Whenever the topic of wokeness comes up, someone inevitably asks, “What do you mean by wokeness?” Sometimes, it’s a good-faith question. Other times, it’s an attempted conversation stopper: a way to insinuate that the term is just a meaningless right-wing slur. To be fair, some on the right do use it that way. Still, though the word has fuzzy boundaries, it clearly points to something real. And it’s important to talk about that something, because wokeness is the largest cultural shift that most of us have seen in our lifetimes.

Broadly speaking, wokeness is an extreme form of progressive politics, occupying the same region of conceptual space as political correctness, identity politics, social justice, and critical theory. At its core is a moral framework that divides the world into oppressors and oppressed. The primary oppressors are White people, men, straight people, and cisgender people; the primary oppressed are people of color, women, and LGBT+ individuals. Woke or not, few deny that there’s still racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry in the world. The distinctive claim of the woke, however, is that these things are utterly pervasive. The West is a White supremacist heteronormative patriarchy, suffused with White privilege, male privilege, systemic racism, microaggressions, and so on.

But wokeness isn’t just a diagnosis; it’s an approach to remaking the world. Its prescriptions include Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives such as implicit bias training; efforts to shield people from upsetting ideas via safe spaces and trigger warnings; reverse discrimination in college admissions, hiring, and elsewhere; speech restrictions; and cancellation - that is, social or professional punishment for expressing views that, until recently, were well within the Overton window (for example, that there are two biological sexes).

In this installment of the 12 Things Everyone Should Know series, we’ll explore the psychological and sociological research on wokeness. We’ll look at sex and age differences in wokeness; whether wokeness elevates the risk of mental illness; whether its empirical claims stand up to scrutiny; whether its policies achieve their stated goals or make things worse; and whether wokeness is on the way out or ramping up.