I’m now convinced wokeness actually began in the 90’s
My friend, I can assure that you if you try hard enough, and maybe have half a fifth of bourbon in you, that you can trace back all societal ills to the 90s.
It actually began back in the 70s. As the spoiled brats from the 50s grew up, they grew out of their Free Love and Drugs Woodstock phase of the 60s, had oopsie-babies, and morphed into crunchy vegetarian feminist ecology minded tree huggers in the 70s. In the 80s, feminists got hoisted on their own retards and were forced into the work force, and a huge amount of inflation made sure that the 2 income family never went away, and the stay-at-home Mom was permanently demonized. These same people changed their minds from being from free-love-ecology-vegetarian-let's-join-a-commune-crunchy-hippies to fuck-you-got-mine shoulder pad wearing yuppies, and the whole crunchy-free-love-ecology-communism thing was seen as uncool, passe, so embarrassing. AIDS did a pretty good job of getting rid of free live and fags for a little while.
Crunchy Communism didn't disappear entirely in the 80s, though. In academia and other subversive underground spots, the coals of the movement were kept alive and gently and lovingly fanned, like a caveman keeping his fire alive.
In the late 80s/early 90s, young Boomers and old Gen X'ers picked up the crunchy mantle again and became neo-Hippies. At first, this was less a movement than it was about smoking pot, listening to the Grateful Dead, Led Zeppelin, and Jimi Hendrix, and tryna fuck bitches, but academia was waiting, and started rebuilding the fires like a drunk caveman with a zippo lighter.
By the 90s, a lot of 1970s concepts began to re-emerge, rebranded for a New Age. For instance, vegetarianism became veganism, and ecology became environmentalist, and so forth. You could see the seeds of it in the 1990s, but it burst forth as a raging wildfire that couldn't be ignored by 2012. The only way to fix it is to cut off its fuel and make it as embarrassing as a hairstyle from the 70s. This time, though, we need to stamp out every spark of crunchy communism so it can't come back ever again.