In the last 12 years, academic language about structural inequality made its way to media and popular discourse, leading to conservative critiques of “wokeness.” But how much really changed beneath the surface in our elite institutions? Musa Al-Gharbi finds that wokeness has peaked after it was the product of socio-economic trends in the professions. But he says it was mostly surface-level, visible in social norms that distracted from underlying economic realities.