Scarcely had the embers of Minneapolis stopped smoldering in 2020 before a wave of pundits and public intellectuals began claiming that we’d already passed “peak woke,” that none of it was really worth discussing anymore, and that “wokeness” had mostly been trumped-up and overstated anyhow. To even use the W-word was “cringe,” to mark oneself as an irrelevant and probably racist rube. What mattered was that with Joe Biden’s inauguration, thoughtful adults would be back in charge, after whatever fleeting rhetorical excesses of the previous few years, and common-sense progressivism would prevail once again.