Have We Never Been Woke?

We Have Never Been Woke is a work of, by, and for the American professional class. According to its author, Musa al-Gharbi, this is a social class defined by its manipulations of symbols and its distinctive symbolic culture. 

During the Great Awokening of 2011 to the present, America’s elite seemed to descend into wanton self-flagellation. Millions purchased copies of books telling them that they were racists. Employers across the country shuffled their employees into training sessions to work on their “bias” and “privilege.” Activists sought to transform their workplaces, institutions, even all of society through a project for equality. Yet in al-Gharbi’s view, the Great Awokening was not an equality project at all, but instead, a project to empower and legitimate the professional class itself. Per the book’s title, that class—“we”—have never been woke.

Al-Gharbi’s book is a sweeping indictment of the American professional class. It presents a robust and convincing case that interclass equality projects led by elites bear little fruit and that those elites are mainly serving their own interests through them. The book also offers a novel and suggestive theory of elite-led left-wing cultural “awokenings” in the United States reaching back to the early twentieth century. Contrary to al-Gharbi’s claim that American professionals have never been woke, however, the class has in fact been woke (after a fashion) since its origins in the late nineteenth century. Professional class culture has always been ordered toward public service—today often rendered as “social justice”—and the class has always sought to justify itself by and through that service. To render that service simply a project for “equality” is to misunderstand professional class culture and thus the professional class itself.

We Have Never Been Woke is primarily a work of rich description. Throughout its 300 pages, al-Gharbi demonstrates a copious knowledge of the academic literature on class, culture, and inequality. Through it, he paints an unflattering picture of American professionals. His name for them is “symbolic capitalists,” a term he derives from the work of the influential French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. While al-Gharbi confuses his terminology—equating the manipulation of language, images, and data (symbols) with Bourdieu’s understanding of the resources and culturally defined personal characteristics that generate status (symbolic capital)—he nonetheless shows a flair for coining a term that already appears influential.

In al-Gharbi’s estimation, the American professional class is hypocritical, self-serving, and deeply mistaken about its role in the production and reproduction of social inequality. Its class culture is “wokeness,” a mélange of intersectionality, cultural libertarianism, therapeutic values, anti-racism, and victimhood culture. Its values are ostensibly egalitarian, but al-Gharbi argues that the central social function of wokeness is not the pursuit of social equality, but the empowerment of the professional class and its own defense of inequality.

Al-Gharbi revels in exposing the often gaping distance between the beliefs and actions of these symbolic capitalists. His most convincing examples highlight the absurdity of what I like to call “elites for equality,” such as six-figure-income Occupy Wall Street protestors claiming to be “the 99 percent,” or Ivy League schools after Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election accommodating the supposed trauma of their white students while ignoring the feelings of their black or immigrant staff. 

Many pieces of evidence are less convincing, however. Al-Gharbi insists that purchasing low-wage services, living in immigrant-rich cities, and working a professional class job is an inherently exploitative act because it benefits from, is enabled by, and/or contributes to inequality. The book lacks any attempt to measure such exploitation, or even to theorize the post-industrial service-oriented economy that produces such class relations. His many observations on this score thus tend toward moral critique rather than social analysis. In fact, there are no novel empirical findings presented in We Have Never Been Woke. This is not to say that the book emphasizes morality. In fact it is overflowing with empirical claims all abundantly cited. Should the reader want to evaluate any of those claims, however, she will have to sift through fifty-six pages of references on her own to do so.

The book’s primary contribution is theory development. Al-Gharbi claims that the Great Awokening, beginning in the early 2010s and peaking in the early 2020s, is but one of four left-wing cultural outbursts in the United States over the past century. In the 1930s, late 1960s to early 1970s, late 1980s to early 1990s, and today, (usually young) Americans rose up to condemn social injustice, defend the downtrodden, and demand radical, even revolutionary, changes in the American social order. Al-Gharbi shows that each such awokening was not a “bottom–up” revolt of the oppressed, however, but instead constituted by professionals and professional class aspirants (read: college students). Their true goal was not social equality but rather status and power for themselves within the professional class.

Working from Peter Turchin’s concept of “elite overproduction,” and relying on relative deprivation theories of revolution, al-Gharbi argues that periodic economic downturns threaten the social status of highly educated young adults. Concerned to secure or protect their own positions in the class hierarchy, marginal members of the professional class weaponize the class’s egalitarian cultural values against dominant members. These challengers claim to represent the oppressed (whether proletarian or female or black or gay or transgendered, depending on the time and place) and make demands for themselves in their name. As awokenings are forms of intraclass struggle for power and status within professional class institutions, it makes perfect sense that they are most intense in academia, education, law, medicine, media, publishing, nonprofits, and entertainment. As they are generational rebellions, it also makes perfect sense that our current awokening has been so animated by matters of race, ethnicity, and gender identity—categories of oppression strongly differentiated by age.

Here, al-Gharbi makes some of his boldest rhetorical moves. He condemns elites from historically underrepresented groups for “portray[ing] advancing their own interests as somehow being a ‘win’ for the groups they identify with.” He labels jobs in the diversity industry as “social justice sinecures” for women. He suggests the recent explosion in non-heterosexual identities among highly educated women is a function of growing sex imbalances among the elite.

While al-Gharbi’s theory of great awokenings is evocative, it lacks a robust empirical defense. The theory is illustrated rather than demonstrated, and in places, it wants for theoretical consistency. For instance, young, educated men’s self-interest in avoiding the military draft plays a central role in al-Gharbi’s explanation of the awokenings of the 1930s and late 1960s to early 1970s, yet it plays no role at all in the awokenings of the late 1980s to early 1990s and of today. More broadly, al-Gharbi depicts awokenings as defensive campaigns for status that melt away once economic recovery emerges and material threats to marginal professionals recede. Yet the awokening of our own time only grew along with the economy in the late 2010s, turning obviously offensive and even persecutorial.

Al-Gharbi’s second important theoretical contribution is his concept of “totemic capital.” He defines totemic capital as a kind of symbolic capital derived from belonging to certain favored identity categories. Similar to academic capital, cultural capital, and political capital, totemic capital is a form of “epistemic and moral authority” that individuals use to secure power, resources, and status in society. One of the more entertaining passages of the book is al-Gharbi’s review of white American academics who in recent years have claimed to be black, Hispanic, or native. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, whom critics famously dubbed “Fauxcahontas” for advancing her career by claiming Cherokee ancestry, is the most famous example. Al-Gharbi roots the value of totemic capital in what sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning name “victimhood culture,” a social system that esteems innocent (often emotional) suffering and grants status to members of identity groups broadly understood to be weak, aggrieved, even damaged.

Unfortunately, al-Gharbi offers no theory of identity groups themselves, either of their formation, definition, or relative rank. Thus totemic capital remains largely underspecified. While Bourdieu sought to measure capital endowments and plot social groups and classes in social space, al-Gharbi allows his concept to remain suggestive. He states that Nkechi Diallo (formerly and more famously known as Rachel Dolezal) “pretended to be Black” but appears too wary to suggest Caitlyn Jenner or Rachel Levine are pretending to be female (transgender identity, the most significant new identity category of the fourth awokening, is barely discussed at all). Thus, like al-Gharbi’s theory of great awokenings, totemic capital stands as a concept awaiting further theoretical and empirical development.

Al-Gharbi self-consciously works within what he calls “a tradition of Black critique” that includes W. E. B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael), and Steve Biko, emphasizing the peculiar harms done to black civil rights movements by white liberals. Throughout We Have Never Been Woke, such professionals are ever in al-Gharbi’s crosshairs, and one cannot really understand his critique without seeing its debt to black radicalism. His accusation that white liberals moralize or even spiritualize politics to their own psychological and material benefit follows directly from these earlier writers and activists.

The failure of American awokenings to accomplish material change for black Americans or the working class does not mean that they have had no material effects at all, however. Here al-Gharbi both undersells his theory of intraclass struggle and ignores many significant demographic changes within the professional class. Awokenings are indeed not “bottom–up” movements when understood at the social level, but they are certainly “bottom–up” movements within the professional class. Through them, challenger professionals have indeed secured real material advantage.

Al-Gharbi takes dominant professionals’ commitments to the woke trinity of diversity, equity, and inclusion to be shallow and easily overruled by self-interest, whether individual or collective. He insists that “elite incumbents and aspirants from historically dominant groups” simply refuse to sacrifice for their supposed values. Thus “inequalities can replicate systematically and virtually indefinitely even when literally everyone supports diversity, equity, and inclusion per se.” But if this were true, how could women possibly have become a majority of college graduates and PhDs, come to dominate the publishing industry and mental health professions, and be on track to become a majority in medicine, law, and education? How could Asians have become so overrepresented in high tech, programming, the sciences, engineering, and healthcare? How could gay men and lesbians become so prominent among professors, psychologists, and lawyers? How could black journalists rise from 0 to 9 percent of the newsroom at the New York Times in two generations? How could Hispanics double their share of full-time faculty in the United States over the past twenty years? If both male and white professionals possess and leverage so much “privilege,” why are they so bad at keeping their rivals out?

By underappreciating the transformations in the professional class over the course of the country’s great awokenings, al-Gharbi underestimates the power that marginal and aspirant members of the class wield. He insists that the demography of woke movements is “white elites aided and abetted by minority-group peers.” Here he gets the hierarchy upside down. Liberal whites take their cues for how to think about race from progressive blacks like Ibram X. Kendi and Nikole Hannah-Jones. Liberal straights understand how to think about transgenderism from Andrea Long Chu and the Human Rights Campaign. Liberal men (and women) discover how to think about gender from progressive women like Margaret Atwood and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. 

If totemic capital actually exists, we would expect as much. Al-Gharbi insists that “consecrated [i.e., elite non-white] intellectuals and creatives are not the ones steering the ship—their affluent, highly educated, white, liberal audiences are.” If this is simply a claim that audiences rather than authors are in ultimate control of meaning, then fair enough. But al-Gharbi goes further, not only absolving non-white elites for their participation in elite structures of power, but even suggesting that they are victims of white liberal “appropriation.”

In al-Gharbi’s overarching desire to unsettle—even deconstruct—the culture and self-conception of his readers, he overestimates the dominance of social justice values in professional class culture. This in turn leads him to misread much of the cultural and psychological work he believes wokeness is doing within the class as well as within society more broadly. Al-Gharbi repeatedly claims that wokeness is the means by which professionals “mystify” and “legitimize” inequality. It is never clear who exactly is the object of such mystifications and legitimations. Al-Gharbi seems to adopt a Marxist understanding of ideology in which ideas are generally false and misleading, capable of mystifying class relations and serving the material interests of the dominant class(es). He would do better to embrace Louis Althusser and instead see the object of ideology not as the listener but as the speaker. In short, professionals are mystifying and legitimating themselves to themselves.

But wokeness is not the only intellectual–moral structure of the professional class. In fact, it is not even the primary one. Al-Gharbi overlooks meritocracy and the role that merit—particularly intelligence and intellectual achievement—plays in professional class culture. America’s symbolic capitalists are committed (in their own minds) both to egalitarianism and to merit, and the former must fit within the latter. As al-Gharbi himself recognizes, the fundamental social justification for the professions is effective public service. That service is, of course, expected to improve the lives of those it serves, but it is not expected to eliminate hierarchy. In fact, a class dependent upon claims to expertise is necessarily dependent upon hierarchy, and professionals know as much. Wokeness is necessarily secondary to meritocracy. Morally righteous incompetency is no claim to authority at all.

The contestation between challenger and dominant professionals that al-Gharbi so ably defines as the cause of our awokenings is fought out on the plane of ideology as a struggle between equality and merit. Both groups emphasize the cultural values best suited to their own self-conceptions and interests. As Max Weber might say, there is an “elective affinity” between marginal professionals and equality. They weaponize the subordinate values of the class to argue that marginal professionals have been discriminated against, have not been accorded equality of opportunity, even that their identity-based expertise has been intentionally undervalued. In turn, there is an elective affinity between dominant professionals and meritocracy. They defend themselves against charges of discrimination through limited accommodations, fair procedures of selection, and upholding the centrality of competence and social trust for the very existence of the class.

This truncated understanding of professional class culture helps explain the reception of the book. Al-Gharbi recently noted that his book “has been warmly received on the left.” I think this is so because the Left does not see itself in al-Gharbi’s critique. True progressives inside the professions are honest social justice advocates pushing for equality both inside and outside in the face of a largely intransigent white liberal establishment that defends itself on the false grounds of “merit.” The true Left are the marginal and aspirant professionals actively “doing the work.” This is not to say that no self-conscious liberals have or will see themselves in al-Gharbi’s relentless critique. Surely some good white people, sincere in their commitments, have picked up the book in a similar spirit to the one in which they picked up Robin DiAngelo’s and Ibram X. Kendi’s books in 2020. As the sales of those books proved, professionals out to defend their power and status are equally enthusiastic to perform acts of self-criticism. They may even agree with al-Gharbi that they have never been woke—with the rather obvious segue to embracing true wokeness and its “tools for challenging the order that has been established in its name.” But I’m not holding my breath.

Image by guukaa and licensed via Adobe Stock.