Al-Gharbi, Musa. We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of the New Elite. Princeton University Press, 2024. $35.00. 432 pp.
When I was a new mom, I lived in a booming urban center of the American south. I was struck by how many of the childcare workers in my neighborhood were new immigrants or minorities. Nannies who rarely resembled the children in their care populated the playgrounds during the day. These nannies worked long days while the mothers, often at least a decade older than myself at the time, worked corporate jobs.
I am no longer living in that city in the American south. However, the trends Musa al-Gharbi describes in We Have Never Been Woke were apparent then, and are even more pronounced today, one year after his book’s publication. What al-Gharbi seeks to describe are the social implications of “wokeness.” The term itself is difficult to define—although as Freddie DeBoer emphatically explains, you know it when you see it.
Al-Gharbi relies on what he’d likely call a “common sense” view of the term. He settles for a definition of wokeness as “being aware of social injustice and being willing to do something about it.” Though intentionally vague, al-Gharbi’s description of “wokeness” makes it clear that those who identify with the term intend it to mean positive social change.
The novelty of al-Gharbi’s approach is the way he reveals that though there has been much concern with improving the conditions of underprivileged peoples through the lens of “wokeness,” the usage of the term actually advances those who are already advantaged. By his reading, no positive social change correlates with a commitment to “wokeness.” The forms of knowledge that result from it, rather, are their own form of capital.
Wokeness, in al-Gharbi’s view, has ironically inhibited the advancement of the underprivileged insofar as it has served to allow upper classes to advance themselves through deploying its customs, systems, and language.
Al-Gharbi opens with an anecdote similar to mine. Imagine, he writes, a young professional living in an urban center. Chances are this individual will look for “someone else” to ensure that their household runs efficiently—someone else to walk the dog, to deliver the groceries, to watch the children and to drive to the airport. This “someone else” is almost always an immigrant or a member of a minority group. The urban professional—what al-Gharbi comes to call a “knowledge worker”—relies on this “other” labor in order to secure his own.
This equivalence between “urban professional” and “knowledge worker” is an important aspect of al-Gharbi’s argument. This is because knowledge workers are a new economic class, comprised of those who are college educated and members of the middle-to-upper middle class. Though knowledge workers are primarily white, they are not exclusively so. They work in education, health care, technology and in nonprofits. Since the age of the industrial revolution, the symbolic capitalist has taken the place of the factory worker—and the dominant “labor” being produced is symbolic capital.
Al-Gharbi’s critique rests on this important distinction.
Though his engagement with Karl Marx is glancing, al-Gharbi’s is a Marxist critique. What really matters to him is the production of labor and capital that either advances or inhibits the cause of the underprivileged class.
The transition that we see occurring, he argues, is an economy that increasingly allows symbolic capital to be translated into traditional capital. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieau, al-Gharbi defines “symbolic capital” as resources like honor, prestige, and recognition. The way our economy works today, al-Gharbi argues, is by allowing knowledge workers to convert symbolic capital—thinking rightly about marginalized people groups and the systems that are thought to support them—into the traditional resources of wealth, employment opportunity and cultural capital.
As the work accomplished in many of these spheres falls in the category of “knowledge” work, the concrete gains are also relegated to the landscape of “knowledge”—such as the policing of language, initiatives to hire minorities to work in symbolic spaces, and the adjudication of proper policies and procedures to deal with issues of privilege. But meanwhile, glancingly little is actually done to promote those who are underprivileged. Strikingly, issues of privilege are relegated almost exclusively to the realm of “knowledge.” In such an economy, thinking and speaking rightly about social justice become more important than making de facto concrete gains for the good of the underprivileged.
Al-Gharbi tells a striking story to illustrate this new reality, one where material gains for the poor have become strikingly immaterial.
In the aftermath of the 2016 election, al-Gharbi writes, many Columbia students claimed to be too traumatized by the election to do their work. By his recounting, wealthy students at an Ivy league university were claiming they were “traumatized” by an election that, if it boded poorly for any socioeconomic class, would likely not be theirs. Meanwhile, the poor and vulnerable—those who actually might be affected negatively by the new administration—required no such accommodations. They continued their work, serving at the cafeteria and taking out the trash. There were no janitorial staff or manicurists demanding days off due to trauma about the election.
Why is this?
Al-Gharbi argues that knowledge about underprivileged groups has become its own kind of capital. All of this is transacted without benefiting the poor. The prestige and recognition gained by knowing can become real wealth. Yet simultaneously, most symbolic capitalists have a thin understanding of the frameworks upon which wokeness is constructed. They have not read Kimberle Crenshaw or Karl Marx at length. Instead, they encounter these ideas in “distorted or simplified form,” and they adopt them because they find them useful to serve their own advancement.
Wokeness, al-Gharbi argues, is an illusion that advances the privileged and does nothing to serve the poor. His argument will certainly anger both those committed to the principles of social justice, and those opposed to Marxist critiques. But both will find something to reflect on in his critique.
