REVIEW: ‘We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite’ by Musa al-Gharbi
Most attacks on wokeness come from the right. To conservatives, the woke are dangerous because they’re sincerely committed to bad ideas—make every decision based on identity instead of merit, defund the police, speak in insufferable jargon to top it off—and push them through their positions in HR departments and government bureaucracies throughout the country. Columbia sociologist Musa al-Gharbi comes at the issue from a different angle in his intriguing new book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite.
To al-Gharbi, wokeness is little more than a spectacle, a way for "symbolic capitalists"—educated folks who earn their living with symbols such as words and numbers, rather than with their hands—to enhance their elite status without tangibly addressing the inequality they act so upset about (yet benefit from). Woke elites don’t consciously think of their motives this way, of course. But it’s a helpful lens through which to analyze their behavior.
The book’s second chapter provides al-Gharbi's most direct diagnosis of where wokeness comes from. Echoing my Manhattan Institute colleague Eric Kaufmann, he points out that "Great Awokenings"—sudden onsets of intense concern about prejudice and discrimination, concentrated among educated professionals—have happened at numerous points in American history. They go at least as far back as the 1920s and ’30s, and are measurable through trends in media, entertainment, voting, and more.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Washington Free Beacon
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Robert VerBruggen is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here.
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