Musa al-Gharbi’s We Have Never Been Woke argues that contemporary US elites claim the language of social justice and identify with progressive causes on one hand while reinforcing economic and social inequality on the other. Though it could have benefitted from a broader scope, this incisive and original study will appeal to scholars, activists and others interested in inequality, identity politics and elite power, writes Suraj Beri.
We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. Musa al-Gharbi. Princeton University Press. 2025 (paperback). 2024 (hardback).
Musa al-Gharbi’s We Have Never Been Woke offers a provocative explanation of social, cultural and moral contradictions of the contemporary elites and their relation to reproduction of inequality via a discourse of equality. This work expands Shamus Rahman Khan’s work on elites’ formation in the premier universities through the discourse of self-made, and Pierre Bourdieu’s work on symbolic capital and its role in producing inequalities. Musa al-Gharbi combines both, describing “symbolic capitalists” who live by producing, managing and legitimising discourses and narratives in the backdrop of growing symbolic economy. He argues that social justice discourse serves as a means to signal the elite status and becomes a form of domination rather than emancipation. He analyses the hypocrisy of the symbolic capitalists’ “egalitarian” values that coexist with lifestyles premised on exploitation and exclusion, particularly focusing on American context.
The immateriality of wokeness
The book’s aim is to demonstrate that “wokeness” functions as the ruling ideology of the elites that aid in legitimising their socio-economic position even as it claims to oppose inequality (33). The central proposition of this work – “we have never been woke” is a critical reflection on post-2010 periods with heightened social justice mobilisations (like Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, March for Science and March for Social Justice) but without any real improvements in the material condition of marginalised groups. It signals the expansion of elite anxiety and intra-elite competition. The author argues that both the wokeness and anti-wokeness of symbolic capitalists allow them to reconcile egalitarian claims and discourse with their exploitative and exclusionary practices.
Al-Gharbi documents how symbolic capitalists focus on symbols, ideas, rhetoric, cultural wars issues rather than “bread and butter” struggles, in other worlds, fetishising cultural politics at the expense of class politics.
Al-Gharbi proposes multiples ways in which identity politics are leveraged by symbolic elite interests to legitimise class domination. They achieve this by concealing elite privilege and actively shifting the public attention away from it. The book excels in revealing how the critique of the system is transformed, by symbolic capitalists (ranging across left, centre and right spectrums of ideology) into a form of ideological reproduction. Al-Gharbi engages with science, knowledge and technology (SKAT) studies, political economy of symbolic professions, to develop a sociological critique of elite forms of domination in contemporary American society.
A reflexive sociology of power
The book is composed of six dense chapters unpacking the idea of wokeness as a form of elite ideology. He engages into a reflexive sociology of power that examines the role intellectuals, professionals, journalists, consultants, lawyers and artists play in the reproduction of domination by the very symbolic struggles couched in the language of egalitarianism. Al-Gharbi documents how symbolic capitalists focus on symbols, ideas, rhetoric, cultural wars issues rather than “bread and butter” struggles, in other worlds, fetishising cultural politics at the expense of class politics. (But al-Gharbi doesn’t tell us how the present-day capitalist economy works and reproduces these inequalities either.)
Through their control over symbolic resources and professions, wealth and power, elites claim ‘victimhood’ by identifying with the poor, ethnic minority and LGBTQ people.
His method involves data analysis of think tank reports, government statistics on demography of occupations, and journalistic accounts, comparing and identifying patterns across US states in different phases of cultural changes along with the rise of symbolic professions, mapping demographic data across income, educational and occupational categories. Following Bourdieu’s insistence on combining mapping social spaces with agents’ practices and dispositions, the author shows that contemporary elites do not suppress the critique, but rather integrate and commodify and the anti-racist, anti-capitalist, anti-gender-binary movements.
He explains how the elites who benefit from this structure of inequality come to identify with the people who suffer from inequalities and dominate popular politics today. Through their control over symbolic resources and professions, wealth and power, they claim “victimhood” by identifying with poor, ethnic minority and LGBTQ people. They commodify social altruism and enhance individual mobility and privilege status.
Symbolic domination in practice
In chapter three, Al-Gharbi focuses on symbolic capitalists and their symbolic domination practices. They don’t see themselves as elites and rather shift the public attention to the top one per cent. He draws on empirical data to show that the symbolic elite benefits in terms of educational attainment and high-status careers. For instance, in the US, most creative professionals (artists, musicians, actors, filmmakers, writers etc.), are highly educated and disproportionately come from white, affluent backgrounds. Credentials translate into high-income positions, exclusive neighbourhoods and social networks that produce advantages intergenerationally. And yet these symbolic capitalists claim a discourse of marginalisation and exclusion that is at odds with the hierarchies of power from which they benefit. On the subject of this manipulative victimisation, Al-Gharbi puts forward the concept of “totemic capitalism” or a claimed or perceived membership in historically marginalized or disadvantaged groups” (237-38). His discussion of this subject is interesting, though it could have been developed in more detail.
Postmaterialist politics and structural inequalities
On the status of postmaterialist politics, Gharbi uses demographic data to connect the rise of symbolic capitalists’ capture of social justice discourse to the battle over language, representation and cultural values. These elites are involved in converting their self-perception and status signalling into a form of political engagement. Symbolic capitalists have over the years clustered in a few specialised urban regions (like the West Coast and Northeast Corridor) which are dominated by industries like finance, consulting, technology and law. And yet these are highly unequal spaces. Despite benefiting from tax breaks, elites have a low rate of donations to charities that focus on poverty alleviation or inequality reduction. They prefer to cause like environmental protection and animal rights or to elite universities, Art museums (186).
Masking inequalities to perpetuate privilege
The sixth chapter discusses how inequalities are mystified through social processes. It deconstructs the universalising narrative of privilege (eg “all whites are privileged, or all males are privileged”) which obscures the unique benefits the upper-class elites draw from racialised inequality. It masks the class differences and renders it acceptable to marginalise, subordinate the white poor for instance since they do not talk about their “privileges”. It shows how the “awareness and confession of privilege” does not help in alleviating poverty or even mitigating inequalities (271).
An impactful, systemic account of the institutional dominance of symbolic elites.
With this book, al-Gharbi has produced an impactful, systemic account of the institutional dominance of symbolic elites. That said, its focus is narrow and could have benefitted from including analysis of economic and political elites’ discourses and practices. This work doesn’t offer any way out of these symbolic discourses loop, produced, circulated and celebrated by symbolic elites; but it does demonstrate where we are stuck. Nevertheless, this is an incisive, significant book that contributes to contemporary cultural and political discourse and how elites relate to it. It will be of interest to scholars, activists and general readers who are interested in understanding dynamics of inequality, identity politics and social justice today.
Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Main image: Ma Di on Shutterstock.
Enjoyed this post? Subscribe to our newsletter for a round-up of the latest reviews sent straight to your inbox every other Tuesday.
The post Contradictions of wokeness and privilege in the new elite first appeared on LSE Review of Books.
