In recent years, Black researchers and artists have worked on establishing critical studies in Blackness as a research field in Danish and Nordic academia. But Black and racially minoritized researchers are not alone in researching Blackness. In 2023, the white Danish literary critic Klaus Rothstein published Den sorte mand. Racisme, woke og hvidhed i dansk litteratur (The Black Man. Racism, woke and whiteness in Danish literature), which examines Blackness as a motif in Danish literature from the 18th century to the present. In this article, we analyze how concepts including anti-black racism, anti-racism and “wokeness” are operationalized in the study. We argue that Rothstein’s claim on the importance of “witnessing” – and thus reproducing – anti-black racism enables the construction of a white liberal non-racist position, characterized by a deep skepticism towards contemporary forms of anti-racism that are presented as both dangerous and destructive. We read Den sorte mand as part of a broader movement of political anti-wokeness, which has gained a strong foothold in the Nordic public sphere in recent years. The article shows that the normalization and intellectualization of anti-wokeness contributes to the delegitimization of research into Blackness and anti-racism, and works to reconfigure the tradition for normalizing and exonerating anti-black racism in a Nordic context.