Sixty‑Year Drift Enabled the Awokening

Wokeness should be read as the emergent product of six decades of correlated institutional changes—post‑1960s academic shifts, career incentives for Boomers, upper‑class adoption of post‑modern norms, and social‑media amplification—that only crystallized into mass cultural force in the 2010s. The argument reframes the phenomenon from a single cause to a cumulative material process that required institutional maturity before a platform ignition. — If accepted, this shifts reform strategy away from targeting single causes (campus curricula or platform features) toward coordinated institutional and incentive reforms across education, professional hiring, and platform governance.