We Have Never Been Woke Part 2: Of “We” and “Wokeness”

At the end of my last post, I said I’d be following up by describing both some of Musa al-Gharbi’s modes of analysis and assumptions in his book We Have Never Been Woke, and outline who is the “we” he describes, and what he means by “woke.”

First, the ground rules. Musa al-Gharbi sets out his examination of the woke, and of the elites, using a method of analysis he calls “analytic egalitarianism.” What he means by this is that all social groups will be considered according to the same rules:

The behaviors of white and racial and ethnicity minorities, men and women, and LGBTQ and “cishet” (cisgender, heterosexual) Americans will be discussed in equivalent terms. This is a commitment that is perhaps more radical than it appears to be at first blush.

The idea of holding everyone to the same standards and rules is a more radical approach, al-Gharbi says, because sociologists and scholars of late have used a very asymmetrical (and thus inegalitarian) methodology, casting identical behavior in very different lights based on the identity group of those engaging in that behavior:

For instance, when racial and ethnic minorities demonstrate a preference to hire, promote, mentor, and otherwise do business with coethnics, this is frequently analyzed in terms of in-group solidarity or building and leveraging social capital, and these behaviors are lauded. When whites engage in the exact same behaviors, they tend to be analyzed in a completely different way—almost exclusively through the lenses of racism and discrimination—and those who engage in such behaviors are pathologized and denounced…Indeed, even when harmful behaviors by other actors are recognized and condemned, responsibility is often still laid at the feet of the historically dominant group. For instance, hate crimes committed by African Americans are regularly attributed to white supremacy; women’s abuse and exploitation of other women (or men) is blamed on the patriarchy. As I’ve discussed elsewhere at length, while these tendencies may be well intentioned, they are also profoundly condescending—and the tortured explanations they produce tend to obscure far more than they elucidate about why certain phenomena occur, or how social orders persist, and who they serve (or don’t).

Analytic egalitarianism is also applied to considerations of racism. Musa al-Gharbi describes and endorses the definitions of racism put forth by Karen and Barbara Fields:

In equally processual terms, Karan and Barbara Fields defined “racism” as the action of applying a social, civic, or legal double standard based on someone’s (perceived) ancestry. This is roughly the definition we will adopt here…However, it is critical to note that the Fields’ definition of racism was not focused on the application of double standards that specifically favor the historically dominant group. Instead, any racialized double standard is “racist” on their definition, irrespective of its intent or purported beneficiaries…

As Karen and Barbara Fields put it, “Racial equality and racial justice are not figures of speech, they are public frauds, political acts with political consequences. Just as a half-truth is not a type of truth but a type of lie, so equality and justice, once modified by racial, become euphemisms for their opposites.”

But while al-Gharbi’s modes of analysis might, as he suggests, seem fairly radical compared to standard sociological analysis (at least in the sense of being a very different approach), there is one important respect in which it not particularly radical – it actually adheres more closely to many of the scholarly works that social justice advocates often claim as inspiration:

Consuming prominent analyses of the post-2010 era, one might gain the impression that wokeness became institutionally dominant because huge numbers of elites and elite aspirants read a bunch of Marx, Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault, and Kimberlé Crenshaw, were completely convinced by their respective arguments, and are now trying to reshape institutions and society writ large in accordance with the prescriptions of these thinkers, as derived from their texts. In reality, many of the practices associated with wokeness betray, if anything, a lack of deep knowledge or engagement with the literatures that are purported to have spawned the dispositions, discourses, and practices in question.

He uses the example of Patricia Hill Collins, who “invented the ‘matrix of oppression’ framework illuminating that race, class, gender, and sexual oppression are intimately related and mutually reinforcing.” Describing her work, he observes how it has been cited in support of “the idea that some groups are uniformly and objectively more oppressed than others on the basis of intersectional advantages and disadvantages,” as well as “the widespread notion that people who are the most oppressed can understand society most clearly, and therefore those who identify with a greater number of, and more severely oppressed, identity categories should be given more deference and respect” in their social analysis than, say, cishet white men. But there’s a catch:

The problem with making these attributions, however, is that Collins rejected each of these ideas directly and unequivocally in Black Feminist Thought (the text that introduced the Matrix of Oppression framework).

This is a regularly occurring theme throughout al-Gharbi’s book. The ideas and arguments put forth by social justice advocates often have little resemblance, or are even diametrically opposed, to the actual contents of the work such activists often reference and claim as inspiration. Thus,

Wokeness is clearly not a result of people being indoctrinated into social justice activism through a deep reading of primary texts like these…Critically, these superficially deep yet substantively shallow modes of speaking about hot topics, big ideas, and influential thinkers are a product of enculturation, not studying in any traditional sense, not even when these discourses are adopted in college (as they often are).

So what is wokeness? And who, exactly, is it that has never been woke?

Invoking any politically charged term runs the risk of kicking off a never-ending series of disputing definitions. In order to avoid this, al-Gharbi tries to clarify what he means by the term and its usage:

Of course, the current ambivalence in the meaning, usage, and likely future of “wokeness” raises the question of what I mean by “woke” as used in this text. Let me start by marking what I do not intend: “woke” will not be used as a pejorative or a slur here. Beyond this, and perhaps to the consternation of some readers, I will decline to provide an analytic definition of the term.

An analytic definition is one that is always and everywhere true by virtue of the meaning of the words used. The classic example is that “bachelor” refers to an unmarried man. This is analytically true – being an unmarried man just is what it is to be a bachelor. But not all ideas can be defined in such analytic terms – they instead refer to clusters of overlapping and interrelated but still logically distinct concepts. But lacking an analytic definition does not mean a concept cannot be meaningfully recognized and discussed:

In fact, many of the most meaningful words in the English language are difficult to precisely define, as analytic philosophers have been demonstrating for centuries now. Consider “love,” “knowledge,” “justice,” “freedom,” “beauty.” The fact that these terms cannot be defined cleanly and unobjectionably doesn’t imply they’re meaningless and should not be used.

Musa al-Gharbi traces out the history “wokeness” as a political and social term, finding that “goes back a long way” and seems to have originated in the 1860s with an pro-worker, antislavery organization called the Wide Awakes: “In the parlance of the times, to be ‘Wide Awake’ was to be alert to social injustice, and to be committed, militantly, to do something about it.” It eventually turned to a phrase encouraging vigilance – to “stay woke” was to keep oneself constantly alert to the risks of injustice that abound. Focusing on its modern usage and the cluster of concepts around which the idea of wokeness congeals, al-Gharbi says:

Indeed, there are certain views that seem to be discursively associated with “wokeness” by both critics and sympathizers alike. Ticking through these may be useful to add some texture to our discussions because many who would now be hesitant to self-identify as “woke” may nonetheless continue to identify with some version of these beliefs – and may also view it as reasonable to associate these particular commitments with the term “woke.”

Among these ideas are support for “antiracism, feminism, LGBTQ rights, and environmentalism” while seeing all these ideas as directly tied together; an “aesthetic embrace of diversity and inclusion” paired with acknowledging past wrongs against vulnerable populations; a “focus on identity, subjectivity, and lived experience,” along with validating people’s individual perceptions of the same; a commitment to “explicit acknowledgement of various forms of privilege”; a belief in “‘unconscious bias’ which creates the need to ‘work’ on oneself” but is never fully eradicable; and a “tight focus on disparities between groups,” although this focus is applied in a way that is asymmetrical. Thus, “disparities between men and women that favor men are presumptively viewed as evidence of sexism (while those that favor women are unproblematic),” and racial or ethnic disparities “that favor whites specifically are taken as evidence of racism” but “if other racial or ethnic groups outperform whites on various measures this is often ignored: the focus is on whites.”

Additionally, al-Gharbi notes that wokeness harbors an “approach to identity that is, for lack of a better term, somewhat mystical.” According to the woke, “race is held as a fiction in need of being abolished and transcended” and is “held to be biologically unreal,” yet at the same time race is said to be permanent and immutable based on the biology of your birth, and “virtually any social phenomenon should be analyzed and discussed in terms of race, and failure to do this is viewed as an unwillingness to be ‘real.’” Gender and sexuality, to the woke, are “fluid, nonbinary, and socially constructed” and are thus artificial and even arbitrary social constructs, but at the same time gender identity and sexual orientation are innate, unchangeable, and fixed at birth such that “people can essentially be ‘born’ gay or born trans (i.e., ‘born in the wrong body’).”

However, al-Gharbi makes it clear that he thinks this “mystical” approach to identity is not in itself a critique of woke ideas:

The discursive association of the aforementioned ideas with “wokeness” therefore implies nothing about their “rightness” or “wrongness.” The observation on the “mystical” nature of beliefs about identity is likewise intended as a description, not a critique. As a Muslim, I don’t necessarily view it as a problem to hold beliefs with these sorts of deep tensions (see: free will and divine providence, for instance) – however, it is important to be aware of, and wrestle with, apparent contradictions.

So if this is wokeness, who are the woke? Musa al-Gharbi identifies wokeness as the dominant ideology of a group of people he calls “symbolic capitalists”:

The Americans most likely to profess beliefs associated with wokeness tend to be the Americans most likely to become symbolic capitalists: highly educated, relatively affluent white liberals.

Symbolic capitalists are social elites – highly educated and highly paid professionals. According to al-Gharbi, “what is often referred to as ‘wokeness’ can be fruitfully understood as the ruling ideology of this increasingly dominant elite formation.” Thus, wokeness is a movement not of the common people, but of the elites:

The genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged in society are not the folks who tend to embrace and propagate these ideas and frameworks. Instead, highly educated and relatively affluent professionals associated with the symbolic economy are the most likely to embrace (and enforce) these norms, dispositions, and discourses.

In fact, the political preferences of the woke not only don’t match the ideas and preferences of those the woke claim to seek to uplift – it often conflicts with the desires of these very people:

For instance, many highly educated white liberals, eager to demonstrate their alignment to causes like Black Lives Matter, aggressively embraced “defunding the police,” even though African Americans themselves generally rejected this aspiration…However, publicly striking the “right” posture on this issue seemed to matter more to adherents than advancing the stated preferences of Black people or building and sustaining viable coalitions that could achieve concrete change.

This extends beyond policy differences to perceptions of daily reality:

After 2011, there were dramatic changes in how highly educated white liberals answered questions related to race and ethnicity. These shifts were not matched among nonliberal or non-Democrat whites, nor among nonwhites of any political or ideological persuasion. By 2020, highly educated white liberals tended to provide more “woke” responses to racial questions than the average Black or Hispanic person; they tended to perceive much more racism against minorities than most minorities, themselves, reported experiencing; they expressed greater support for diversity than most Blacks or Hispanics. White Democrats also became significantly more likely to perceive others in their social circles as “racist,” even as nonwhite copartisans moved in the opposite direction (and white non-Democrats were flat).

But before going too much further down this line, it’s worth taking a break here and examining what, exactly, a symbolic capitalist is supposed to be? What is it to participate in what al-Gharbi calls the “symbolic economy,” what is the “symbolic capital” used by this group of elites, and how does it relate to woke ideology? These ideas will be outlined in more detail in the next post.