A Symbolic Ideology

"We Have Never Been Woke

By Musa al-Gharbi

Princeton, 432 pages, $35

In the fall of 2015, student protesters seemed suddenly to be everywhere. From the University of Missouri to Yale, they called on universities to deploy their educational programs and resources to fight racial injustice. Videos of their protests had observers opining that something was either very wrong or very right with the kids. Attention turned to Generation Z, whose first cohort had recently matriculated: Perhaps their coddled childhoods made them fragile; perhaps their diversity made them wise.

In "We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite," Musa al-Gharbi tells us that our focus on Generation Z is a distraction. Nothing new was arriving on campus; by 2015, we were years into the Fourth Great Awokening.

Mr. al-Gharbi, a sociologist and assistant professor at Stony Brook University, uses "Great Awokening" to refer to dramatic, rapid shifts in the attitudes and activities of knowledge workers -- or, as he calls them, "symbolic capitalists." These are the people who produce and interpret data, images and words and work in fields like education, media, law and finance.

The most recent awokening, Mr. al-Gharbi tells us, began not in 2015 but around 2011. After 2011, the use of "terms referring to various forms of prejudice and discrimination" surged in popular media outlets. Related shifts in focus occurred in academic research, advertising and entertainment. Meanwhile, affluent, well-educated white liberals -- symbolic capitalists are mostly that -- began to adopt attitudes we now call woke. For example, they came to perceive "much more racism against minorities than most minorities . . . reported experiencing." Increasingly, they joined the Democratic Party and became "more militant."

Those who consider Generation Z the source of our troubles will be hard-pressed to explain why shifts across knowledge industries started when the oldest Gen Zers were in their midteens. Those who think wokeness arose in equal and opposite response to Trumpism will be hard-pressed to explain why well-educated white liberals shifted so early and, as Mr. al-Gharbi details, much more than other groups.

Mr. al-Gharbi's analysis ties the current awokening to three earlier moments. The lineage of symbolic capitalists goes back to the early 20th century, when the sciences, college teaching, journalism and other fields professionalized. Their claim to influence was founded on their expertise and willingness to use it for the common good. The professions that emerged have since justified themselves with the potent combination of moral and intellectual authority, as implied in the Covid-era phrase "follow the science." If being woke means thinking that one knows and cares more than others about our social ills, especially the plight of the powerless, then symbolic capitalists have always been woke. From the late 1920s to the late '30s, then again from the mid-'60s to the mid-'70s, symbolic capitalists led protests on multiple fronts, including civil rights, war and economic inequality. The late '80s and early '90s produced a mania for "political correctness." Mr. al-Gharbi argues that the present, fourth, great awokening "is not particularly novel." It's "a case of something."

But not a case of being woke, if that means really understanding and combating injustice. Awokenings happen, according to Mr. al-Gharbi, when the symbolic capitalists' expectations for a good life are disappointed. Campus antiwar protests took off only after colleges ceased to be a reliable refuge from the draft. Protests also coincided with "a stall in the growth of symbolic capitalist jobs." In the '60s, as during earlier great awokenings, symbolic-capitalist protesters sincerely believed they were making common cause with nonelites, whose discontent is also needed to spur a great awokening. But the protesters fought mostly for themselves and stopped fighting when their prospects improved.

Symbolic capitalists can be sincere only because they are unwoke, or lacking self-awareness. When, in 2011, they chanted "we are the 99%," they ignored, Mr. al-Gharbi reminds us, their own top-income quintile, "the primary driver of rising inequality." Today, when they catechize rural white people about "privilege," they don't notice that their own noisy apologies for their larger advantages change nothing for the genuinely disadvantaged. Believers in their own reasonableness, they ignore evidence that they are more prone than others to rationalize away inconvenient facts. Mr. al-Gharbi isn't antiwoke; antiwoke conservatives, he believes, are themselves symbolic capitalists who think that emancipation starts with denouncing woke Manhattan private schools. Rather, Mr. al-Gharbi compares what symbolic capitalists say to what they do and finds a pronounced, lamentable gap.

As social science, "We Have Never Been Woke" sometimes overreaches. When Mr. al-Gharbi confidently discusses what "tends" to happen during awokenings, he is working with too little evidence. Most of the data available to characterize recent awokenings don't cover the awokening of the 1930s. Even for the awokening that started in the mid-'60s, the evidence doesn't neatly fit the thesis that elite economic dissatisfaction helped launch it. For example, Mr. al-Gharbi observes, citing the economist Richard Freeman, that only 6% of doctorate students graduated in 1958 "without specific career prospects," compared to 26% in 1974. That could suggest that the labor market for college graduates worsened in the run-up to the second awokening. However, Mr. Freeman's comparison isn't between 1958 and 1974. It's between 1968 and 1974. That's consistent with Mr. Freeman's analysis, which finds a bust for college graduates starting around 1969. But that bust came too late to ignite Mr. al-Gharbi's second awokening.

Mr. al-Gharbi's effort to move proudly analytic symbolic capitalists to analyze themselves is important. He is mainly in the business of describing, not moralizing, but the self-serving blindness of woke symbolic capitalists seems like a moral failing. The idea that moral progress depends on attending to social science is a signature of the knowledge professions. It is, for better or worse, wokeness rightly understood.

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Mr. Marks, a professor of politics at Ursinus College, is the author of "Let's Be Reasonable: A Conservative Case for Liberal Education."" [1]

1. A Symbolic Ideology. Marks, Jonathan.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 16 Oct 2024: A.15.