Based mostly on the dialogue over quite a few posts on this collection (starting right here) unpacking the arguments of Musa al-Gharbi’s We Have By no means Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, one may assume that al-Gharbi is hostile to woke concepts or woke values. However that may be a mistake, and would present that one has did not carefully take note of his arguments.
The title of the guide itself ought to make this clear. The argument is that symbolic capitalists have did not be woke, not that wokeness as such is a failed concept. As I discussed in my preliminary publish on this collection, the guide is a criticism of woke activism written by somebody who’s himself sympathetic to woke concepts. His criticism is that the activists have did not dwell as much as the concepts—their habits contradicts what wokeness would really suggest. As such, the strongest critique of woke activists is the precise content material of woke concepts:
Concepts related to wokeness can equally present us with instruments for difficult the order that has been established in its identify. In lots of respects, that’s exactly the mission of this guide.
All through the guide, al-Gharbi finds that what woke progressives espouse and what they do are wildly out of sync with one another:
Over the course of this textual content, we now have seen that the attitudes and inclinations related to “wokeness” are primarily embraced by symbolic capitalists. Wokeness doesn’t appear to be related to egalitarian behaviors in any significant sense. As an alternative, “social justice” discourse appears to be mobilized by up to date elites to assist legitimize and obscure inequalities, to sign and reinforce their elite standing, or to tear down rivals – typically on the expense of those that are genuinely weak, marginalized, and deprived in society.
However this, by itself, doesn’t undermine the concepts the woke espouse. For instance, no libertarian would severely suppose that the arguments libertarians make towards lease management laws (each financial and ethical) are undercut by the truth that Robert Nozick as soon as invoked lease management laws to attempt to forestall his landlord from growing his lease. Was this hypocritical of Nozick? Definitely. Does it represent proof that arguments towards lease management are due to this fact invalid? After all not. This, too, is the case with woke concepts, as al-Gharbi factors out:
What, then, ought to we make of the ideologies and modes of research related to wokeness? Can they be helpful guides for understanding and discussing the social world? Or are they basically harmful, deceptive, or irredeemably corrupted? Is the primary problem that symbolic capitalists are likely to leverage social justice discourse in unlucky methods? Or is it that symbolic capitalists have been led astray by wokeness into pursuing social justice in a counterproductive method? Put merely, is the issue wokeness or are we, ourselves, the issue?
Simply as physicists (up to now) lack a idea of all the pieces, social scientists, too lack a idea of all the pieces. As al-Gharbi factors 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.” That is simply as true with woke concepts. For instance, al-Gharbi describes the so-called “discursive turn” in social analysis. This concept emphasizes that how phrases are outlined shouldn’t be one thing that emerges in a purely impartial approach from the ether. How issues are outlined can strongly stack the deck in favor of or towards sure concepts or teams—and this makes the definition of phrases a major energy battle. Total, al-Gharbi notes, “This is a genuine contribution to understanding the world.” Nevertheless, regardless that the concept is authentic, the woke prolong the speculation properly past its usefulness:
That mentioned, right now many symbolic capitalists appear to attribute an excessive amount of energy to symbols, rhetoric, and illustration. Many assert, within the absence of sturdy empirical proof, that small slights may cause monumental (typically underspecified) hurt. Underneath the auspices of stopping these harms, they argue it’s authentic, even mandatory, to aggressively police different individuals’s phrases, tone, physique language, and so forth. As we now have seen, individuals from nontraditional and underrepresented backgrounds are among the many probably to seek out themselves silenced and sanctioned in these campaigns, each as a result of they’re much less prone to possess the cultural capital to say the “correct” issues within the “correct” methods on the “correct” time and since their deviance is perceived as particularly threatening (insofar as this heterodoxy undermines claims made by dominant elites ostensibly on behalf of traditionally marginalized and deprived teams).
This overextension additionally leads the woke to place an undue emphasis on “symbolic gestures towards antiracism, feminism, and so forth,” even if these efforts “change virtually nothing about the allocation of wealth or power in society.” Total, the deal with language, whereas authentic within the correct context, has been stretched to the purpose the place it turns into ineffective and even actively counterproductive:
Campaigns to sterilize language, for example, won’t ever carry anybody out of poverty. Referring to homeless individuals as “unsheltered individuals,” or prisoners as “justice-involved persons,” or poor individuals as “individuals of limited means,” and so forth are discursive maneuvers that always obscure the brutal realities that others should confront of their day-to-day lives…
Extra broadly, gentrifying the discourse in regards to the “wretched of the earth” doesn’t make their issues go away. If something, it renders elites extra complacent once we discuss in regards to the plight of “those people.” On this the empirical analysis is kind of clear: euphemisms render individuals extra snug with immoral behaviors and unjust states of affairs. This is likely one of the essential causes we depend on euphemisms in any respect.
One other concept related to the woke is that of “intersectionality,” an concept 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.” Nevertheless, as al-Gharbi has burdened all through his guide, the best way this concept is invoked by the woke tends to be unrelated to, and even the other of, what the scholarship they cite really says. For instance, al-Gharbi describes how the woke cite the concept 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.’)”
That is precisely the kind of factor that the precise scholarship of intersectionalism says we can’t validly do. For instance, somebody may 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.” However intersectional idea tells us that this is able to be a fallacious inference—and that’s to the credit score of intersectionality, as a result of the conclusion can also be factually false. Immigrant Blacks really are likely to have considerably greater incomes than native-born whites. So, al-Gharbi says, intersectionality is a crucial perception regardless of how it’s misrepresented by the woke:
Nevertheless, the truth that many have interaction in these sorts of self-serving and facile analyses doesn’t imply intersectionality itself is improper or needs to be discarded. The important components of the idea appear straightforwardly true and helpful for social evaluation.
One other helpful and true concept related to the woke is about how the impacts of previous racial discrimination can proceed even within the absence of present racial discrimination, because of how previous results could be perpetuated in present establishments:
On this similar interval, following the civil rights motion, prejudice-based discrimination in most job markets declined. Nevertheless, talent – and schooling – primarily based discrimination elevated dramatically, as did the returns on having the “correct” credentials and abilities. As a result of schooling was (and continues to be) inconsistently distributed throughout racial strains, the sensible results of those new “meritocratic” types of reward and exclusion have been corresponding to overt racial discrimination in lots of respects. Therefore, racialized socioeconomic gaps persist, largely unchanged, at the same time as overtly bigoted attitudes and behaviors have turn into far much less frequent and more and more taboo.
An issue, nevertheless, is that a lot 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 apply, the methods 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) approach the woke invoke concepts like “systemic racism” can also be mirrored in how they invoke “historical injustices” or “history” to explain present outcomes:
In a similar way, many up to date symbolic capitalists evoke “history” as a chief trigger of up to date injustices. Nevertheless, “history” doesn’t do something. The tendency of many symbolic capitalists to research up to date injustices in historic phrases typically obscures how and why sure components of the previous proceed into the current. Discussing the persistence of race ideology, historian Barbara Fields defined, “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.”
However, correctly understood, the concepts are themselves sound and value contemplating:
In an identical vein, this chapter spent important time exploring how appeals to “systemic” or “institutionalized” racism or sexism are sometimes used to mystify social processes somewhat than illuminate them. Nevertheless, the concept of systemic drawback appears straightforwardly right: historic inequalities, paired with the methods methods and establishments are organized within the current, can result in conditions the place sure individuals face important disadvantages whereas others are strongly advantaged.
One other useful concept related to the woke is the concept of positionality—the concept that our social place and identification affect how we see and perceive the world. This, too, is a useful and helpful concept, al-Gharbi says. However there’s an issue right here, too: those that mostly evoke positionality fail to use the concept to themselves:
Taking positionality severely ought to lead of us to interrogate the extent to which their very own ostensibly emancipatory politics (and particularly the homogeneity of those convictions inside a area) could undermine their capability to know sure phenomena, make them ignore key views and inconvenient info within the pursuit of their most popular narratives and insurance policies, and drive them to pursue programs of motion that don’t, in actual fact, empower or serve the individuals they’re imagined to be empowering or serving, nor mirror others’ personal values and perceived pursuits. Certainly, taking these concepts to their logical endpoint ought to lead extra individuals aligned with the Left to query the extent to which their very own “emancipatory politics” could, in actual fact, be a product of their very own elite place, and will primarily serve elite ends somewhat than uplifting the genuinely marginalized and deprived.
Total, a parallel is perhaps made with affirmation bias and its use in public discourse. I’ve no formal numbers right here, however my impression is that roughly each single time the concept of affirmation bias is invoked, it’s as an evidence for why these individuals are unable to see why my aspect is definitely right about regardless of the problem of the second is, and roughly zero level nothing % of the time it’s used as a possibility to discover why my views is perhaps misinformed and what sort of essential insights I is perhaps overlooking. However this doesn’t invalidate the concept of affirmation bias itself! So, too, al-Gharbi says in regards to the concepts related to wokeness:
The actual fact so many as a substitute use these frameworks in nonreflexive methods—to strengthen their very own sense of ethical and mental superiority or affirm their prejudices about “those people” who don’t profess, consider, or really feel the “correct” issues—neither entails nor implies that these modes of research can’t be put to extra productive use.
And that’s al-Gharbi’s general message. His critique shouldn’t be of wokeness per se, however of the behaviors of those that declare to be impressed by woke concepts. 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!” As an alternative, he sees that as an issue that must be fastened, as a result of behind all of it, there are useful concepts in wokeness that may make the world a greater place – and the truth that progressives have by no means been woke in apply is a failure of progressives, and never of woke concepts. As he sums it up,
To place it merely, the truth that symbolic capitalists have by no means been woke reveals loads about us. It says a lot much less, nevertheless, in regards to the frameworks and concepts that we acceptable (and sometimes deform) in our energy struggles.
This wraps up my abstract of al-Gharbi’s guide. Within the subsequent few posts, I’ll define what I agree with from his guide in addition to what I’ve discovered, what I disagree with or the place I believe he missed the mark, after which summarize my general ideas.
