We Have Never Been Woke
* Book: We Have Never Been Woke. By Musa al-Gharbi. Princeton University Press, 2024.
URL = https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691232607/we-have-never-been-woke?
Contextual Quote
"The key to understanding Wokeness, Al-Gharbi insists, is the struggles of “Symbolic Capitalists” – “professionals who traffic in symbols and rhetoric, images and narratives, data and analysis, ideas and abstraction”. In other words, writers and academics, artists and lawyers, museum curators and tech professionals. It is a social stratum that attempts to entrench itself within the elite, elbowing out others already there, by using the language of social justice to gain status and accrue “cultural capital”. Theirs is a struggle within the elite presented as a struggle against the elite on behalf of the poor and the dispossessed.
This is not simply cynicism or hypocrisy, Al-Gharbi argues. Symbolic capitalists have constructed myths about their social roles that allow them genuinely to believe in fairness and equity while entrenching inequality and injustice, myths that have been accepted by many social institutions and power-brokers. The consequence is that the language of social justice has helped “legitimize and obscure inequalities”, allowing sections of the elite to “reinforce their elite status… often at the expense of those who are genuinely vulnerable, marginalized and disadvantaged”.
Many aspects of this argument have been expressed before, for instance by the cultural theorist Catherine Liu and the philosopher Olúfémi Táíwò. Liu argues that the professional-managerial class “hoards virtue” to enhance self-worth and justify “its unshakable sense of superiority to ordinary working-class people”. In Elite Capture, Táíwò also maintains, though from a different perspective, that the elite have appropriated the politics of radicalism to serve their own ends.
These works are important in helping make sense of the absurdities of contemporary politics."
- Kenan Malik [1]
Review
Kenan Malik:
"Kenan Malik:
"This constant disparity between the professed beliefs of liberal students agitating for social justice and actions that revealed an indifference to the material injustice surrounding them led Al-Gharbi to write a book to try to make sense of it. We Have Never Been Woke has just been published in America and will soon be out in Britain. If you want to understand what just happened in the US election, it is one of the more useful starting points. For the story of the election can be viewed from one perspective as that of the division between those who can see the disparity that so struck Al-Gharbi and those who can’t or won’t.
Given that the Columbia activists were ignoring the tangible injustice all around them, why did they adopt the language of social justice? Or, to put it another way, what role does that language play in a world in which real injustice and inequality are ignored? Those were the questions that bugged Al-Gharbi as a student and lie at the heart of his book.
His answer is that the language of social justice – “wokeness” if you will – is not about social justice at all but acts rather as an ideological glue binding together a section of the elite that want to keep climbing the ladder of privilege but don’t want to see themselves as part of the elite.
“Woke” is not a particularly useful term, more often used in disparagement than in analysis. Al-Gharbi recognises this, disavowing it as a slur, refusing even to define it. What matters to him is how the concept is deployed in practice both by supporters and detractors."
More information
- Book: Olúfémi Táíwò. Elite Capture