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One signal that wokeness is waning: the words printed at the bottom of the helmets of NFL players.
I don't have metrics on this, this is all just my subjective perception. I scrubbed through my recording of the games while writing this in the interest of accuracy.
At the start of the 2020 season, just a few months after social justice become trendy, the NFL decided to allow players to swap out the name of their team on the back of the helmet for a social justice message. At that time they could choose one of four messages: "Stop Hate," "It Takes All Of Us," "End Racism," or "Black Lives Matter." The league would also sometimes print these messages on the field.
At the season opener this past Thursday, with the L.A. Rams facing the Buffalo Bills, I noticed a new message: "Choose Love." I thought it was just nearly all of the Rams sporting this one, but this article says it was all of them. Few of the Bills were displaying anything except for their team name. That the preferred message was so non-specific was a signal itself that attitudes may be shifting. The article says that the NFL says "Choose Love" is a message against hate crimes and gun violence, but I would never have guessed that had it not been spelled out for me.
This past Sunday I watched three games: Cincinnati Bengals vs. Pittsburgh Steelers, Green Bay Packers vs. Minnesota Vikings, and Tampa Bay Buccaneers vs. Dallas Cowboys.
For Bengals vs Steelers I saw zero of these messages. Notably neither quarterback on either team had such a message.
In Packers vs Vikings I couldn't see any messages on the Packers, I'd say about a third of the Vikings had them. Neither quarterback had them.
For Cowboys vs. Bucs I saw none on the Cowboys, about half of Bucs players had them, which included the quarterback Tom Brady, sporting "Inspire Change."
In all of the games I noticed just one "Black Lives Matter," on a Vikings player.
Maybe I'm just misremembering the prevalence of these the past two seasons, but I thought they used to be more likely than not, especially for star players.
My observation is that wokeness proceeds in waves. Imagine you are standing on a beach watching the tide come in. The water level appears to rise each time a wave hits the shore and then fall again as the wave recedes. If you have never seen the ocean before then it is easy to think that the crest of each wave marks the highest level that the water will ever achieve. But in truth, each wave crests a little higher than the one before and gradually the water level rises until much of the beach is under water.
Wokeness has not advanced in a straightforward manner, increasing a little each day. Instead, wokeness advances and recedes in waves but each wave leaves a somewhat higher baseline level of wokeness than came before.
I remember thinking in late 2019 that wokeness seemed to have abated. The worst excesses of #metoo had already come and gone. BLM, Ferguson, etc seemed to be a long time in the past. It felt like there was a little more space to speak openly. And as bad as covid was, I remember feeling like it had led to even less focus on woke issues, at least for the first few months of 2020. Then George Floyd was killed and within a few days, wokeness had become more popular and more intense than I had thought possible.
Eventually I realized that this pattern has played out many times in much the same way. Wokeness seems to be declining until some new event ignites the public's passion, re-energizes the woke and facilitates new achievements for wokeness. Gradually the fervor dies down and some people start to question the worst excesses of the moment. For a time it seems that wokeness is in decline until the cycle repeats again. There are the major ones: Ferguson, #metoo, George Floyd. But there are also many minor incidents that follow the same pattern: JK Rowling, the Atlanta spa shootings, each new Dave Chappelle show, and so on.
But even though each of these waves eventually subsided, most of them left wokeness at a higher level than it was before. Presumably wokeness will not increase forever. Eventually the waves will cease or diminish so much that they don't matter. I am genuinely unsure if that will take closer to 2 years or 200. But it is a mistake to think that just because wokeness seems to be receding now it has truly peaked.
If we think of wokeness as a tool, and not as a social phenomenon (with its "natural" cyclicity), then its occurrence could be explained almost purely by underlying events, when this tool is applicable. But I am not sure its level is net raising. As a tool, it stimulates development of counter-tools and techniques.
Depp v Herd is a good illustration of countering Metoo. So when Metoo and abuse narrative didn't work out, they employed "harassment by the internet mob anyway". Here's the grandiose title of the report:
"Targeted Trolling and Trend Manipulation: How Organized Attacks on Amber Heard and Other Women Thrive on Twitter"
A quote from Variety:
Apparently no one hired Bot Sentinel! The troll farm as a rhetorical device is known since at least Rian Johnson's defense of his StarWars movie against popular criticism, but here the coordination seems to raise at a new level. Arms race goes on.
In sum, I think there is a nonlinear arms race dynamics, fueled by underlying social events, not a steady rise.
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At this point, I've come to find proclamations about the imminent death of wokeness somewhat naive and premature. These types of predictions have been made almost continuously ever since the Culture War was a thing, and none of them have been borne out yet. I'm unsure if it's even just temporarily receding at the moment, let alone truly going away - the small anti-woke victories used to support the claim that the mainstream is finally beginning to abandon that belief system are usually quite narrow and are often counteracted by increases in wokeness elsewhere, and to interpret that as a general de-wokening of society one needs to ignore the instances where things have either stayed stagnant or have gotten much worse.
I understand the attraction of believing that sanity will prevail, and I would love if wokeness was actually waning. But I can't see how that's happening in any material way, since a huge amount of institutions are still firmly captured by that ideology and staffed by their acolytes (and they are all firmly committed to Doing Better). It's going to take a lot more than NFL helmet decals to make me believe that it's disappearing.
I think only when we start to see women participating less in positions of power will wokeness recede. Wokeness imo is almost entirely explained by women taking over more and more media spaces and capturing institutional power. Unfortunately this trend hasn’t really slowed down much.
You're not wrong, it's certainly contributed a good bit to the awokening of our institutions. Here's an article called "Did Women In Academia Cause Wokeness?" which is pretty related to what you said, and which I would recommend perusing.
https://noahcarl.substack.com/p/did-women-in-academia-cause-wokeness
The author notes that women are disproportionately represented in grievance studies. Among the humanities, the subject with the highest proportion of women receiving bachelor's degrees and doctoral degrees is "Ethnic, Gender and Cultural Studies" (basically grievance studies).
Then they do a gender comparison of opinions in two fields: anthropology and sociology.
"Compared to men, women were more likely to say that “Sociology should be both a scientific and moral enterprise”, and that “Sociology should analyze and transcend oppression”. They were less likely to say that “More political conservatives would benefit discipline”, and that “Advocacy and research should be separate for objectivity”."
"What about anthropology? The next table shows the proportion of male versus female anthropologists (from a sample of 301) who agreed and disagreed with various items. Compared to men, women were more likely to say that “Science is just one way of knowing”, and that “Postmodern theories have made important contribution”. They were less likely to say that “Field is undermined by antiscientific attitudes”, and that “Advocacy and fieldwork kept separate for objectivity”."
"Finally, there is the evidence supplied by Eric Kaufmann in his mammoth report for the CSPI. Kaufmann compiled data from several different surveys of graduate students and academics. He found that women were more likely to support dismissal campaigns, more likely to discriminate against conservatives, and more likely to support diversity quotas for reading lists. Overall, they had significantly more left-wing views. To quote Kaufmann: “if the share of women rises, we should expect the balance of internal opinion to move in the direction of emotional safety over academic freedom.”"
In other words, female academics are less likely than male academics to place importance on objectivity and dispassionate inquiry, and more likely to place importance on the ability of their work to be used as a vehicle to deliver their political propaganda. They are disproportionately represented in woke disciplines. And women in general are also less pro-free speech and more pro-censorship. As a result, the author considers women's influx into academia to be a factor that led to increasing wokeness.
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