How a new "woke" elite uses the language of social justice to gain more power and status--without helping the marginalized and disadvantaged.
Society has never been more egalitarian—in theory. Prejudice is taboo, and diversity is strongly valued. At the same time, social and economic inequality have exploded. In We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite (Princeton UP, 2024), Musa al-Gharbi argues that these trends are closely related, each tied to the rise of a new elite—the symbolic capitalists. In education, media, nonprofits, and beyond, members of this elite work primarily with words, ideas, images, and data, and are very likely to identify as allies of antiracist, feminist, LGBTQ, and other progressive causes. Their dominant ideology is “wokeness” and, while their commitment to equality is sincere, they actively benefit from and perpetuate the inequalities they decry. Indeed, their egalitarian credentials help them gain more power and status, often at the expense of the marginalized and disadvantaged.
We Have Never Been Woke details how the language of social justice is increasingly used to justify this elite—and to portray the losers in the knowledge economy as deserving their lot because they think or say the “wrong” things about race, gender, and sexuality. Al-Gharbi’s point is not to accuse symbolic capitalists of hypocrisy or cynicism. Rather, he examines how their genuine beliefs prevent them from recognizing how they contribute to social problems—or how their actions regularly provoke backlash against the social justice causes they champion.
A powerful critique, We Have Never Been Woke reveals that only by challenging this elite’s self-serving narratives can we hope to address social and economic inequality effectively.
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feel your max with Brooks running and the all-new Ghost Max 2 they're the shoes you deserve designed to streamline your stride and help protect your body treat yourself to feel good landings on an ultra high stack of super comfy nitrogen infused cushion that takes the edge off every step every day the Brooks Ghost Max 2 you know technically they're a form of self-care Brooks let's run there head to Brooks running dot-com to learn more Ryan Reynolds here for I guess my hundredth mint commercial no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no honestly when I started this I thought only have to do like four of these I mean it's unlimited premium wireless for $15 a month how are there still people paying two or three times that much I'm sorry I shouldn't be victim blaming here give it a try at mid mobile dot-com slash save whatever you're ready $45 up from payment equivalent to $15 per month new customers on first three-month plan only taxes and fees extra speed slower above 40 gigabytes of details welcome to the new books network hi everyone I am Gary mine today we'll talk about moosa algorithm we have never been bought hi moosa how are you doing today great thanks for having me so can you share a bit about yourself and the book sure I'm so I'm a sociologist by training I'm now in the school of communication journalism at Stony Brook University I had kind of a weird past and through academia I started at community college and I went to school kind of off and on walls figuring out what to do with my life had a bunch of different visions of what that might be I taught for a little while at the University of Arizona after I got my master's degree in philosophy I was teaching political science classes because I had a so initially when I started school I had planned to study things like metaphysics and things like this while I was a philosopher but I had twin brother that he was killed in Afghanistan and in the aftermath of that I realized that kind of politics was more important than I thought it was important in different ways than I thought so I kind of shift my focus to focus initially on international affairs national security issues and so after I got my master's in philosophy I shifted my focus to applied social epistemology so like what do we know in virtue of what um and then I got canceled by Fox News one of us teaching political science and ended up losing that job and then through a series of weird events I ended up failing upwards and ended up at a PhD program in Columbia at Columbia University and in the Department of Sociology and as a tenure chart professor now and it was really my time in in Manhattan moving from this sort of small military community where I lived my whole life and to moving to the upper west side of Manhattan uh Justice Trump got elected on that was like a big culture shock and me trying to figure out basically like what so going on here was kind of the impetus for the focus I talk about a bit the introduction right so one of the main ideas in your book is symbolic capitalism so can you share a bit about that for our audience? Sure so symbolic capital is an idea that was formulated by sociologist Pierre Bortu and under his formulation initially he came up with so basically what symbolic capital is is it's the different ways that people get other people to do what they want without coercing them without forcing them to do what you want and the ways that people convince others that various ones of inequality are actually legitimate or normal or justified so people follow you because they think they should they defer to you because they think it's appropriate and so symbolic capital is one of the main ways that inequalities are legitimized and kind of reproduce themselves over time and so Bortu came up with three different forms of symbolic capital in his initial formulation so he had academic capital which is like capital that people have on the basis of things like their credentials or association with knowledge economy institutions so I'm a professor of sociology or I'm an expert in international affairs or I went to Harvard or you know so on and so forth so these are ways about getting other people to listen to you because you know more because you have information that they don't have or skills that they don't add events and so on and so forth the second form that he came up with was political capital so that's getting people to listen to you or defer to you on the basis of the position that you hold within an organization or on the basis of your reputation as a good leader so this is a competent person they get stuff done they have a strong trap record or they're the manager or something like that so political capital is the form of symbolic capital that has people listen to you on on those basis and then finally he came up with a third one which is cultural capital which is the kind of deference that people get on the basis of seeming interesting or sophisticated or cool or things like this so in when cultural capital is at play people do what you want them to do because they really want to impress you or they want to be kind of proximal to you or they want you to think positive things about them and want to associate with them and so collectively he said about these different forms of symbolic capital kind of shape who who's perceived as insiders or outsiders geniuses or hacks legitimate rulers or kind of people who are imposing on other people and in the book I came up was one more form of symbolic capital that's really unique to a lot of knowledge economy professions and I call that totemic capital and that's a form of deference that people enjoy in knowledge economy spaces oftentimes by claiming affiliation with historically marginalized or disadvantaged groups so within things like within spheres like journalism or academia there's a perception that people who are non-white non-heterose non-heterosexual non-male and so on and so forth are more moral than cisgender heterosexual white males able-bodied neurotypical white males and so on that they're more moral than people who belong to historically dominant groups that they have kind of privileged access to truth under some circumstances like there's a perception that non-whites have a deeper truer understanding of inequality or race than white people do or that women or non-binary people have a deeper or truer understanding talk more honestly about things like gender than men do and so these perceptions are actually important and consequential in a lot of fields like journalism or academia where things like prestige or social deference or certain opportunities or and things like this are kind of important on the basis of of people's judgments about your knowledge or your morality or your truth and things like this yeah and so that's the idea of symbolic capital and the main actors and we have never been woke the main constellation of people to book focuses on are people that call symbolic capitalists and so those are people who work in professions where people are manipulating data and symbols and ideas people who are like consultants or academics or journalists or scientists and researchers analysts people who work in science and technology so on and so forth basically people whose jobs don't involve providing physical goods and services to people and I call them symbolic capitalists because people who work in these kind of non material jobs basically the way we butter our breath the way we make a living is by getting other people to basically trust us and defer to our expertise and believe the things we say or convince other people to act certain ways or not act certain ways and so on and so forth so yeah so that's the core actors of the book or people I call symbolic capitalists they've also been called the professional managerial class the creative class and by a number of other names by other authors right so I was thinking you know does symbolic capitalism become particularly excessive in a more materialistic society such as the US because then the symbolism doesn't have that kind of sanctity or structure that it would have in a more religious or culturally oriented safety yeah I mean that's that's a really insightful question so there are also for instance one of the classic sociologist Emile Durkheim argued that there is this important difference between kind of capitalist countries kind of Western style capitalist materialist kinds of countries versus countries that have more traditional forms of social solidarity and connection and it turned in part on this on this very dimension and Mark's actually Karl Mark's also offered a similar thought about how global capitalism kind of hollows out a lot of the the meaning behind symbols and John Baudrillard extended this thought that in a lot of kind of modern capitalist company that countries symbols are highly mutable people feel a lot more freedom to just kind of change their affiliation from this to that from this to that and kind of combine different kinds of symbolic identities and these really idiosyncratic ways and in fact that's one of the things that can be opportunity enhancing in a lot of knowledge economy fields is that you you're able to like find really unusual combinations of different symbolic identity groups like I'm a queer disabled neural divergent Muslim or something like that like people love kind of combining these like unusual combinations of different identity things one thing one last thing I'll note is that there's a there's a political scientist Inglehart who whose work also shows that another big difference is that as countries get richer basically as people have to worry less about kind of securing their basic needs things like you know food water electricity just kind of getting their basic needs covered they start obsessing more and more over kind of symbolic struggles and symbolic differences and and all of this kind of stuff so richer countries also tend to have like a lot more kind of overheated culture war stuff Inglehart argued and he has a lot of data that suggests that so I think I'll just say I think that's a really insightful question I think there's a lot there right so from the reason that I thought about that and you know today we see a lot of companies you know putting on the LGBT color and like you mentioned in your book with Ford Foundation Henry Ford himself had to resign from his own own formation as the foundation where towards ideals of social injustice so I was wondering if you could talk about that in that context as well yeah absolutely so that the case of the Ford Foundation is really interesting and I mentioned it in the book in part because one one kind of move that a lot of symbolic capitalists make so people who work in the knowledge professions again people who are like doctors lawyers consultants journalists bureaucrats so on so forth they tend to make a lot more money than most Americans and they enjoy a lot more prestige a lot more comfortable lives better working conditions and so on and so forth by almost any measure you look at their elites but we refuse like we aggressively refuse to think of ourselves as elites we think of ourselves as the people checking the elites holding the elites to account and so on and so forth and we often when we talk and think about social problems we focus on the millionaires and the billionaires and we kind of present ourselves as these kind of four helpless cogs like who are just being you know blown around despite our good intentions there's just nothing we can do okay so I think the Ford Foundation keys is just a really interesting counterbalance to those kinds of narratives so what happened in the case of the Ford Foundation is the Ford Foundation was created of course by Henry Ford and his son Edsel Ford and the idea behind the Ford Foundation was that they would fund things like basic science and medical research in Detroit which is where Ford Motors was initially based and in that kind of surrounding area but over time as the foundation grew and more and more kind of in the kind of administrative ranks expanded ever more as there were more symbolic capitalists making decisions about allocations during a during the 1960s and and and and early 70s a lot of symbolic capitalists not just in the Ford Foundation but in America as a whole became a lot more concerned with social justice with racial justice gender gender inequality sexual liberation and so on and so forth and they became actually a lot more oriented sort of socialism in this period they became very critical of capitalism and the capitalist small of this and so on the Ford Foundation started issuing a lot of grand almost all of their grants stopped being about medical research and stuff like this but instead they became one of the primary benefactors of research around race gender sexuality and and a lot of the spokespeople for the foundation and a lot of the people they funded were also very critical of capitalism and things like this and this annoyed Henry Ford's son Henry Ford the second who took over the foundation who was the who was the formal the kind of the board chair of the foundation after after this is after the people who started it kind of stepped back or died and and so Henry Ford the second tried to kind of push back against this shift within the foundation and its priorities and you would think oh okay well it's his foundation technically it's in his name he's a super rich billionaire of course he's gonna be able to just roll over these bureaucrats and impose his will on that how could they stop him it's the Ford Foundation but in truth that's not the way it played out actually um Ford was unable to to actually change the priorities of the foundation against his wishes they basically they basically ignored him and he couldn't actually force them in the way he that he wanted to so ultimately he just resigned he resigned from his own foundation because he couldn't force the symbolic capitalists to do what what he wanted them to and he as he stepped back he even said to the media he had wished he had just shut down and dismantled the foundation while he had the chance and and he went on this long rant about how well and it's true that the the foundation itself is a creature of capitalism it's a it's a foundation that's funded by this multinational auto corporations that's how the Ford Foundation has any money that's how any of these bureaucrats have a job is because of this corporation that's funded them or that created the endowment that that that funds them and so he said yeah it's a creature of capitalism but you'd be hard-pressed to realize that from anything that they put out from any of the people that they fund and so on and so forth and so this this kind of enraged him but he was powerless and in fact I think he resigned now his son Henry Ford III is now involved with the Ford Foundation again he was recently folded back into the foundation but only on the condition that he kind of embraces their their priorities with respect to race gender sexuality and so on and so he explicitly I'm basically just conceded that this is kind of what the foundation is about these days so the the fords went to war with the bureaucrats in their own foundation and they lost and so I think this is a nice illustration of how it's absolutely the case that people who work in the symbolic professions often are in a deep sense dependent on the super rich the millionaires and the billionaires and a lot of the things we do we do on their behalf but that's not the whole story if we if we to the extent that we focus on that and we miss the the actual power that we wield on society and and we pretend to be these kind of helpless cogs being blown around then we actually miss important insights about why the world looks the way it does who actually benefits from the prevailing order and how and so that's that's why I brought the that's why it leveraged the example of the Ford Foundation but I do think it's like really instructive about some of these differences between power and class and things like this with an institution it's that time of the year your vacation is coming up you can already hear the beach waves feel the warm breeze relax and think about work you really really wanted all to work out while you're away monday.com gives you and the team that piece of mind when all work is on one platform and everyone's in sync things just flow wherever you are tap the banner to go to monday.com right so it's very interesting that we say that symbolic capitalist wield a certain power and yet what we see today a lot with this you know throwing around of the word trauma which you mentioned in your book warden embrace widely until Vietnam War itself so I was wondering if you could talk about you know that like how trauma as a word became a part of language daily language in the American public discourse and how that sort of created victimhood culture that also went to win the you know excesses of the symbolic capitalism yeah so the the idea of trauma as you pointed out it didn't really become like even even around the time of the World War One as you know trauma wasn't taken very seriously so when people when soldiers were returning from war and they had experienced what we would today call post-traumatic stress disorder but was called shell shock and a number of other things so different points people didn't take it seriously they thought that this was soldiers kind of basically lying to get it out of war or that it was a product of basically weak effeminate men who couldn't hold themselves together in conflict like real men could and things like this and so things like post-traumatic stress disorder or the idea of trauma in general was not taken seriously people just assumed that they were lying or that it was a fault of weak constitutions this started to change during the Vietnam War era and the reason it started to change is because a lot of psychologists were against the war and they started to ground their opposition in the war to the their opposition to the Vietnam War in the idea that the reason why we should get out of Vietnam the reason we should stop fighting is because the war is traumatizing America's young men and mass so they started embracing this concept that up until that time most psychologists didn't take particularly seriously but it became a useful concept for psychologists to kind of ground their opposition to the war in their domain of expertise and so the idea and so post-traumatic stress disorder was officially added to the DSM which is the main manual for diagnosing that kind of codifies what are mental disorders and what are not and so post-traumatic stress disorder was added to the DSM at the end of the Vietnam War and the idea of the kind of image of the traumatic the kind of traumatized soldier became a very prominent symbol in that you know in that period on before the Vietnam War but like basically starting after World War I going into World War II there were there was a movement among veterans and families of veterans and other kinds of rights kind of allies of them to try to take trauma more seriously to try to put in a in a deep sense to kind of put people's feelings or kind of personal perceptions of having undergone something deeply disturbing and deeply troubling to kind of put those beyond reproach to make it like in a seem inappropriate or taboo to challenge or question those things to instead take them seriously but again that those efforts really didn't break through until the Vietnam War because at a period where it became useful for psychologists to do this after the Vietnam War after the idea of post-traumatic stress disorder was added to the DSM gradually the the range of cases that that kind of fell under post traumatic stress disorder the range of things that were kind of classified as trauma began to expand on this is a phenomenon that's called a concept creep it happens with a lot of different concepts what happened with the idea of trauma so trauma increasing stops being talked about exclusively as a domain of soldiers who experienced combat and increasingly became associated also with people who survived horrific kinds of crime especially things like sexual assault where people were survivors of terrorist attacks or people who were survivors of natural disasters and and so on and so forth so the range of people who were purported to have experienced trauma kind of grew dramatically 9/11 and the war on terror and the growing number of veterans who kind of experienced war and came back affected by it and our tendency in that period to really honor the losses and sacrifices and to kind of valorize and heroize the people who were killed in 9/11 in the war on terror really helped move the meter including first responders not just you know really help move the meter like he expands significantly the the trauma construct after Vietnam and then the other big change that happened was there were some shifts in the cognitive and behavioral sciences and other adjacent fields that suggested and this is now more challenged in the empirical literature just for as a note but there were some there were some developments in the cognitive and behavioral sciences that argued that undergoing traumatic events can like literally change people's brain in kind of durable ways and so how a lot of people mobilize that research was to argue that trauma literally changed the kind of person you were undergoing traumatic events changed you fundamentally forever trauma was it just a thing that you experienced and hopefully overcame but it instead became a type of identity a type of person a trauma survivor became kind of naturalizes the type of person that and a basis for identity claims and over time these changing evolutions of trauma and going from thinking of victims of war in crime and natural disasters and things like this instead of thinking of victims as people who who should who should be pitied or instead of thinking of instead of it being shameful to be victimized by other people or to experience this kind of weakness or struggles or things like this increasingly it became not only not shameful but actually a source of honor or pride to be a survivor to be someone who who confronted or experienced different kinds of trauma and kind of made it through to the other side and so that's this kind of shifted the moral culture especially among symbolic capitalist knowledge economy professionals where the kind of first people to adapt this different form of moral culture and to really embrace it and a lot of other places in the world and even in America and a lot of sub cultures it's still the idea is you know if you're confronted if you're victimized you should either confront the person who did something to you like challenged them directly kind of take it up with them or else like not not let them see you kind of broken not give them the satisfaction of seeing you but within a lot of knowledge economies spaces and highly educated people urban dwelling people and so on and so forth the idea is increasingly popular that instead what you should do if you're victimized by people is try to fold a bunch of third parties into the dispute to try to tie things that happen to you personally into these kind of bigger cosmic struggles so if someone says something some kind of awkward racially inflected comment that's not just you know Susan having an off day instead of reflection of these kinds of deeper cultural forces and the America's long history of segregation and Jim Crow or it's tied to contemporary tragedies like on the murder of George Floyd and so it's basically connected to this kind of broader social cultural thing that other people have a perceived stake in for the goal of folding other parties into the dispute instead of dealing you dealing with it person-to-person directly yeah and so these are some of the changes that have kind of arisen and became more more pronounced especially within knowledge economy spaces but not exclusively there but especially there as the idea of trauma became more popular and kind of more broadly accepted right so one of the things that you also mentioned in the book is that a lot of people who are actually marginalized they're working in basic services making it basic profession like gardeners or cleaners or you know wait stuff I do a restaurant you know that sort of thing and then I would talk about their life in in these terms like their traumatized or their marginalized they're just going on about their lives they're just trying to you know have enough money to provide for their family and just live a longer life so I was wondering you know this whole dynamic or using this sort of language using the sort of victimhood culture is it more particular to American social activism which then filters out to the rest of the world or if that a feature of activism itself of you know intellectual activism itself yeah I think it's it's it's a feature of of kind of highly educated urban people who are associated with the knowledge professions especially it is something that's definitely more prominent among rich people than non-rich people in the United States as you note and in fact there's for instance there's a great essay a scientific study that came out that was looking at when people apply to college how who who is it that when they apply apply to college they in their college admissions essays they spend a lot of time talking about having overcome race race-based disadvantage or gender disadvantage or sexuality discrimination and so on and so forth it turns out that it's Americans who make over a hundred thousand dollars a year or more who are most likely to talk about having overcome those kinds of advantages disadvantages people who are poor are more likely to one not think it would really help them to talk about different kinds of persecution that they faced or different kinds of challenges they had to overcome or growing up in poverty and stuff like that they don't think they're they it sometimes even feels shameful or or kind of weird or gross to talk about that kind of stuff and then too even when they are convinced even if you convince them that it would actually help them when they apply to college to lean into that kind of background more and they're often just not as good at telling the kinds of stories that resonate with elite gatekeepers so for instance on people who are from non-elite backgrounds who achieved significant social mobility when they're telling the story of how that happened they're more likely to chalk it up to other people who supported them along the way or lucky breaks and things like this they don't tell the kind of heroic bootstrapping story that you're supposed to tell about how as a result of your grit and determination and all of this kind of stuff you kind of pulled yourself up from the and so as a result of that they when when people when people in institutions favor create like allocate resources or opportunities or things like that on the basis of who can tell these kind of compelling harrowing stories of overcoming disadvantaged ironically that actually stacks the deck in the favor of elites rather than people who are genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged and you see similar dynamics across a lot of different fields as far as the question about international one thing that is the case so there's a psychologist known anthropologist Joseph Henrik we wrote a book called the weirdest people in the world and a weird is an acronym for Western highly educated industrialized rich Democrat so it turns out that people who grew up in these societies have really unusual kind of cognitive profiles and one of the ways in which they're really unusual is that they really focus on themselves they're like really self-oriented and they think a lot about motives and dispositions and people's feelings and internal states and they really want to differentiate themselves from other people so in a lot of societies people actually don't miss like people want to belong or they want to show that they're part of the group they're not trying to say oh I'm so different from everyone else I'm so unusual I'm so special I'm so whatever look at me but that is something that weird people tend to do and one thing that's interesting is that the symbolic professions not just in the United States but actually in a lot of international context as well I showed this in an in an article I published on my sub-stack recently so the symbolic professions in the US and worldwide tend to select for people who are kind of more characteristically weird there's this phenomenon called institutional isomorphism which is that a lot of other institutions around the world copy the kinds of norms and policies that prevail in kind of really prestigious existing institutions so if you're so basically like in the higher ed space everybody copies Harvard everyone wants to be like Harvard so if Harvard has some kind of policy or preference or whatever a lot of other schools around the world we're trying to be like Harvard we'll just copy what Harvard is doing and so if Harvard has these kinds of DEIs kind of this kind of social justice oriented framing and how it makes some of its hiring decisions or if they select people or try to encourage people to talk about themselves as agents of change and so on and so forth then a lot of other institutions worldwide will copy that even if that's not kind of the norm in that and so as a result of things like institutional isomorphism and selection criteria that the fact that a lot of these symbolic professions just kind of pull more characteristically weird people anyway then you end up seeing a lot of these trends in the United States among symbolic economy professionals also replicate in a lot of international contexts and including some of the social movements so for instance you saw March for Science movements in a lot of other knowledge economy hubs worldwide in South Korea in in Hong Kong in New Delhi a lot of other places and then you see even Black Lives Matter protests they have them in Tokyo and in other places like this where they don't even have a large number of African Americans per se but so you see a lot of these kinds of not just policies and structures but also social movements that get picked up and copied worldwide and it's not just one way it also goes like so for instance in the United States after the Charlie Hebdo massacre in France there were like Jesuis Charlie kind of protests in the United States as well demonstrations of solidarity and so it's not just everyone copying the United States the United States also integrates some of these other movements but you see a lot of circulations of these kinds of ideas and social movements and stuff among knowledge economy professionals worldwide this has been very thought probably and thank you so much for your time and your thoughts will serve and all the very best for the book thank you so much for having me it's been a lot of fun [Music]
