Sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, a professor at Stony Brook and a Columbia University fellow, is having a well-deserved moment. His book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite (Princeton University Press), released last October, has caused quite the stir, leading a burgeoning mountain of reassessments of the “Great Awokening” that began in the early 2010s.
Professor al-Gharbi’s profoundly skeptical functionalist take on why “woke” ideas attained such cultural cachet during the 2010s has triggered recent flattering profiles in The New Yorker and the The Atlantic, as well as laudatory promotional blurbs from prominent public commentators and favorable reviews from publications across the political spectrum (how many books about a fraught political topic offer an argument that wins plaudits from both Jacobin and National Review?). A Washington Post reviewer, to pick from one of many positive reviews, closed his glowing exegesis by declaring al-Gharbi “one of the most insightful and provocative sociologists of his generation.”
In our conversation with al-Gharbi for the latest Blue City Blues podcast episode, we spent the better part of an hour discussing why the spectacularly rapid spread of woke ideas into the cultural mainstream of blue cities and their deep embedding into the DNA of culturally progressive institutions has done little or nothing to improve the position of the actually marginalized. Short answer? Because that was never really the point, al-Gharbi told us.
Early in his book, al-Gharbi resists offering a singular definition of “woke,” acknowledging that it is a contested term which means different things to different groups of people, That said, he associates “woke” with a set of interlocking identitarian commitments around concepts of allyship and intersectionality, a focus on identity, subjectivity and lived experience, a fixation on various forms of privilege and group disparities, and so on. The recent rise to prominence of those ideas, he convincingly argues, was not at all what it purported to be. His thesis is that this complex of ideas gained prominence when it became the ideology of a rising elite he dubs (drawing on a concept borrowed from sociologist Pierre Bourdieu) “symbolic capitalists.”
These are the people, like us and like al-Gharbi himself, who make their living manipulating information and symbols and data rather than working with their hands. Symbolic capitalists are the winners in the 21st century transition to a knowledge economy; they are essentially the same people urban studies guru Richard Florida had previously dubbed “the creative class.” While symbolic capitalists genuinely believed that adopting woke ideas was the pathway to help the downtrodden al-Gharbi argues, they were blind to what they were actually accomplishing, which is that the turn to wokeness they spearheaded was actually about an intra-elite competition for status and power.
Al-Gharbi produces evidence to demonstrate that there have been four Great Awokenings – the first in the 1930s, a second one in the late 1960s, again in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and then the latest one that began in the 2010s and is currently fading away – over the course of the last century. Each was precipitated by a structural mismatch: when the number of aspirants to symbolic capitalist professions outstrips the number of higher-status jobs available to them, many of these people become disaffected and begin to see themselves as members of the oppressed and marginalized classes, and seek to make common cause with the truly marginalized.
They do so by ostentatiously embracing the language and ideas of social justice but deploy this discourse largely as a means to wrest status and economic power from the more successful symbolic capitalists whose jobs and status they covet. Woke becomes a weapon within a progressive elite game of musical chairs.
In the early pages of We Have Never Been Woke, al-Gharbi explains to readers that he began thinking along these lines only after moving to New York City for graduate school. Having grown up in a military family in a small town in Arizona, al-Gharbi planned to join the priesthood before experiencing a crisis of faith (a few years later he would convert to Islam). A product of red America, with a brother who died fighting in Afghanistan, he attended community college and sold shoes before studying philosophy at the University of Arizona and eventually finding his way to Columbia.
There, for the first time, he came face to face with the wealthy progressive professional class that dominates blue cities; he was struck by these people, who fluently spoke the language of social justice and yet seemed oblivious to their own class privilege. Even as they sincerely professed their concerns for the downtrodden, al-Gharbi says he could not help but notice that these culturally cosmopolitan members of the urban upper class seemed to take for granted the faceless masses of mostly black and brown workers whose poorly compensated labor sustained their comfortable lifestyles. He dedicated his doctoral research to figuring out this contradiction, resulting in We Have Never Been Woke.
The book is carefully argued and non-polemical, but it stands nonetheless as an indictment of the performative, self-congratulatory obliviousness of symbolic capitalist elites. As such, it provides a less than flattering take on the trajectory of present day “symbolic capitalist hubs” like Seattle. It’s worth noting that al-Gharbi’s book, which arrived on shelves just as the current Great Awokening appears to be rapidly fading, could not have been better timed. Whereas just a few short years ago an argument like al-Gharbi’s might have precipitated his hasty and hysterical cancellation – cultural progressive elites weren’t in a particularly self-critical mood circa 2020 – it’s now being received in just the opposite way by the cohort it describes.
With Trump having won the popular vote, sweeping all the swing states, and making huge gains with non-college educated, more downscale voters of color, many living in America’s bluest cities, educated blue city progressives are beginning the painful process of looking in the mirror as they contemplate what went so wrong for their side politically. We delve into that question too with Musa, asking him what symbolic capitalists are supposed to do now, in this disquieting era of Trump 2.0, to win back the popular majority and political power. If you’d like to hear his answer, give the episode a listen.
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Blue City Blues Episode 4, “Why Didn’t Blue Cities Going Woke Help the Marginalized?”: a conversation with sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, author of We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite (Princeton University Press).
Could it be the huge wage disparity between the people living near the various waterfront and the rest of us?
If anyone takes the bait and listens, kindly let us know the answer to the question posed by the title – “So Why Didn’t it help Marginalized People?” 11 paragraphs apparently weren’t enough to get to that.
I.e., what was Seattle doing that is supposed to have been “woke”, and why didn’t it work? I am aware that they’ve been bit on “lived experience” thing.
Or am I sort of missing the point – maybe this isn’t so much about tangible policy questions, it’s more about striking the right pose for the times?
Thanks for this insightful review, Sandeep and David. Sounds like an terrific book. Will listen to your podcast. Glad to see that many blue wokies are finally looking in the mirror. Some of us have been saying this for years!
According to ChatBot: “As of 2023, approximately 7.6% of U.S. adults identify as LGBTQ+…” When the other 92 percent of the population, with traditional so-called gender identities, is suddenly pressured by numerous public and private organizations to state personal pronouns, that is woke policy.
Another example is the formal acknowledgment at the start of public activities recognizing that the land is the traditional territory of Indigenous peoples. Even indigenous groups are starting to oppose this as a meaningless, performative act which diverts attention from solving real problems.
Regarding Land Acknowledgements, if they were NOT made, wouldn’t that signify that taking others’ land is merely part of the natural order of things, and thus not even worthy of mention?
It has become common to declare that “such and such was merely a performative act,” and in this way diminish those words and acts by classifying them as empty ritual, devoid of any real meaning. But ritual is part of culture, and culture shapes our understanding of many things.
Yes, in most regions of the US, the indigenous peoples have been pushed to the margins of our society; their problems and needs and aspirations given far less attention than those issues which occupy space in the mainstream American consciousness. Acknowledging this fact — which is a tacit acknowledgement of their having been here first — is necessary first step in recognizing that both indigenous Americans and European-Americans are linked by history and also by being part of America’s present-day social fabric.
I think the problem is, that’s as far as it goes. So the person who makes the statement at the beginning of a meeting is setting out their stall that with that comes a host of other beliefs/ideology that aren’t about indigenous people. Any working-class person in the room usually immediately feels uncomfortable as this is not the way meetings start in their own environment. Now they feel excluded and uncomfortable as they know if they disagree with any of a raft of other ideology that usually is parceled up with land acknowledgements then they will be rejected. Nothing changes for indigenous people though. The individual who makes the statement can feel superior however. An example of this is people talking earnestly like this, while being offensive to the Spanish-speakers they are interacting with for class-based reasons. Some of these people don’t join the dots and are quick to judge those around them for spurious reasons.
(R Hodsdon said): Regarding Land Acknowledgements, if they were NOT made, wouldn’t that signify that taking others’ land is merely part of the natural order of things, and thus not even worthy of mention?:
A reasonable question, but looking beyond the US American experience and instead of looking at the broader history of the world, one can only conclude that this has indeed been the natural order of things for a very long time. In fact, one could say that the US is unique among civilizations from the standpoint that it is singularly distinguished for trying to put a Band-Aid on European expansion into the Americas through the establishment of Indian reservations, and on into present day ‘stolen land’ acknowledgments. Prior to this, conquered nations were typically enslaved or extinguished. End of story. Whether you like it or not, that has been the natural order of things. It seems to me that acknowledgment efforts do not reveal some new unknown or unappreciated history or that anything is accomplished beyond attempting to place guilt on the present day descendants. Being mindful of history as we progress isn’t a new idea.
I’d add that I think the article topic, book review, and your comment point to one of the most basic things that divides US political thinking and policy; One group see’s the world as being in a way that they wish it was and want it to be. -And clearly the world would be a better place if that was how the world actually operated. The other group see’s the reality of how the world actually is. This has been amply demonstrated through the results of socialist and communist political structures, -which always fail to provide for true equity among classes including the working class and marginalized communities because it is impossible to eliminate human competition, aspiration, desire, effort, and greed. In fact, it is the desire of humans to better themselves in competition with their peers that drives the wealth, innovation, and success of capitalism. Unfortunately, in the reality of a competitive society, really in all societies, there are losers. I’d submit that the ultimate solution for the marginalized is not with recriminations, reparations, government policies, or woke social ideology. It’s with the family unit and self-responsibility for the lifting of oneself and one’s offspring. This is the way of the world, indeed across every species on the planet.
Uh…alas, yes it’s true that “….taking others’ land is merely part of the natural order of things,”
An example? Every tribe of pre-Columbian people (i.e. Native Americans and First Nations) took land from other tribes. (Any exceptions?)
So Why Didn’t it help Marginalized People?
It’s looking like it really is about striking the right pose for the times. Honestly, these examples, I didn’t care for myself. I may have managed to never refer to a single person with a plural pronoun. But there are things that make a difference, and things that don’t. If we expunge these usages that offend thee, will marginalized people start to thrive? No.
Anyone with a brain cell could see that an ideology that was enthusiastically adopted by multinational companies and Wall Street was doing nothing for the lower classes. When elite Americans wax lyrical about identity, class is always sidelined – if not totally ignored. None of this is new, just whatever guise is fashionable in coastal universities. Rob Henderson coined “Luxury Beliefs” A few years before al-Gharbi’s book was published – although again not a new concept. His memoir “Troubled” describes a similar story of encountering the upper class; 90%+ from wealthy, stable intact two-parent families, who while promoting “woke” ideas which discourage stability and family formation in the working-class told him they fully intend to ape their parents, get married and reproduce the same lifestyle and rampant ambitions of power. He came up through the L.A. foster system and went to Yale via 8 years in the Navy. He now has a Ph.d in Sociology from Cambridge. His essays started being published a few years earlier (2019?) and the elites definitely did not appreciate his critique. So his recent book tour was shunned by the typical culprits across the nation. Mainly it seems to be because he is willing to talk to those they disapprove of but whom millions of people listen to; such as Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson. Calling huge swaths of the nation right-wing nazis for common sense views that the majority hold, was a road to nowhere for the Democrats. They have made “woke” snobby and a way to attack, exclude and demonize fellow Americans that has done nothing except cause division and cynicism.
I have not read Henderson’s book but I clearly should. I 100 percent agree with you that the concept of “luxury beliefs” is central to understanding the cultural trajectory of progressive elites in blue cities like Seattle over the last decade or so.
Sandeep Kaushik and David Hyde, THANK YOU for this great review. I am feeling uplifted, and more importantly, HEARD. Over the past 18 years (it began with the Obama campaign), I’ve been grimacing through all those buzzwords (intersectionality, lived experience, and other schlock), and tried my best to avoid my own pronoun – but fully respecting those who had one. May it all die now.
I’m seeing a big of a parallel between these upper middle-class proponents of wokeness and previous generations of protestors and revolutionaries. Maybe it’s because I studied this stuff in Political Science at UW, but one doesn’t have to dig very far to find that Che Guevarra, Simon Bolivar, Karl Marx, Vladmir Lenin, Guy Fawkes, William Wallace, and so many others were from upper middle class to nobility classes. It is very rare to find the true change makers (Harriet Tubman, Booker T. Washington, et al) who arose from nothing.
Talk about bad timing. We have an authoritarian regime in Washington using unconstitutional power to deny employment and federal funding to anyone associated with some ill-defined but obviouusly nefarious concept (“wokeness”). But Sandeep and David want to join Donald and Elon in ringing the alarm bells about whatever-this-thing-might-be and whatever-it-might-be-doing. Reminds me of lefties in 2012, after several years of government expansion under W and Obama, railing against something they called “neo-liberalism.” No idea what it was, but it sure sounded scary. (Except that it wasn’t a thing anymore.)
There’s a reason Trump won, Walter. Look in the mirror.
My personal preference would be that Trumpism does not coalesce into a durable, dominant majoritarian coalition in the United States, the way Reaganism did for the better part of my (sadly departed) youth. That will require some changes on our side, and some uncomfortable conversations. Uncomfortable in particular for a certain sort of over-educated, overwrought, overly woke white progressive, by which I mean that cohort of people who remain most blinded to their own profound culpability in creating the current political fiasco we all area living in.
So I’ll say it again, Walter. I think It’s time — past time, really — you take a good, hard look in the mirror.
Hard but fair.
David: wouldn’t you need to know a bit about me and my politics to determine whether Sandeep’s rather personal reply is “fair?” For example, what has been my publicly stated position on “defund,” apparently a core issue for so-called “wokeists?”
Hello Walter,
We have never met but
I’ve been reading you for a number of years.
I believe that I am aware of your views, as you are of mine.
We have disagreed strenuously on occasion.
Can I cite specific ones? No. I found the encounters too frustrating, and I suspect you found mine similarly.
I believe that policies typical of yours are part of the reason why Trump is in office, (which is of course a disaster.)
Am I incorrect in my understanding of your views is incorrect? That’s quite possible.
I would be delighted if I misunderstand your opinions on something so central as, say, DEI and affirmative action. And I would be happy to apologize in public.
But my recollection of your views is that such views require a reconsideration of core Democratic policies.
Reasonable people can disagree.
David: I don’t know you or your political views. Wouldn’t dare to comment on whether you are responsible for Trumpism, which is what Sandeep hilariously (drunkenly?) suggested about me. Please grant me the same grace, despite whatever negative impression you got from my writings.
Senator, I am not now, nor have I have ever been, a member of this nefarious “collectivist, identitarian” party. We need to catch up, Sandeep.
We do. And I need to stop late night drunk commenting! In the sobering light of day, my comment reads to me as overly personal and harsh, but I did not intend it that way. I admit I’m angry, but I’m pissed at a class, not at individuals.
Thought there might have been some liquid fortification there. I think you know I have been a pretty lousy “wokeist” at times. More in person, good man.
As for a definition of “woke,” and an explantion of my problem with it, I’ll offer the following:
Woke is a counterculture that formed on the left and that originated as an explicit rejection of what we might call traditional, or Enlightenment, liberalism. Its foundational aspect is its profound anti-liberalism. Or more specifically, its condemnation of liberal individualism.
My preferred term is “identitarianism,” but that’s a mouthful, so if we’re going to use the common parlance, then I’ll say that “woke” provides a full blown ideological take on questions of identity, and particularly race, that rose up explicitly as a root-and-branch rejection of traditional liberal ideas of social progress. Woke rejects — indeed, condemns as (at best) false consciousness or (more often) whiteness the liberal focus on the individual, and notions of individual autonomy/responsibility.
Instead, it replaces liberalism’s focus on the individual with a form of left collectivism, where social groupings based on identity cleavages are understood to be the foundational building blocks of the social order. Individual characteristics don’t matter; racial or other identity groupings do. So when it comes to race specifically, antiracism rejects the liberal dream of equality between individuals, and the core liberal belief that color-blindness, however impossible to achieve, is a worthwhile ideal or goal. It rejects the notion that racism is a sin of the individual, a defect of character, the antidote to which is to train our psyches to root out prejudice and to therefore treat others the same regardless of their identity characteristics.
Instead, it sees pursuit of racially blind (or more broadly, identity blind) equality as a false promise and really a cloak for maintaining systems of oppression. Therefore woke seeks to replace liberalism’s humanistic belief in individual autonomy and responsibility — we are each of us responsible for ourselves, and are responsible for our own actions, and should be treated as autonomous agents in the world and judged on our individual merits — in favor of an understanding of society as a zero sum competition of identities for political, social and cultural power, in which some identity groupings have attained power, and have over time used that power to fundamentally twist and corrupt society’s institutions and to advocate a set of foundational myths that are designed to perpetuate their hegemony over marginalized identities.
Given the scale and extent of this institutional corruption, the woke believe, the only antidote to this oppressive imbalance is to radically reorient society via a Carnivalistic social inversion that — in the name of long-delayed justice — replaces the oppressors with the oppressed at the top of the identity hierarchy. Achieving this requires explicitly re-racializing the public sphere (albeit in favor of the non-white), using a yardstick of equity to condemn the current liberal order and push forward progress on racial justice.
This makes woke identitarians deeply anti-institutional. Drawing on the Fanon/Dworkin/Foucault traditions of thought, they propose that liberal democratic institutions are so irredeemably corrupted by [racism/colonialism/sexism/capitalism/power, take your pick] they need to be extirpated root-and-branch and replaced with a new utopian, communal order built from scratch. Thus we must strive to eliminate police, and the criminal justice system, and even governance is itself infected by destructive and oppressive pluralistic notions, etc. Instead, the new order will use the soft cultural power of “community” to enforce norms of behavior. I could go on, but you get the idea.
I am , at my philosophical core, a traditional liberal. I believe strongly in all those things that wokery rejects: tolerance, pluralism, secularism, rationality, equality within the public sphere, And I therefore have a deeply seated skepticism of anti-liberal ideologies, whether they originate on the right or the left.
Politically, of course, it doesn’t matter what I think personally. But it does matter that my worldview is, more or less, broadly shared by Americans across a wide swath of the political spectrum, whereas woke identitarian collectivist ideas are — it has become painfully but unavoidably evident — a countercultural bubble in which a relatively small but culturally influential minority of educated progressives live.
Luckily a comprehensive rebuttal isn’t called for here, because it seems that we may agree on a central point. It’s about racism, right? Sure, a lot of other things have jumped on board, but at its original core.
Your analysis of what wokesters want to do, must be based on having sat in on antifa board meetings or something – “extirpated root and branch”, etc., ha ha, no. No one who matters promoted any such ideas. (I mean, for all I know the Democratic district headquarters are all in with that, but if any Democratic representative elected anywhere was on board, they kept pretty quiet about it.) But they did have this view of the cause and solutions to racism, that focused on the wrong thing. Tragically, it hasn’t worked, it can’t work.
Racism comes out of reality. We have a visually identifiable minority that has been substantially impoverished for centuries. That has made its mark on our society, and as long as that reality is still with us to any significant extent, it isn’t going to be erased by policing our institutions. The only way out, that I can see, is for the richest nation on earth to eliminate poverty within its border. Yes, really.
This region has had its moments. In 1970, King county homeownership rates for black households, were same as white, within a percentage point. Because black men had good jobs at Boeing. Now it’s half the white rate, because they don’t have good jobs at Amazon. When ALL black households are thriving, racism will still be with us, honestly, but it will wither away in a couple generations. But it won’t happen as long as the nation depends on poverty as part of its economic basis. All the Horatio Algier examples you want, but we can’t all get higher on the ladder – it isn’t really a ladder, it’s a pyramid resting on people on the bottom.
But you can’t really put the blame entirely on the progressives, left alone to deal with this problem while the conservatives traffic in denial and division, while they served big business (yes, Walter, there is Neoliberalism.) The progressives weren’t radical enough, it’s the story of the last 50 years, but our system depends on a balance, people of different persuasions working together to solve real problems. You can’t expect much when the right half excuses itself from responsibility in every way. You can’t really expect the left half to balance itself, to develop its own right to address the excesses.
Hey, Sandeep, it really takes a lot of gall to tell anybody else to “look in the mirror” after spewing out something like this. Fact is, racists want to be racists loud and proud, without having to apologize about it, and without having anybody call out their racism to them. It all stems from this, and most of the rest of it is word salad that could have been generated by some AI bot.
Wow this discussion went real meta real fast. Look at all these college degrees picking apart the faults of the educated class. Is this debate helping anyone? No it is not. Why engage in class warfare when you could engage in culture wars?
Why can’t we engage in some political introspection while also resisting MAGA? I’m certain our listeners and Post Alley readers are more than capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time.
I would also encourage everyone to take a listen to Musa’s own words rather than read the summary. You may well end up disagreeing with some or all of it. But it’s worth spending time thinking it over.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/blue-city-blues/id1777289409?i=1000691432999
David: I listened to the podcast and will read the book.
Sounds like al-Gharbi‘s argument is based on generational ambition.
Based on what I see, that makes sense.
Lots of younger people (I mean in 30s-50s) trying to “make their bones” by pushing standard sensible welfare state liberalism into comical critical theory wokism tho aided and abetted by significant numbers of muddleheaded boomers.
I appreciate this open-minded look at recent events and the failure to achieve anything material as opposed to symbolic. An additional point might be made about the tragic wasted opportunity when many moderate people and leaders were anxious to recognize real problems and collaborate on solutions only to be rejected by the woke. The book you review probably has an answer to that: in a struggle for status, real partnerships are rejected because they address the material problem, not the symbolic one and thus are useless in the struggle for status. A sad and tragic result.
The end of the article poses strange question when it asks how these same credulous and destructive people can regain power and influence. Why should we be anxious to re-install them after such a painful lesson about whom not to trust?
Thanks for introducing me to the book. I will read it. Keep up your good work, Sandeep and David.
Thank you for this review. I am going to read this book. I think this may mean we can go back to the hard work of defining what outcomes we are trying to achieve, using evidence to achieve them and reporting honestly and fulsomely on how we did. This is particularly important in the public sector which gets tangled in good intentions at the tip of a hat and rise of an eyebrow. In the city, investing for outcomes dropped off with Ed Murray and continues more or less until now. I understand how hard this can be when people accuse you of being in league with the Antichrist for wanting to raise math scores, but don’t sign up for this work unless you mean it.