David Rozado has pioneered studies on wokeness, where he created charts showing sharp upticks in the usage of terms like ‘sexism’, ‘racism’ and ‘transphobia’. Until recently, he’d confined himself to studying the Anglosphere and his native Spain. Rozado has now extended his analysis to dozens of other countries, and what he finds is pretty remarkable: The Great Awokening is a global phenomenon.
In almost every country Rozado looked at, there was an increase in the frequency of what he calls “prejudice-denoting terms” beginning around 2012. As the left-hand chart below indicates, this was true even in countries like Kenya and Nigeria – where you’d assume people would be more concerned about things like poverty.
As you’d expect, mentions of ‘Islamophobia’ were most common in Muslim countries, while mentions of ‘anti-Semitism’ were by far the most common in Israel. And mentions of ‘sexism’ (and related terms) were most common in Spain. For the other three types of prejudice, the pattern was less clear, though the UK came close to the top on all three.
Perhaps the most interesting finding to emerge from Rozado’s analysis is that the big increase – the “woke hockey stick”, – appears to be happening more or less simultaneously in all countries. This is somewhat surprising. Most of us had been assuming that it occurred first in the US, then in other Western countries, and then (if at all) in the rest of the world.
Among Western countries, the US does appear to be a front-runner on mentions of ‘racism’, as you’d predict, though the margin isn’t huge. So did the Great Awokening originate in America, as most of us had been assuming? It did. Though it was amplified in many countries at the same time through social media.
