Musa Al-Gharbi Questions Elite Wokeness

Musa Al-Gharbi, author of “We Have Never Been Woke,” spoke with Swarthmore students on Feb. 8 about the rise of wokeness and how it has not resulted in significant material change by elites. The talk, moderated by Swarthmore political science professor Jonny Thakkar, was part of his Night Owls series: late-night Saturday talks on current cultural issues and the theory of trying to understand them. Al-Gharbi, a trained sociologist and philosopher, is now a professor at Stony Brook University’s School of Communication and Journalism. Last Saturday, about 50 students trekked in from the freezing rain to discuss his concept of symbolic capital and its divisions. 

Symbolic capital, unlike traditional conceptions of capital, is not monetary, or even quantitative. Instead, it is the amount of power and respect from learned knowledge, held by people such as journalists, professors, doctors, and influencers. It is not a class defined by income, and includes everyone from teachers to most of the world’s ten richest people. Swarthmore students, regardless of socioeconomic background, hold symbolic capital by having an elite, respected education to their name. Al-Gharbi’s definition of symbolic capital, and its connection with elite, social justice oriented jobs, informs his understanding of the distance between wokeness and reality. His book urges readers to consider what displays of social justice and theory developed through academic jobs by these elites actually accomplish. 

Al-Gharbi hesitated to define wokeness, pointing to the fluidity of terms such as woke and politically correct as they are used by both the right and left. Loosely, he said that modern wokeness could look like strong social justice language that does not align with actions and lifestyle. Instead, during the talk and in his book, he relies on perceptions and cultural understandings of what being woke looks like, both for people who use it as an insult and as a compliment. 

“I argue that the stories that symbolic capitalists tell ourselves about how we’re advocates for the marginalized and the disadvantaged, how we’re on the right side of history and so on, these positive stories about us in our professions obscure the nature of contemporary inequality and other social problems and interfere with our ability to recognize why social problems come about, who benefits from them, and how,” Al-Gharbi said. 

Rather than being representative advocates for the marginalized, Al-Gharbi argues symbolic capitalists are part of the elite, and movements such as Occupy Wall Street with its calls of “We are the 99%” obscure that fact. By ignoring that the top 20% – the upper-middle class with six-figure salaries – controls 71% of America’s wealth, elites conveniently group themselves in with the general public.

“We miss who leverages that wealth, how it’s leveraged, how it’s acquired, and so on,” Al-Gharbi said. “It’s very convenient if you’re still under the upper-middle class, it allows people with healthy six figure salaries, with a million dollars in assets to go, ‘Oh, it’s me and the Waffle House guy’. It doesn’t benefit the employees at Waffle House to put themselves in the same boat as white collar professionals. It benefits white collar professionals to think of themselves and put themselves in the boat of the Waffle House employee.”

However, people with symbolic capitalism are least likely to self-identify themselves as elites, Al-Gharbi said. For example, journalism now is largely full of people with Ivy League degrees but identifies as a career by the people and for the people. This extends to politics, where the Democratic Party in 2024 received more upper-middle class votes and donations, while Trump received more votes from nonwhite and female populations than in 2020.

“The Democratic Coalition has become, since 2010, more and more upscale,” Al-Gharbi said. “Highly educated, relatively affluent people have been moving towards the Democratic Party since 2010, whereas people who are less affluent, less educated, people who are racial and ethnic minorities, religious people, across the board have been gravitating towards the Republican Party. The marginalized and disadvantaged people that we view ourselves as allies to and advocates for, have been fleeing our preferred political party in ever larger numbers over the course of the ‘Great Awokening’, in ways that flipped the election twice now and gave us Donald Trump.”

Along with politics, Al-Gharbi pointed to protest movements as being led by woke symbolic capitalists, but focused more on elite institutions than gains that would impact those left out of the institutions. He compared these protests to past ones, such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (better known as SNCC), which placed students alongside members of the community to advocate for community-led goals.

He also suggested that elites resist the urge to lead movements instead of support, pointing to anecdotes of symbolic capitalist canvassers changing language to reflect learned terms from colleges and making it appeal less to the majority of voters. 

“My urge for people would be to focus less on these abstract problems and more on what can I do to help people who need help concretely.”