We Have Never Been Woke, Part 10: Should We Be Woke?

Based on the discussion over numerous posts in this series (beginning here) unpacking the arguments of Musa al-Gharbi’s We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, one might assume that al-Gharbi is hostile to woke ideas or woke values. But that would be a mistake, and would show that one has failed to closely pay attention to his arguments.

The title of the book itself should make this clear. The argument is that symbolic capitalists have failed to be woke, not that wokeness as such is a failed idea. As I mentioned in my initial post in this series, the book is a criticism of woke activism written by someone who is himself sympathetic to woke ideas. His criticism is that the activists have failed to live up to the ideas—their behavior contradicts what wokeness would actually imply. As such, the strongest critique of woke activists is the actual content of woke ideas:

Ideas associated with wokeness can similarly provide us with tools for challenging the order that has been established in its name. In many respects, that is precisely the project of this book.

Throughout the book, al-Gharbi finds that what woke progressives espouse and what they do are wildly out of sync with each other:

Over the course of this text, we have seen that the attitudes and dispositions associated with “wokeness” are primarily embraced by symbolic capitalists. Wokeness does not seem to be associated with egalitarian behaviors in any meaningful sense. Instead, “social justice” discourse seems to be mobilized by contemporary elites to help legitimize and obscure inequalities, to signal and reinforce their elite status, or to tear down rivals – often at the expense of those who are genuinely vulnerable, marginalized, and disadvantaged in society.

But this, by itself, does not undermine the ideas the woke espouse. For example, no libertarian would seriously think that the arguments libertarians make against rent control legislation (both economic and moral) are undercut by the fact that Robert Nozick once invoked rent control legislation to try to prevent his landlord from increasing his rent. Was this hypocritical of Nozick? Certainly. Does it constitute evidence that arguments against rent control are therefore invalid? Of course not. This, too, is the case with woke ideas, as al-Gharbi points out:

What, then, should we make of the ideologies and modes of analysis associated with wokeness? Can they be useful guides for understanding and discussing the social world? Or are they fundamentally dangerous, misleading, or irredeemably corrupted? Is the main issue that symbolic capitalists tend to leverage social justice discourse in unfortunate ways? Or is it that symbolic capitalists have been led astray by wokeness into pursuing social justice in a counterproductive manner? Put simply, is the problem wokeness or are we, ourselves, the problem?

Just as physicists (so far) lack a theory of everything, social scientists, too lack a theory of everything. As al-Gharbi points out, “any theoretical approach that elucidates some important aspect of society will generally obscure other phenomena. It will handle some things well and explain other things poorly.” This is just as true with woke ideas. As an example, al-Gharbi describes the so-called “discursive turn” in social research. This idea emphasizes that how terms are defined is not something that emerges in a purely neutral way from the ether. How things are defined can strongly stack the deck in favor of or against certain ideas or groups—and this makes the definition of terms a significant power struggle. Overall, al-Gharbi notes, “This is a genuine contribution to understanding the world.” However, even though the idea is legitimate, the woke extend the theory well beyond its usefulness:

That said, today many symbolic capitalists seem to attribute too much power to symbols, rhetoric, and representation. Many assert, in the absence of robust empirical evidence, that small slights can cause enormous (often underspecified) harm. Under the auspices of preventing these harms, they argue it is legitimate, even necessary, to aggressively police other people’s words, tone, body language, and so forth. As we have seen, people from nontraditional and underrepresented backgrounds are among the most likely to find themselves silenced and sanctioned in these campaigns, both because they are less likely to possess the cultural capital to say the “correct” things in the “correct” ways at the “correct” time and because their deviance is perceived as especially threatening (insofar as this heterodoxy undermines claims made by dominant elites ostensibly on behalf of historically marginalized and disadvantaged groups).

This overextension also leads the woke to put an undue emphasis on “symbolic gestures towards antiracism, feminism, and so forth,” despite the fact that these efforts “change virtually nothing about the allocation of wealth or power in society.” Overall, the focus on language, while legitimate in the proper context, has been stretched to the point where it becomes useless or even actively counterproductive:

Campaigns to sterilize language, for instance, will never lift anyone out of poverty. Referring to homeless people as “unsheltered individuals,” or prisoners as “justice-involved persons,” or poor people as “individuals of limited means,” and so on are discursive maneuvers that often obscure the brutal realities that others must confront in their day-to-day lives…

More broadly, gentrifying the discourse about the “wretched of the earth” doesn’t make their problems go away. If anything, it renders elites more complacent when we talk about the plight of “those people.” On this the empirical research is quite clear: euphemisms render people more comfortable with immoral behaviors and unjust states of affairs. This is one of the main reasons we rely on euphemisms at all.

Another idea associated with the woke is that of “intersectionality,” an idea that al-Gharbi says is “both important and fairly uncontroversial: there are emergent effects, interaction effects, that are greater than, or different from, the effects of two phenomena studied independently.” However, as al-Gharbi has stressed throughout his book, the way this idea is invoked by the woke tends to be unrelated to, or even the opposite of, what the scholarship they cite actually says. For example, al-Gharbi describes how the woke cite the idea of intersectionality to “simply tally up their different forms of perceived intersectional disadvantages as though they can simply be stacked on top of one another (e.g., ‘As a Latinx, bisexual, neurodivergent woman my perspective is more valid, and my needs more important than yours — a white, cisgender, gay neurotypical man.’)”

This is exactly the sort of thing that the actual scholarship of intersectionalism says we can’t validly do. For example, someone might naively say “Given that in America, with respect to income, whites do better than Blacks, and natives do better than immigrants, native whites must do better than immigrant Blacks.” But intersectional theory tells us that this would be a fallacious inference—and that’s to the credit of intersectionality, because the conclusion is also factually false. Immigrant Blacks actually tend to have somewhat higher incomes than native-born whites. So, al-Gharbi says, intersectionality is an important insight despite how it is misrepresented by the woke:

However, the fact that many engage in these kinds of self-serving and facile analyses does not mean intersectionality itself is wrong or should be discarded. The essential elements of the concept seem straightforwardly true and useful for social analysis.

Another useful and true idea associated with the woke is about how the impacts of past racial discrimination can continue even in the absence of current racial discrimination, as a result of how past effects can be perpetuated in current institutions:

In this same period, following the civil rights movement, prejudice-based discrimination in most job markets declined. However, skill – and education – based discrimination increased dramatically, as did the returns on having the “correct” credentials and talents. Because education was (and continues to be) unevenly distributed across racial lines, the practical effects of these new “meritocratic” forms of reward and exclusion have been comparable to overt racial discrimination in many respects. Hence, racialized socioeconomic gaps persist, largely unchanged, even as overtly bigoted attitudes and behaviors have become far less common and increasingly taboo.

A problem, however, is that much of the “skill – and education – based discrimination” paired with the heavy emphasis on credentials and certifications has itself been actively promoted and upheld by woke progressives. Thus, in practice, the ways the woke “appeal to ‘systems,’ ‘structures,’ and ‘institutions’ can serve as a means to mystify rather than illuminate social processes. These frameworks can be, and regularly are, deployed by elites in order to absolve them of responsibility for social problems and to legitimize their inaction to address those problems. They are evoked in hand-wavy ways to avoid getting into specifics (because the specifics are uncomfortable).” This mystifying (and unclarifying) way the woke invoke ideas like “systemic racism” is also reflected in how they invoke “historical injustices” or “history” to describe current outcomes:

In a similar fashion, many contemporary symbolic capitalists evoke “history” as a chief cause of contemporary injustices. However, “history” doesn’t do anything. The tendency of many symbolic capitalists to analyze contemporary injustices in historical terms often obscures how and why certain elements of the past continue into the present. Discussing the persistence of race ideology, historian Barbara Fields explained, “Nothing handed down from the past could keep race alive if we did not constantly reinvent and re-ritualize it to fit our own terrain. If race lives on today, it can do so only because we continue to create and re-create it in our social life, continue to verify it, and thus continue to need a social vocabulary that will allow us to make sense, not of what our ancestors did then, but of what we ourselves choose to do now.”

But, properly understood, the ideas are themselves sound and worth considering:

In a similar vein, this chapter spent significant time exploring how appeals to “systemic” or “institutionalized” racism or sexism are often used to mystify social processes rather than illuminate them. However, the idea of systemic disadvantage seems straightforwardly correct: historical inequalities, paired with the ways systems and institutions are arranged in the present, can lead to situations where certain people face significant disadvantages while others are strongly advantaged.

Another valuable idea associated with the woke is the idea of positionality—the idea that our social position and identity influence how we see and understand the world. This, too, is a valuable and useful idea, al-Gharbi says. But there’s a problem here, too: those who most commonly evoke positionality fail to apply the idea to themselves:

Taking positionality seriously should lead folks to interrogate the extent to which their own ostensibly emancipatory politics (and especially the homogeneity of these convictions within a field) may undermine their ability to understand certain phenomena, lead them to ignore key perspectives and inconvenient facts in the pursuit of their preferred narratives and policies, and drive them to pursue courses of action that do not, in fact, empower or serve the people they are supposed to be empowering or serving, nor reflect others’ own values and perceived interests. Indeed, taking these ideas to their logical endpoint should lead more people aligned with the Left to question the extent to which their own “emancipatory politics” may, in fact, be a product of their own elite position, and may primarily serve elite ends rather than uplifting the genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged.

Overall, a parallel might be made with confirmation bias and its use in public discourse. I have no formal numbers here, but my impression is that approximately every single time the idea of confirmation bias is invoked, it’s as an explanation for why those people are unable to see why my side is actually correct about whatever the issue of the moment is, and approximately zero point nothing percent of the time it’s used as an opportunity to explore why my views might be misinformed and what kind of important insights I might be overlooking. But this doesn’t invalidate the idea of confirmation bias itself! So, too, al-Gharbi says about the ideas associated with wokeness:

The fact so many instead use these frameworks in nonreflexive ways—to reinforce their own sense of moral and intellectual superiority or confirm their prejudices about “those people” who do not profess, believe, or feel the “correct” things—neither entails nor implies that these modes of analysis cannot be put to more productive use.

And that’s al-Gharbi’s overall message. His critique is not of wokeness per se, but of the behaviors of those who claim to be inspired by woke ideas. When he says “we have never been woke,” he doesn’t then go on to say “and a good thing too, because these ideas are all terrible!” Instead, he sees that as a problem that needs to be fixed, because behind it all, there are valuable ideas in wokeness that can make the world a better place – and the fact that progressives have never been woke in practice is a failure of progressives, and not of woke ideas. As he sums it up,

To put it simply, the fact that symbolic capitalists have never been woke reveals a lot about us. It says much less, however, about the frameworks and ideas that we appropriate (and often deform) in our power struggles.

This wraps up my summary of al-Gharbi’s book. In the next few posts, I’ll outline what I agree with from his book as well as what I’ve learned, what I disagree with or where I think he missed the mark, and then summarize my overall thoughts.

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