This is the second of two essays about a new book that I love (yes, love!): We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. The first one derives a lesson strongly related to the upcoming election from Musa al-Gharbi’s sweeping analysis of “symbolic capitalists.” If you know anyone who has decided not to vote or to vote for an unelectable candidate, please share it.
As I explained last week, al-Gharbi’s book is focused on the roles and impact of symbolic capitalists, “professionals who traffic in symbols and rhetoric, images and narratives, data and analysis, ideas and abstraction (as opposed to workers engaged in manual forms of labor tied to physical goods and services). For instance, people who work in fields like education, science, tech, finance, media law, consulting, administration, and public policy are overwhelmingly symbolic capitalists. If you’re reading this book, there’s a strong chance you’re a symbolic capitalist.” “I am, myself,” says al-Gharbi, “a symbolic capitalist.” Without an academic sinecure or best-selling books, my symbolic capital account has a fairly low balance, but regardless: me too.
Some symbolic capitalists accrue wealth and the attendant social status, but al-Gharbi points to “cultural capital” as the most salient kind: “[C]ultural capital is about demonstrating oneself as interesting, cool, sophisticated, charismatic, charming, and so on. People reveal their cultural capital through how they talk, how they carry themselves, their dress, their manners, their tastes and expressed opinions—all of which provide strong cues as to one’s level of education, socioeconomic background, ideological and political alignments, place of origin, and so forth.” In fact, cultural capital is so important in this milieu that “symbolic capitalists are often quite willing to trade wealth for symbolic capital—especially if they are already relatively well off (or hail from relatively advantaged backgrounds). As a recent study in the American Sociological Review put it, jobs that increase one’s moral standing with others or one’s moral self-image often ‘function as a luxury good, which higher-paid workers are more willing to trade for as the urgency of pecuniary income recedes.’”
A central point of the book is that “wokeness has become key a source of cultural capital among contemporary elites—especially among symbolic capitalists.” By wokeness the author means publicly associating oneself with social justice beliefs and causes. The key here isn’t to dispute the definition of wokeness but to explore just what that association entails, how it is expressed, and how it affects everything: symbolic capitalists themselves, the people symbolic capitalists see themselves as advocating for, the social and political climate, the possibility of communicating across difference, and much, much more.
You really have to read the book to do it justice. I’ll mention just a few things that struck me powerfully.
Al-Gharbi does us all a favor by pointing to the crudeness and insufficiency of the five gross racial categories that have become an orthodoxy in talking about identity in this country. He makes the point, for example, that interventions such as affirmative action, intended to address racial injustice, in practice often chiefly benefit the members of a category whose life circumstances don’t fit the intended profile:
Nonrepresentative elites regularly enhance their own position by exploiting programs designed to lift people out of poverty or provide opportunities to descendants of those disenfranchised by slavery and segregation. A radically disproportionate share of Black people capitalizing on affirmative action policies at colleges and universities (and downstream in the symbolic economy) are of immigrant or multiracial background. These beneficiaries also tend to be already affluent compared with most other Black Americans. These patterns are especially pronounced at elite schools (and by proxy, elite symbolic professional institutions). Critically, this “elite capture” is hardly unique to Black people. Across ethnicities, comparative studies in the United States and abroad have found that affirmative action programs tend to primarily benefit already financially well-off members of the target groups. Similar patterns hold across gender lines as well: efforts to enhance the position of “women” in recent decades have likewise mostly benefited white professionals. Indeed, some scholars have argued that relatively affluent white women have perhaps benefited more than any other population from affirmative action policies in the United States.
Before I sat down to write this, I listened to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Pod Save America. She said something that resonates strongly with al-Gharbi’s book: “We must mobilize for an affirmative vision for this country. We can’t just mobilize on fear. We need to be clear about what the stakes are, but I don’t believe in a fear-only approach.” Speaking about people who opt out of the election, she added, “Giving up is a privilege that people just can’t afford.”
Al-Gharbi talks about the way that woke symbolic capitalists tend to see social processes as distant from present-day interventions. History is often invoked to explain things that are now renewed and reinforced by the living acting in these times in ways that are not historically predetermined. Wicked problems are described as “structural,” with the implication they are baked into “the system” in a way that is nearly impossible to address. The result is often giving up on anything constructive in favor of a hopelessness that becomes passivity:
“[S]tructures,” and “history” are often mobilized by symbolic capitalists to absolve us of responsibility for the choices we make—through hyperbolically deterministic narratives on the one hand, and unduly pessimistic analyses on the other. According to some prominent accounts, America is fundamentally racist, and it always has been. “Progress” has been largely mythological. Injustices are so deeply entrenched and pervasive that nothing short of revolution can rectify the situation. Smaller ameliorative measures may even be counterproductive insofar as they make a bad situation more tolerable, thereby forestalling the dramatic change that needs to happen. However, revolution does not seem to be on the horizon in the foreseeable future, nor is there an obvious path from the current status quo to a (leftist) revolution. Hence, it seems as though the only thing that the clear-eyed can do is carry on as usual (albeit with occasional pangs of guilt) and regularly condemn the system we profit from even as we continue to actively exploit it. Arguments like these are superficially radical yet functionally conservative. They allow adherents to feel self-righteous, and to present themselves as deeply committed to substantial change (especially as compared with those focused on incremental and piecemeal reforms, whom they often mock), while neutralizing any apparent obligation to do anything (beyond saying, thinking, or feeling the “right” things).
Many members of the group I have long associated myself with—”woke progressives”—have boxed the left into a well-insulated trap where the oxygen supply is rapidly dwindling. This could be a good thing. If it gets too hard to breathe, people might have to find the exit to reality. The alternative—a worldview in which injustice is so fully embedded in historical conditions that there is virtually no possibility to address it other than a time machine, in which the only things left to do are police language, condemn and ridicule the insufficiency of pragmatic organizing, and work the system while nibbling on the hand that feeds without drawing blood—amounts to putting a coat of lipstick on giving up and calling it revolution. Forgive me for quoting AOC again: “Giving up is a privilege that people just can’t afford.”
Esther Phillips sings “I Feel the Same.”
Order my book: In The Camp of Angels of Freedom: What Does It Mean to Be Educated?