Richard Hanania on the Legal Origins of Woke Culture

We are joined by author Richard Hanania to discuss his controversial new book "The Origins of Woke." Richard argues that modern woke ideology stems directly from changes to civil rights law in the 60s and 70s, not broader cultural shifts. He traces how pursuing equality of outcomes rather than opportunity put quotas and disparate impact front and center, leading to impacts on testing, HR, and more. We debate whether wokeness may also have religious origins. Richard details the role of government in racial classification, Title IX, and mandating practices at universities. We discuss potential government action to combat wokeness, and whether running for office with an unorthodox approach could drive change.

Simone Collins: [00:00:00]

Hi, today we are joined by a very special guest, the author on Substack and Twitter, Richard Hanania. Really awesome work. We love following him and we love talking with him even more.

So we're so excited he's coming on the podcast .

Malcolm Collins: Well, so an interesting thing is, is. with our audience, you're hitting an audience. It's going to be great for your book. The origins of woke. But it great in an interesting way because we are so interested in the same type of stuff.

We actually are going to have persistent disagreements about the types of questions that normal people have literally no vested interest in. Exactly. I am so interested. And I know our audience are interested. Here your theory on the origins of woke presented in like the short version that will get them excited for the book.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Richard Hanania: So the, the basic argument, if you're going to send up, you know, you're going to sum it up in a sentence is that wokeness is caused by government policy through via [00:01:00] civil rights law. And it's a strong claim and it's not, you know, it's a very, it's a claim that can you know, it could be misinterpreted and of course it doesn't explain literally every single thing that ever happened.

Like, it doesn't explain like Z's or pronouns or, or whatever, but the basic outline of like, all policy is racist. If it has like a disparate impact, how we classify race in this country. You know, the fact that our institutions have HR departments that and DEI offices that are obsessed with race. It's like, That is ultimately traceable to law.

There's a fascinating history there and it can potentially be undone by law too.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Oh, so I mean, you've gotten fairly in the weeds in your book into like how this first was introduced into law and why it wasn't stopped as it was happening. Can you talk a little to that?

Richard Hanania: Yeah, so this is a history book.

I mean, I want to say origins of woke. I mean, my background is in political science. I'm trying to like, meet the standards of like, a good social science argument of like, how we got here. And so that requires a lot of history. And yeah, I mean, the civil rights movement. I [00:02:00] mean, that's the basically every school children know about it.

It's, you know, the idea that, you know, there was there was a sort of this moral sort of wave in reaction to Jim Crow laws in America in the 1960s that culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And what happened after that is that the people, you know, who were involved in that movement didn't just pack up and go home and embrace that she wasn't solved overnight.

There was, you know, pretty much immediately within, you know, within You know, within literally years there was a move towards equality of outcome rather than equality of results. And what happened, what happened from there was you had to start pushing, you know, quotas or quasi quotas onto private institutions.

You had to start going after standardized tests. And later the same civil rights act and other, you know, associated laws, smaller less important laws were used to go after free speech through hostile work environment and, and harassment and all these things really led to the rise of HR really led to like a institutional homogenization.

And so it's sort of the genesis of how we got here. So

Malcolm Collins: can you talk about [00:03:00] when really the moment happened when it moved from equality of opportunity to equality of outcome, like in the legal system? I mean, there

Richard Hanania: are, you know, there's so many sort of, you know, there's so many sort of, you know, steps on the way, but I think the Greggs decision in 1971 was, you know, pretty much the ratification of it by the Supreme Court.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission thought it would lose that case. It actually sort of encouraged that. plaintiffs not to appeal because they thought the legislative history was so clear that you could use tests and you couldn't just say they were racist on the grounds that whites do better on them than blacks.

They said, clearly that's not what the law meant. That's not what the law says. They thought they would lose. It goes to the Supreme court and there's a unanimous decision. I mean, the Supreme court would surprise people on race in a lot of ways. And during the Warren and Berger years in the 1960s and 1970s but that really, that really codified it.

And then it was sort of off to the races.

Malcolm Collins: So can you educate our audience on the Greeks decision? What happened in it? What was at stake?

Richard Hanania: Yeah. Yeah, okay. So the greg's decision was basically a lawsuit against [00:04:00] a corporation in North Carolina company in North Carolina. I think it was a textile factory. And they had given basically a test, you know, they used to discriminate based on race you know, before the civil rights act, then they integrated, but they used to, they, they would have basically like an IQ test and they would have some educational requirements like high school degree and basically went to the Supreme Court.

Somebody argued that this was discriminatory just because blacks did not do as well on the test as whites did, right? This idea of disparate impact had been around for a while. But when they passed and signed the Civil Rights Act, you know, the belief was that that discrimination had to be intentional.

You had to actually have an intent to want to keep somebody out of a job. But then this was the theory of disparate impact. You went to the Supreme Court on that basis and the Supreme Court basically said, anything that has a disparate impact is basically presumptive, can be presumptively seen as discriminatory as violating the Civil Rights Act.

And then it becomes on the business as a, as the burden of proving that it's actually necessary. And there's, you know, all the, all kinds of steps to determine what that means. We can [00:05:00] get into the weeds, but that's basically the idea. So when you hear something is racist, because whites do better on it than blacks, it's all from a Supreme Court decision in 1971.

Malcolm Collins: Fascinating. So, question, when you look at the current, the most recent Supreme Court ruling that's, you know, on everyone's mind these days, with, with you know, tied to early colleges and admissions and everything like that I don't know what it's called off the top of my head, but is it sort of like the opposite of this?

Do you think it could lead to an untangling of some of this? Or do you think it's, it's just, I don't know. It's, it

Richard Hanania: is a it's a related area of law. It's not the, so that, that one was about employment. This one is about universities directly discriminating based on race. And it's a, you know, you can'