Blue Cities Like Seattle Went Woke. So Why Didn’t it help Marginalized People?

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 21^st 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).