On the finish of my final put up, I mentioned I’d be following up by describing each a few of Musa al-Gharbi’s modes of study and assumptions in his guide We Have By no means Been Woke, and description who’s the “we” he describes, and what he means by “woke.”
First, the bottom guidelines. Musa al-Gharbi units out his examination of the woke, and of the elites, utilizing a technique of study he calls “analytic egalitarianism.” What he means by that is that every one social teams shall be thought-about in keeping with the identical guidelines:
The behaviors of white and racial and ethnicity minorities, women and men, and LGBTQ and “cishet” (cisgender, heterosexual) Individuals shall be mentioned in equal phrases. It is a dedication that’s maybe extra radical than it seems to be at first blush.
The thought of holding everybody to the identical requirements and guidelines is a extra radical method, al-Gharbi says, as a result of sociologists and students of late have used a really asymmetrical (and thus inegalitarian) methodology, casting equivalent habits in very totally different lights primarily based on the id group of these participating in that habits:
As an illustration, when racial and ethnic minorities exhibit a choice to rent, promote, mentor, and in any other case do enterprise with coethnics, that is continuously analyzed when it comes to in-group solidarity or constructing and leveraging social capital, and these behaviors are lauded. When whites interact in the very same behaviors, they are usually analyzed in a very totally different manner—nearly solely by means of the lenses of racism and discrimination—and people who interact in such behaviors are pathologized and denounced…Certainly, even when dangerous behaviors by different actors are acknowledged and condemned, accountability is usually nonetheless laid on the toes of the traditionally dominant group. As an illustration, hate crimes dedicated by African Individuals are usually attributed to white supremacy; ladies’s abuse and exploitation of different ladies (or males) is blamed on the patriarchy. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere at size, whereas these tendencies could also be properly intentioned, they’re additionally profoundly condescending—and the tortured explanations they produce are inclined to obscure way over they elucidate about why sure phenomena happen, or how social orders persist, and who they serve (or don’t).
Analytic egalitarianism can be utilized to concerns of racism. Musa al-Gharbi describes and endorses the definitions of racism put forth by Karen and Barbara Fields:
In equally processual phrases, Karan and Barbara Fields outlined “racism” because the motion of making use of a social, civic, or authorized double customary primarily based on somebody’s (perceived) ancestry. That is roughly the definition we’ll undertake right here…Nevertheless, it’s important to notice that the Fields’ definition of racism was not centered on the appliance of double requirements that particularly favor the traditionally dominant group. As an alternative, any racialized double customary is “racist” on their definition, regardless of its intent or purported beneficiaries…
As Karen and Barbara Fields put it, “Racial equality and racial justice are not figures of speech, they are public frauds, political acts with political consequences. Just as a half-truth is not a type of truth but a type of lie, so equality and justice, once modified by racial, become euphemisms for their opposites.”
However whereas al-Gharbi’s modes of study may, as he suggests, appear pretty radical in comparison with customary sociological evaluation (a minimum of within the sense of being a really totally different method), there’s one vital respect during which it not notably radical – it really adheres extra intently to most of the scholarly works that social justice advocates usually declare as inspiration:
Consuming distinguished analyses of the post-2010 period, one may achieve the impression that wokeness grew to become institutionally dominant as a result of enormous numbers of elites and elite aspirants learn a bunch of Marx, Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault, and Kimberlé Crenshaw, had been fully satisfied by their respective arguments, and are actually making an attempt to reshape establishments and society writ massive in accordance with the prescriptions of those thinkers, as derived from their texts. In actuality, most of the practices related to wokeness betray, if something, an absence of deep information or engagement with the literatures which are presupposed to have spawned the tendencies, discourses, and practices in query.
He makes use of the instance of Patricia Hill Collins, who “invented the ‘matrix of oppression’ framework illuminating that race, class, gender, and sexual oppression are intimately related and mutually reinforcing.” Describing her work, he observes the way it has been cited in assist of “the idea that some groups are uniformly and objectively more oppressed than others on the basis of intersectional advantages and disadvantages,” in addition to “the widespread notion that people who are the most oppressed can understand society most clearly, and therefore those who identify with a greater number of, and more severely oppressed, identity categories should be given more deference and respect” of their social evaluation than, say, cishet white males. However there’s a catch:
The issue with making these attributions, nevertheless, is that Collins rejected every of those concepts immediately and unequivocally in Black Feminist Thought (the textual content that launched the Matrix of Oppression framework).
It is a usually occurring theme all through al-Gharbi’s guide. The concepts and arguments put forth by social justice advocates usually have little resemblance, or are even diametrically opposed, to the precise contents of the work such activists usually reference and declare as inspiration. Thus,
Wokeness is clearly not a results of folks being indoctrinated into social justice activism by means of a deep studying of major texts like these…Critically, these superficially deep but substantively shallow modes of talking about scorching matters, large concepts, and influential thinkers are a product of enculturation, not learning in any conventional sense, not even when these discourses are adopted in school (as they usually are).
So what’s wokeness? And who, precisely, is it that has by no means been woke?
Invoking any politically charged time period runs the chance of kicking off a endless sequence of disputing definitions. In an effort to keep away from this, al-Gharbi tries to make clear what he means by the time period and its utilization:
After all, the present ambivalence within the that means, utilization, and certain way forward for “wokeness” raises the query of what I imply by “woke” as used on this textual content. Let me begin by marking what I do not intend: “woke” is not going to be used as a pejorative or a slur right here. Past this, and maybe to the consternation of some readers, I’ll decline to offer an analytic definition of the time period.
An analytic definition is one that’s all the time and all over the place true by advantage of the that means of the phrases used. The basic instance is that “bachelor” refers to an single man. That is analytically true – being an single man simply is what it’s to be a bachelor. However not all concepts might be outlined in such analytic phrases – they as an alternative check with clusters of overlapping and interrelated however nonetheless logically distinct ideas. However missing an analytic definition doesn’t imply an idea can’t be meaningfully acknowledged and mentioned:
In actual fact, most of the most significant phrases within the English language are troublesome to exactly outline, as analytic philosophers have been demonstrating for hundreds of years now. Contemplate “love,” “knowledge,” “justice,” “freedom,” “beauty.” The truth that these phrases can’t be outlined cleanly and unobjectionably doesn’t suggest they’re meaningless and shouldn’t be used.
Musa al-Gharbi traces out the historical past “wokeness” as a political and social time period, discovering that “goes back a long way” and appears to have originated within the 1860s with an pro-worker, antislavery group known as the Broad Awakes: “In the parlance of the times, to be ‘Wide Awake’ was to be alert to social injustice, and to be committed, militantly, to do something about it.” It will definitely turned to a phrase encouraging vigilance – to “stay woke” was to maintain oneself always alert to the dangers of injustice that abound. Specializing in its fashionable utilization and the cluster of ideas round which the concept of wokeness congeals, al-Gharbi says:
Certainly, there are specific views that appear to be discursively related to “wokeness” by each critics and sympathizers alike. Ticking by means of these could also be helpful so as to add some texture to our discussions as a result of many who would now be hesitant to self-identify as “woke” might nonetheless proceed to determine with some model of those beliefs – and can also view it as cheap to affiliate these specific commitments with the time period “woke.”
Amongst these concepts are assist for “antiracism, feminism, LGBTQ rights, and environmentalism” whereas seeing all these concepts as immediately tied collectively; an “aesthetic embrace of diversity and inclusion” paired with acknowledging previous wrongs in opposition to weak populations; a “focus on identity, subjectivity, and lived experience,” together with validating folks’s particular person perceptions of the identical; a dedication to “explicit acknowledgement of various forms of privilege”; a perception in “‘unconscious bias’ which creates the need to ‘work’ on oneself” however isn’t totally eradicable; and a “tight focus on disparities between groups,” though this focus is utilized in a manner that’s asymmetrical. Thus, “disparities between men and women that favor men are presumptively viewed as evidence of sexism (while those that favor women are unproblematic),” and racial or ethnic disparities “that favor whites specifically are taken as evidence of racism” however “if other racial or ethnic groups outperform whites on various measures this is often ignored: the focus is on whites.”
Moreover, al-Gharbi notes that wokeness harbors an “approach to identity that is, for lack of a better term, somewhat mystical.” Based on the woke, “race is held as a fiction in need of being abolished and transcended” and is “held to be biologically unreal,” but on the identical time race is alleged to be everlasting and immutable primarily based on the biology of your start, and “virtually any social phenomenon should be analyzed and discussed in terms of race, and failure to do this is viewed as an unwillingness to be ‘real.’” Gender and sexuality, to the woke, are “fluid, nonbinary, and socially constructed” and are thus synthetic and even arbitrary social constructs, however on the identical time gender id and sexual orientation are innate, unchangeable, and glued at start such that “people can essentially be ‘born’ gay or born trans (i.e., ‘born in the wrong body’).”
Nevertheless, al-Gharbi makes it clear that he thinks this “mystical” method to id just isn’t in itself a critique of woke concepts:
The discursive affiliation of the aforementioned concepts with “wokeness” subsequently implies nothing about their “rightness” or “wrongness.” The commentary on the “mystical” nature of beliefs about id is likewise supposed as an outline, not a critique. As a Muslim, I don’t essentially view it as a downside to carry beliefs with these kinds of deep tensions (see: free will and divine windfall, for example) – nevertheless, it is vital to pay attention to, and wrestle with, obvious contradictions.
So if that is wokeness, who’re the woke? Musa al-Gharbi identifies wokeness because the dominant ideology of a bunch of individuals he calls “symbolic capitalists”:
The Individuals probably to profess beliefs related to wokeness are usually the Individuals probably to develop into symbolic capitalists: extremely educated, comparatively prosperous white liberals.
Symbolic capitalists are social elites – extremely educated and extremely paid professionals. Based on al-Gharbi, “what is often referred to as ‘wokeness’ can be fruitfully understood as the ruling ideology of this increasingly dominant elite formation.” Thus, wokeness is a motion not of the widespread folks, however of the elites:
The genuinely marginalized and deprived in society will not be the parents who are inclined to embrace and propagate these concepts and frameworks. As an alternative, extremely educated and comparatively prosperous professionals related to the symbolic financial system are the probably to embrace (and implement) these norms, tendencies, and discourses.
In actual fact, the political preferences of the woke not solely don’t match the concepts and preferences of these the woke declare to hunt to uplift – it usually conflicts with the wishes of those very folks:
As an illustration, many extremely educated white liberals, desirous to exhibit their alignment to causes like Black Lives Matter, aggressively embraced “defunding the police,” though African Individuals themselves usually rejected this aspiration…Nevertheless, publicly placing the “right” posture on this situation appeared to matter extra to adherents than advancing the said preferences of Black folks or constructing and sustaining viable coalitions that might obtain concrete change.
This extends past coverage variations to perceptions of every day actuality:
After 2011, there have been dramatic modifications in how extremely educated white liberals answered questions associated to race and ethnicity. These shifts weren’t matched amongst nonliberal or non-Democrat whites, nor amongst nonwhites of any political or ideological persuasion. By 2020, extremely educated white liberals tended to offer extra “woke” responses to racial questions than the common Black or Hispanic individual; they tended to understand far more racism in opposition to minorities than most minorities, themselves, reported experiencing; they expressed larger assist for range than most Blacks or Hispanics. White Democrats additionally grew to become considerably extra prone to understand others of their social circles as “racist,” at the same time as nonwhite copartisans moved in the other way (and white non-Democrats had been flat).
However earlier than going an excessive amount of additional down this line, it’s value taking a break right here and analyzing what, precisely, a symbolic capitalist is meant to be? What’s it to take part in what al-Gharbi calls the “symbolic economy,” what’s the “symbolic capital” utilized by this group of elites, and the way does it relate to woke ideology? These concepts shall be outlined in additional element within the subsequent put up.
