Waking Up from Woke

By Michael C. Behrent

Thursday, October 24, 2024

 

What if wokeness, far from being a passionate quest for social justice, is the pursuit of injustice by other means? What if wokeness, rather than being the pinnacle of political consciousness, is deeply confused about its underlying motives — if instead of being “woke,” it is sound asleep?

 

These are the questions that Musa al-Gharbi raises in his provocative and compelling new book. Though it is a sophisticated sociological study, We Have Never Been Woke is, in many ways, less scholarly monograph than jeremiad. Al-Gharbi — a recent Ph.D. who thanks God in his acknowledgments — often adopts the tone of an Old Testament prophet. “Your silver has become dross; your wine is mixed with water. Your princes are rebels and companions of thieves.” Isaiah’s condemnation of a world turned upside down has echoes in al-Gharbi’s unsparing analysis of contemporary liberal culture. The “Great Awokening” is not, in his account, a national reckoning with the legacy of social inequality and racial privilege but a massive contest for social distinction among educated urban elites. Al-Gharbi’s rich sociological-historical analysis explains how the silver of social justice became the dross of elite status anxiety.

 

While al-Gharbi’s account abounds in erudition and data illustrating many facets of modern society, the story he tells is also a personal one. His sociology is lined with autobiography. He was raised in a small town in Arizona near the Mexican border. After community college and a couple of public-university degrees, he sold shoes at Dillard’s. “I was great at it,” he recalls, but he was never promoted to management because he was considered overqualified. Not until 2016, 13 years after completing high school, did he begin a doctoral program in sociology at Columbia University.

 

Al-Gharbi’s experience at Columbia — an elite university in a city replete with graduates of elite universities — is what made his book possible. Columbia both introduced him to the problem he seeks to explain and offered him (some of) the tools he needed to explain it. This paradox haunts his study. At Columbia, al-Gharbi came to realize that white elites are hell-bent on presenting themselves as champions of progressive causes even as they take for granted the social hierarchy that ensures their privileged status. In 2016, he watched as Columbia students panicked over Donald Trump’s election, believing they were “uniquely vulnerable” to his regime while paying little heed to campus service workers who, according to the students’ own narratives, would be most harmed by the new administration. “Although the classrooms were full of tears in the days that followed, one never saw, say, the janitors making a scene, sobbing uncontrollably about politics as they scrubbed rich kids’ messes out of the toilets.”

 

Then came the summer of 2020. Al-Gharbi watched as “overwhelmingly white” demonstrators composed of “academics and professionals” held up signs declaring “Black Lives Matter” on the medians of Broadway on the Upper West Side. What stood out to him was not their message but their behavior: “On several occasions, I observed demonstrators engaged in this ritual literally right in front of — sharing the median with — homeless Black men who didn’t even have shoes. They were crowding the benches that homeless people were using, standing amid bags that contained their few worldly possessions, in order to cheer on BLM. Meanwhile, the Black guys right in front of them seemed to be invisible.”

 

Al-Gharbi devotes his book to solving the contradiction these anecdotes highlight. “Why is it,” he asks, “that people who benefit the most from what sociologists call institutionalized racism or sexism also happen to be the people most conspicuously concerned with ‘ideological’ racism, sexism, and so on . . . ? How can elites whose lifestyles and livelihoods are oriented around the production, maintenance, and exploitation of inequality still view themselves as egalitarians?”

 

To understand the contemporary infatuation with social justice, what is said matters less than who says it. For al-Gharbi, wokeness is organically tied to “symbolic capitalists” — that is, the knowledge-economy professionals who “traffic in ideas, symbols, and information.” They include tech-company professionals, lawyers, journalists, and professors, among others. Though they are mostly in the top quintile of the income distribution, symbolic capitalists are primarily concerned with accumulating cultural capital. First coined by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, “cultural capital” refers to the degrees, publications, philanthropic work, and other markers of status that confer cultural preeminence as surely as monetary capital ensures wealth. Wokeness, al-Gharbi maintains, has become one of the hottest items in markets for cultural capital.

 

Yet cultural capitalism, like its economic counterpart, goes through cycles. Sometimes the market is bullish, sometimes bearish. Al-Gharbi’s thesis is that wokeness manifests itself when cultural capitalism is in crisis. Earlier outbreaks — the leftism of the 1930s, the student radicalism of the 1960s, and the political correctness of the 1980s — all coincided with moments when elites working in the symbolic economy felt threatened. For instance, al-Gharbi claims that the high point of student radicalism in the Sixties occurred when college students felt targeted by the draft. The current bout of wokeness, he contends, dates back to the Occupy movement of 2011. Far from paving the way for Left populism, the protests against the “1 percent” are best understood as a settling of scores among elites, in which the lower ranks of symbolic capitalists attacked the advantages enjoyed by their better-off peers. As al-Gharbi puts it, such conflicts erupt when “growing numbers of frustrated erstwhile elites grow bitter toward the prevailing order and try to form alliances with genuine marginalized populations.”

 

Therefore the problem with wokeness, from al-Gharbi’s perspective, is not its ideological extremism or its fondness for identity politics, but the fact that it is no more than a self-serving strategy employed in intra-elite status contests. “We have never been woke” because wokeness was never about social justice to begin with. Whatever social effects wokeness has, they have little to do with actual justice. Of course, wokeness does create jobs — but primarily for symbolic capitalists. Al-Gharbi dwells on the “social justice sinecures” exemplified by “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) administrators at universities. At a time when administrative bloat has exploded on campuses, al-Gharbi wonders whether the “ever-growing DEI-industrial complex” has any practical effect beyond “providing practitioners with gainful employment.” Furthermore, the lifestyles of symbolic capitalists tend to exacerbate social inequality rather than mitigate it. City-dwelling and the preference for online and home-delivered goods encourage the Amazonification and Uberization of the economy, resulting in poorly paid and precarious jobs and dependence on immigrant labor.

 

Finally, symbolic capitalists are particularly clueless about their own social identity. While they may pay lip service to a watered-down Marxism, “symbolic capitalists tend not to think of themselves as a class.” Ideology is other people’s politics (and, in electoral terms, typifies Republicans rather than supposedly clearheaded Democrats). Al-Gharbi writes: “While the beliefs and preferences of others may be driven by prejudices, emotions, superstition, dogma, and ignorance, the positions of well-educated and highly intelligent voters are believed to be shaped by logic and ‘the facts.’” If a minimal definition of “woke” means being able to see the reality lurking beneath the fairy tales society tells about itself, the typical symbolic capitalist is singularly unwoke.

 

By downplaying the content of social-justice discourse and viewing it as an expression of social interests, al-Gharbi’s account yields extraordinarily illuminating insights. But his conviction that beliefs consist primarily of self-interest properly understood raises a few questions. His thesis relies heavily on Bourdieu, who theorized that individuals internalize the assumptions and prospects of their social class, working them up into constellations of beliefs and behaviors (which he dubbed habitus) that allow them to navigate the social world. Bourdieu saw social actors as free agents who paradoxically embrace the fate their social origins seal for them. To illustrate this point, he liked to quote Leibniz’s observation that magnetic needles rather enjoy pointing northward. While by no means a mere disciple of Bourdieu, al-Gharbi in his work partakes in the strengths and limitations of the Frenchman’s theory. Though his book is carefully argued, extensively documented, and highly persuasive, one wonders: Can the emotions unleashed by the Great Awokening, however hypocritical, be reduced primarily to an expression of class interests?

 

To be fair, al-Gharbi’s position is not that symbolic capitalists’ beliefs are insincere but rather that they are merely beliefs, unconnected to any serious program for action. Even so, he tends to consider woke ideology primarily through the lens of interest. Yet doesn’t wokeness belong to a long tradition of political passions (however irrational), perhaps even to the chaotic “passion for equality” that Alexis de Tocqueville believed was endemic to democratic society? Before these passions can be bureaucratized and instrumentalized, don’t they need to exist, however naïvely? Haven’t “we” — or at least some of us — tried to be woke?

 

Al-Gharbi’s argument can also be read as evidence of the growing discomfort of the Left with its own direction. Nietzsche spoke of a great ladder of religious cruelty, culminating with the sacrifice of God. Perhaps there is, on the left, a ladder of political cruelty that must end in the denunciation of wokeness itself as the highest form of oppression, as capitalist reason at its most cunning.

 

Yet it may be that the most significant lesson of al-Gharbi’s book is not that the Left is hypocritical but that, as a society, we care too much about symbols. Politicians, it is said, will always disappoint you. Al-Gharbi’s view is that symbols will, too — regardless of who endorses them. Reflecting on the initial upsurge of wokeness, he observes that “there were no comparable social justice–oriented shifts in how waitresses serve food, how truck drivers deliver freight, how beauticians cut nails, how construction workers build houses, how grocery store clerks ring up food, how plumbers unclog toilets.” Maybe these people, immersed in the practical details of work and life, understand something symbolic capitalists don’t.