Now, Williamson will write entire columns in which he simply rants about “woke” people and “wokeness” in some form or another. So here we have a self-consciously ridiculous term that might have placed conservative intellectuals in conversation with black skeptics—a term that contains so many hints that progressive black thought, for instance, is more complicated than Kanye West suggests with all his talk about plantations.
I am sure someone will correct me if I am mistaken, but I can’t remember ever having written a column about “wokeness.” I have written a couple about “plantation” rhetoric. I suppose he could have got this even more wrong if he’d put some effort into it, but effort does not seem to be his thing.