclair’s famous quote, “It is not difficult to get a woman to believe something when her salary depends upon it.”
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The Origins of Woke draws much from the work of law professor Gail Heriot of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, such as her article “The Roots of Wokeness: Title VII Damage Remedies as Potential Drivers of Attitudes Toward Identity Politics and Free Expression” on the malignant effects of specific provisions in the Civil Rights Act of 1991.
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In the 1960s, the federal government geared up for a long twilight struggle with the forces of Jim Crow in the South, creating numerous bureaucracies to battle entrenched Southern segregation. But, it turned out, as soon as the federal government stopped allowing state-sanctioned or state-tolerated violence against firms that violated Jim Crow norms by no longer segregating their lunch counters and the like, overt discrimination almost immediately collapsed in the South. After all, Jim Crow with its persnickety caste rules was a drag on economic growth, so the Southern business class was happy to finally join modern, booming America.
This left federal bureaucrats with a lot of time on their hands.
Similarly, even though the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s ban on sex discrimination in employment had been added as a joke by a segregationist senator trolling the bill, traditional sex discrimination in hiring largely evaporated in the 1970s. It turned out that capitalists loved having a law tell them to double their potential workforces. (That’s one reason 1973 shows up on so many graphs as the last really good year for male wage growth in American history.)
Rather than announce “Mission accomplished” and go find other work, the triumphant forces of the civil rights bureaucracy became instead the scourge of ever more esoteric forms of discrimination, such as disparate impact, hostile environment due to mean speech, sexual harassment, and disability access. They increasingly intervened in the American workplace in favor of complaining members of protected groups, which cultivated a culture of complaint.
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Over time, Democrats figured out that it was in their interest for corporations to be uncertain what exactly the governments’ rules are regarding race and sex. This avoided making clear to voters, who, even in California remain strongly opposed to racial preferences, how much of a thumb the government was putting on the scale.
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In response to the proliferation of government regulations (and the lawsuits that accompany them) banning discrimination against some people and encouraging discrimination against others, corporations vastly increased their human resources staff to cajole and mollify the bureaucrats.
Of course, corporate HR staffers are less the adversaries of the government and plaintiff attorneys than their codependents in a symbiotic relationship featuring slightly different career paths in the same business. Just as many of the environmental consultants hired by corporations to placate the Environmental Protection Agency are former EPA staffers (and thus are definitely not going to call for repealing environmental laws), corporate HR, federal civil rights bureaucrats, discrimination lawyers, sexual harassment trainers, and so forth have perfectly understandable mutual economic incentives to bring ever larger parts of American life under their purview to generate more business for people like themselves.
From 1968 to 2021, despite immense improvements in automation, the number of Americans working in Human Resources grew from 140,000 to 1,500,000.
Big increase in Democratic Party patronage, backed by federal law forcing everyone to pretend to believe the sob stories and increased censorship.
Mr. Sailer is nothing if not a comedic genius.
Rinse and repeat for a chunk of fedgov: win a kind of war; need more to do, so they find ways to muck things up.
More we give Defense, the more we lose. More State does, more the world hates us. Complying with new EPA regs puts up more pollutants than reduces. Etc.
But Wokeness taps into our tribal, internecine hatreds, channeling us into hating the Straight White Man to the maximum; while triggering our instinct to help the halt and the lame: gnash and wail over George Floyd, unappealing as he was.
Troubling that people are rather prone to dysfunctional spirals; a bit of Skoptsy in all of us.