By David Dante Troutt
22 October 2026
You know it’s election season because it’s time to remake the past. As progressive candidates—many identified with the DSA—score victories across the country, both hopefuls and pundits have taken aim at “woke 1.0”. Even AOC called it “crazy.” Rejecting its excesses and cancellations, they suggest “woke 2.0” will stay focused on “affordability.”
The problem is that the repudiation campaign risks erasing the same issue that awakened “wokeness” in the first place: racial inequality. Remember, whatever wokeness is, it only became a global thing with the “racial reckoning” that followed George Floyd’s murder.
Those early days of the pandemic allowed most Americans to see what many African Americans have struggled with for years. Law enforcement practices that belittled and besieged with impunity. Underlying health conditions like diabetes, heart disease and obesity that put us at much higher risk of death when Covid struck. And economic pressures enhanced by systemic racism that were reflected in housing insecurity just when Americans were supposed to shelter in place.
Millions protested in the streets. We talked a lot about diversity, equity and inclusion. And yet we have moved with alacrity to a racial backlash ever since.
Almost nothing has changed the underlying facts about racial inequality. Measures such as unemployment rates, health insurance access, food scarcity, diminished small business opportunities and greater public health risks all tell a worsening story. Indeed, these policy areas were direct targets of a Trump II, now backed by all three branches of the federal government.
So, why repudiate today what was already almost immediately ridiculed (Critical Race Theory, Black History Month), rejected (racial equity) and punished like a crime (DEI)? After all, these were the racial origins of wokeness—whatever that term really meant. The brief period certainly had its unhelpful, even damaging, excesses. But the underlying beliefs remain worthy of us.
As I argue in my new book, the so-called “racial reckoning” confused one form of reckoning—awareness of a problem—with another—accountability for its harms. There was a lot of awareness in 2020—DEI meetings, op-eds, webinars, books, pledges of support, even accusations. But precious little accountability for the problems we’d awakened to.
Within two years anti-wokeness came roaring back with the ferocity of white supremacy. If woke 1 was notable for ideas about defunding, canceling and abolition, anti-wokeness took each of these to unimaginable heights.
Institutions that carefully (and tepidly) established pipeline access to opportunities for dramatically underrepresented groups were accused of practicing racism, sued, fined and their federal funding revoked. Most surrendered their inclusive practices in anticipation of a lawsuit, dismantling whole departments. Federal agencies like the EEOC promote “snitch suits” to draw out whistleblowers, part of a massive “course correction” for decades of “reverse race discrimination” against white males. The DOGE cuts took special aim at Black women’s federal jobs. Dismantled aid programs surgically removed public health supports for our developing allies. (Only white South Africans now qualify as eligible asylum seekers.) Then came mass deportations and the armies of recently recruited, inadequately trained ICE agents—who now enjoy federal immunity from civil rights claims.
Anything associated with anti-racism and racial equity has been defunded, canceled or abolished.
From Day 1 of Trump II, the strategy worked by turning woke’s most identifiable term into a racial epithet: DEI. Nothing says Black like DEI. In two executive orders issued January 20, 2025, Trump declared DEI “unlawful” (and “repugnant” and “unpatriotic”). This is not legally true, nor was DEI ever defined. But the message was powerfully clear. If you, your colleagues or your work are associated with what we call DEI, we can defund, cancel and abolish you. Since most people’s definition of DEI begins with Black people, say no more. The implied threat is enough.
Repudiating woke 1 in this way enabled a federal retribution campaign against Blacks (and others). Jobs, careers and scholarships were lost within months. Institutional supports disappeared. Admissions, participation and leadership among Black students, businesses and professionals have free fallen.
Repudiating woke 1 may also have revealed how little appetite Americans had for defending the racial justice beliefs they pledged just a few years earlier. Why so little resistance?
We march instead toward an election season where the underlying racial concerns of “woke 1” will be replaced by the supposedly much saner concerns about affordability. This is not a bad thing. For years, research institutes like mine have been demonstrating how a rampant lack of affordability stretches inequality to the breaking point.
Yet once again, even a close look at affordability will reveal a disparate impact upon Black housing consumers, children and the elderly. In fact, where the 20th century told the story of a Great Migration of African Americans away from the South as a way out of poverty, mob violence and disfranchisement, the 21st shows a massive reversal—largely for economic reasons. Since the late 1990s, Black people have been relocating to more affordable parts of the country in search of jobs, mostly in the South—a quiet racial reckoning on one’s own terms.
Woke was never a favorite word of mine, but we should be careful what we dismiss out of hand. Behind woke was a sea of evidence of inequality hiding in plain sight. What submerges Black American opportunities is, like the affordability crisis, always a harbinger of broader threats to our fragile democracy. Racial equity and greater affordability are intertwined solutions. They often go together.
If there’s to be a “woke 2.0”—and we need one—let it finally reach the accountability that’s truly overdue.
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David Dante Troutt is Distinguished Professor of Law at Rutgers Law School in Newark, NJ and the director of the Rutgers Center on Law, Inequality and Metropolitan Equity. His new book is Reckoning the Racial Reckoning: From Backlash to Accountability after George Floyd (Cambridge University Press).