The History of Wokeness
Over the summer, I drove down to one of the numerous beach towns in Ocean County, New Jersey with two friends: one is a cop, the other a special ed teacher and athletic coach; both are black Americans in their late 20s. Over a dinner of chicken francaise and penne vodka at an old school Italian-American restaurant, we discussed the upcoming election season.
Both friends expressed their frustration with the Democrats’ hypocrisy and elitism. And while both agreed that Trump is more of a crude showman than an avowed “racist,” the teacher expressed frustration with Trump for giving racists license to unleash their ignorance more publicly than before, and thus was leaning toward voting blue. The cop agreed with our friend’s concerns, but argued that on the basis of policy alone, it would be in the best interest of black Americans to vote red this time around, citing all that Trump has done in favor of law and order and to create jobs for working class folk.
I often joke that my political leanings change with the wind, my contrarian tendencies usually impelling me to fight against the prevailing political current of the particular space I find myself in. Something about the mix of the salty sea breeze with the staunchly right-wing air of Ocean County tempted me to morph into an insufferable SJW that night. Among the reddest regions of our blue state, whose population is over 90 percent white–many of whom are working class and struggle with substance abuse–one is likely to find MAGA flags (and even Trump blowup dolls) adorning houses where people are watching Fox News inside with the same devotion that some watch EWTN or TBN.
When Trump’s detractors write off his supporters as deplorable racists, I tend to cringe. Yet sadly, several of my encounters with Ocean County residents have confirmed that sometimes this assessment is spot-on. My day trip with these friends was one of those instances.
As we walked from the restaurant toward the boardwalk, past stores selling “kiss my Italian ass” booty shorts, “come at me bro” t-shirts, and MAGA hats, we eventually found ourselves in a bar blasting country music. The officer sang along. I asked him how he–as a Yankee–knows country songs. One of his boys in the department put him onto it, he said, as he went on to list all the country acts he knows.
The DJ shifted to a mix of very tame, mid-aughts pop songs–Britney, Backstreet Boys, Justin Timberlake, Usher, Jason DeRulo. The teacher made his way into a circle of drunk white girls, who feeling honored by his presence, took out their phones to record themselves dancing with him for their story. Another 60-year-old-ish white lady, drunk off her ass with a crystal meth build and complexion, stumbled around the dancefloor while looking at us with suspicion. After a few minutes, she approached us, getting in the cop’s face.
“I don’t like you laughing at me like that.”
Clearly angry, but trying to contain himself, he assured her we were not laughing at her and asked her to “please just go back to where you were sitting, ma’am.”
“No. I don’t have to listen to you.”
Sensing that things were only going south from there, I told the lady to back off and led my friends out of the bar. Trying to make light of the moment, the cop joked about the irony of such a Trump-y crowd being so suspicious of “one of their own.”
“I’m sure they would’ve seen you’re on the same team if you were in uniform,” said the teacher, half-jokingly.
We are told that one side is full of deplorables against freedom, and the other is determined to fight for freedom and defend the rights of the downtrodden (you can decide which is which). So goes the standard narrative within today’s culture war. A cycle of sensational news stories get churned out, incensing one faction or the other: the demonic Olympic Opening Ceremonies, Tony Hinchcliffe’s racist jokes at a Trump rally, Andrew Tate’s outrageous comments about beating women, Sam Smith’s gender-bending VMA performance, an M2F boxer fighting biological women in the ring, a pro-Palestine activist tearing down what she thought were Israeli flags in front of a Greek restaurant. Examples abound. People may “take a stand” against these “outrages” online, but little changes. In the words of the great Erykah Badu, the world keeps turning…
I sometimes wonder if these spectacles are even real…if they are just psyops curated for the sake of stoking the flames to make us hate each other even more and distract us from what’s really going on. Something about the news cycle indeed feels manufactured, and the online reactions to culture-war fodder feels so predictable, almost as if we’re all reading off a script in an eerily Baudrillardian way.
Surely, such musings are the stuff of deluded, very-online schizos. Whether there is truly a planned “agenda” orchestrated by sinister, Oz-like figures behind a curtain aiming to “divide and conquer,” we may never know. Though in my defense, much more neurotypical types like Adam Curtis have already warned about how the dissemination of Manichaean narratives incite the masses to bicker over non-issues that make no dent in the current power structures, as did Orwell, Huxley, and Benson before him. It’s works like these, and more recently books like Musa al-Gharbi’s We Have Never Been Woke, that convince me that despite my proclivity for magical thinking, I might actually be onto something after all.
The book, which masterfully combines al-Gharbi’s extensive sociological and historical research, sets out to challenge the assertion that wokeness and anti-wokeness are new phenomena. He even pushes back against those who trace the roots of today’s “Great Awokening”–and the reactions to it–to the culture wars of the 1970s. Instead, he pinpoints the first wave of Awokenings to the 1920s.
Al-Gharbi asserts that we are currently in our fourth wave of a cycle of in-fighting among “symbolic capitalists”–a term he borrows from the French sociologist Pierre Bordieu–who tend to view society through the lens of ideas, abstractions, and symbols rather than concrete structures and events. While “signaling” their concern about certain material crises (poverty, lack of housing and jobs, etc.), symbolic capitalists prioritize conceptual matters–namely those revolving around “identity.” They rarely take into account the actual needs and values of those who are marginalized or at a disadvantage. Their vision of “empowering” these populations rarely involves affording them more agency, and instead is predicated on maintaining the current status quo of elite power behind the purely symbolic facade of progress. Anti-elitist posturing, condemnations of super-elites and “the One Percent,” are mainly tools used by elites to distract from the power they hold in their hands, and which they have no intention of letting go of anytime soon. And so, al-Gharbi concludes that we are not, nor have we ever actually been, woke.
Right-wingers who claim to take a stand against “the left’s” elitism and fixation with identity get looped into this “symbolic” trap, as their “platform” is mostly just a reaction to that of their opponents. The anti-woke, al-Gharbi says, “are obsessed with the woke.” In effect, this tendency to mirror their opponents rather than propose a substantial alternative renders their agenda just as much divorced from the real problems that plague blue collar workers and others who don’t operate within the fields of knowledge and culture production–whose cause they claim to be determined to advocate for.
Symbolic capitalists conveniently look past the fact that symbolic advocacy for or denunciation of causes–in the form of (non-grassroots) protests, enforcing speech-codes, or social media posts–do little to actually change concrete realities. Furthermore, al-Gharbi laments that when it comes to “resistening” whatever power structure they deem to be most corrupt, symbolic capitalists, blinded by their ideological fervor and moral anxiety to prove themselves on the right side of history, naively ignore the fact that “literally any ideology can be ‘captured’ by elites.” Understandably, most would prefer to dismiss the possibility that movements and narratives can be co-opted by the very entities they are aimed against for the sake of maintaining the current status quo.
In internet parlance, someone who is “based” prides herself on being unafraid to “call a spade a spade” and laugh dismissively at the “cringe” discourse on the mainstream left and right. Her views are quite literally based in reality, so she tells herself. Assuming a posture of ironic detachment, she makes politically-incorrect jokes while mocking the hysteria of cultural conservatives. As much as ironic humor can make for good fun and take the appearance of standing above the discourse, it is ultimately nihilistic and does not render its proponents immune from being co-opted by those in power. The current state of the “Dimes Square scene” is a case in point.
Al-Gharbi’s book is “based” in the truest sense of the word. Its aim is to do much more than to react to the discourse, and even to react to reactions to the discourse. Al-Gharbi manages to put forth a veritably meta-discursive commentary on current events thanks in part to his reliance on concrete facts and extensive research as his point of departure, but perhaps even more so to his commitment to intellectual virtue over performative posturing.
Written with a remarkable sense of humility and with charity for those he critiques, his work comes off more as a labor of love than as a polemic…or as an opportunity to advance his career. Al-Gharbi is refreshingly unafraid of letting the facts speak for themselves. He seems utterly unconcerned with making statements that might incite some to paint him as either a “liberal” or a “conservative.” He freely engages with the ideas of thinkers like bell hooks and Ta-Nehisi Coates, Mary Harrington and Sam Kriss, who are commonly associated with certain ideological factions. And above all, he has no qualms with critiquing himself, as he readily admits to being a symbolic capitalist who is guilty of all the things he himself expresses reservations toward.
This is most evident when addressing issues tied to race. His engagement with race is shockingly frank, relying more on data and statistics than on moralism or ideology. He is quick to critique standard woke tropes about people of color, bluntly stating that had he not mentioned that he was black in the introduction of the book, most progressives would have dismissed his book as an anti-woke, reactionary rag. Yet he has no qualms with acknowledging the reality of systemic racism, which he believes to remain very much alive, reminding readers that just because the woke left may push a radical racial agenda that is detached from the real needs of black folk, it doesn’t give one license to pretend that systemic racism is a mere hoax.
Though more of a realist than a moralist, al-Gharbi certainly has a knack for pricking the consciences of his readers. I must admit to having been put in crisis by his criticism of symbolic capitalists. As I read, I kept looking for fuel to point my finger at “them,” those sinister elites determined to silence and take advantage of “us” common folk. Yet as I read on, I couldn’t help but embrace the fact that it’s me–a degree-holding, cosmopolitan center-dwelling, knowledge job-employed symbolic capitalist, with a fragile ego on the prowl for some great Other upon which to project my guilt, desperate for chances to claim my solidarity with the proletariat–who is the problem.
By this point, I’ve learned by habit to swat away the demands from pharisaical SJWs to check my privilege at the door and #DoBetter. But al-Gharbi’s prophetic voice–fueled as it is by facts rather than an ideological agenda, by humility rather than a “sneering” air of self-righteous condescension, and by his engagement with the psychoanalytic insights of thinkers like Christopher Lasch–genuinely made me want to do better…not so much for the sake of absolving myself of guilt and convincing others that I am among those who are “saved,” but for the sake of my very soul.
The gratitude and respect that filled me as I closed the book was overshadowed by a creeping sense of horror. Not only was I horrified by my own complicity in the mess created by symbolic capitalist snowflakes like me, but by the fact that argument’s like that of al-Gharbi are so few and far between…to accept the fact that a book like this is but a drop of reality in a sea of Baudrillardian simulations, a legit red-pill in the matrix that is the discourse. It terrifies me to think that so many of us truly believe that the “issues” and “scandals” that we so self-righteously react to are “real,” and that we have a moral duty to “speak out” on them…and that somehow our fomenting ideological divisiveness is somehow contributing to “making the world a better place.”
Experiences like the one in Ocean County are a painful reminder of the consequences of our culture war-dominated discourse, setting would-be-allies against each other and calling us to take up arms against our ideological “enemies” rather than looking to join forces in reclaiming our agency from corporate conglomerates and self-serving politicians.
While the realm of abstractions–of “symbolic” ideological causes and moralistic fervor–sows division and chaos, reality “grounds” us, providing us fertile soil for the seeds of unity and genuine progress to grow. Despite the turmoil of our current political moment, Al-Gharbi holds out hope. We’d all do well–us in the knowledge professions especially–to heed his advice to tune out the “symbolic” discord and refocus our attention on the concrete.
Stephen G. Adubato is a writer and professor of philosophy based in New York. He is also the curator of the Cracks in Postmodernity blog, podcast, and magazine. Follow him on Twitter @stephengadubato.
