The triumph of Wokeness is closely tied to the failure of Education Reform to close the white-black test score gap. The 2002 No Child Left Behind act put together by Ted Kennedy and George W. Bush promised that blacks would score above average by 2014.

That didn’t happen.

Granted, No Child Left Behind was an incredibly stupid piece of legislation. And yet, it might have helped buy us a decade of social peace because when blacks would complain about not having as much money as whites, nice white people would say, “Yes, but soon education reform is going to fix black people’s problems. No more soft bigotry of low expectations holding blacks back!” And so society was relatively functional, with the lunacy of the Great Awokening forestalled.

When education reform failed to deliver, nice white people didn’t say, “Oh, well, I guess The Bell Curve was right after all.” No, unable to tolerate the idea of a permanent racial IQ gap, they became susceptible to lowbrow theories of systemic racism as the cause of black people not being rich.