Is ‘Wokeness’ Worth Saving?

This interview is part of The Reconstruct, a weekly newsletter from Sojourners. In a world where so much needs to change, Mitchell Atencio and Josiah R. Daniels interview people who have faith in a new future and are working toward repair. Subscribe here.

The term “woke” has become something of an anathema in recent years. Those on the Right use “woke” to disparage anything they think of as social justice or political correctness. Those on the Left initially deployed the term to describe a person who was socially conscious, but after it became apparent that banks and corporations were adopting “woke” coded language, and that the semantics of “wokeism” were more performative than substantive, “woke” fell out of vogue.

Musa al-Gharbi, a sociologist and assistant professor in communication and journalism at Stony Brook University, shows in his debut book We Have Never Been Woke that those of us who work in the symbolic professions — higher education, science, tech, finance, journalism, and really any job that allows you to work from home — have a tendency to use social justice or “woke” language to increase our social capital. We self-identify as “allies” or “anti-racists” as a way of proving what we stand for while failing to critically analyze ourselves.

As al-Gharbi explained to me during our interview, those of us in symbolic professions are eager to apply social justice analyses and frameworks to everyone but ourselves.

I was especially convicted by this insight as I reflected on the first piece I ever wrote for Sojourners, during the “Great Awokening” of 2020. The piece was a critique of U.S. policing and my experience with the police, but when I read it now, I recoil at how I fail to acknowledge my class (and complexion) advantage compared to other Black Americans. Even though my experience with the police is legitimate, and even though racialized policing is a reality in the U.S., al-Gharbi’s work has forced me to reckon with the ways self-interest can emerge even when we think we’re pursuing a righteous path.

My hope is that after you finish reading this, you will go and find a copy of We Have Never Been Woke, especially if you self-identify as a social justice Christian. Below, al-Gharbi and I discuss all things “woke,” the Black critical tradition, non-white and non-Christian support for Christian nationalism, and his Muslim faith.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Your new book is also your first book. What is the argument of We Have Never Been Woke and what makes it especially timely?

The starting point is the interwar period, and especially after the ’60s. There were these big changes to the global economy that favored what you might call the “knowledge professions” or the “symbolic professions” — fields like finance and consulting and HR and education and media-related fields — [people in the “symbolic capitalist” professions] have a lot more power and influence over society than ever as a result of these transformations. Especially relative to people who provide physical goods and services, the traditional capitalists, and so on. One of the things that’s striking about this transformation is that the professions that have gained all this power and influence over the last 50 years — a lot of these professions have defined themselves in terms of altruism and serving the common good.

To stick with my own professions: Journalists are supposed to speak truth to power and be a voice for the voiceless, [to] educate citizens to be active participants in democracy. Scholars — academics — are supposed to follow the truth wherever it leads and to tell the truth without regard to anyone’s political or economic interests.

If you look today at the contemporary political landscape, the people who occupy the symbolic professions are the Americans who are most likely to self-identify as antiracists, feminists, environmentalists, allies to LGBTQ+ people, and so on. What you might expect is that as these professions, and as the people who work in these professions have gained increasing clout — more affluence and influence over society — you might expect to see that inequalities would be shrinking. You might expect to see long-standing social problems getting fixed. You might expect to see growing trust in institutions because of all the great work that we’re doing. But that’s not what we’ve seen over the last half-century.

Instead, we’ve seen growing inequalities, social problems have festered, and in some cases, grown worse. We’ve seen increasing institutional dysfunction, growing mistrust of institutions, and growing polarization. And the core question that the book is trying to wrestle with is why that is.

What does it mean to be “woke”?

I don’t provide a dictionary style definition of the word “woke.”

I think that people over-focus on definitions at the expense of substance in many cases, and “woke” is a highly contentious term. So, instead of trying to pave over these disputes by picking a definition that suits my own analytic interests and just paving over those differences, what I do instead is I try to highlight what different stakeholders mean when they refer to “woke.”

I show in the book that the constellation of beliefs and practices and ways of engaging in morality and politics that people seem to be referring to as “wokeness” was referred to by other names in other periods. It was previously referred to as “political correctness” in the late ’80s to early ’90s. 

How do you define “symbolic capitalists,” and why do you think it’s important to include yourself in that group?

The group of people that I call symbolic capitalists, and they’ve been known by other names by other scholars — the professional managerial class, the new class — I call them symbolic capitalists because we make a living primarily by cultivating and leveraging what Pierre Bourdieu called symbolic capital. We make a living based on what we know, who we know, and how we’re known basically.

Think of people who work in fields like consulting and finance, tech, science, education, and media. People who make a living by manipulating symbols and data and ideas instead of producing physical goods and services for people.

I belong to [multiple] symbolic professions — journalism, education, science, and social practice. So, I’m a symbolic capitalist sampler platter. I think it’s important to fold myself into the picture. In fact, one of the things that I don’t talk about in the book itself, but that I’ve talked about a little bit in conversations about the book, is that in some ways, this book is itself a physical embodiment of some of the things that it criticizes.

One of the big arguments that the book makes is that one of the reasons symbolic capitalists are not very effective at achieving our expressed goals and sometimes create harm for the people we’re trying to help is precisely because we don’t apply these lenses, frameworks, and modes of analysis that we use to analyze Republicans and Christian nationalists and all these other people that we don’t like — we don’t apply these lenses to ourselves and to the institutions that we belong to or the causes that we support. And so that leaves us with this really distorted understanding of the social world.

You locate your critique of this contradiction in the Black critical tradition. Why was it important for you to do that? 

First, because Black scholars have been some of the first ones to actually put their fingers on this contradiction in a strong way. People like W.E.B. Du Bois, for instance. In part because Black people have been at the forefront of this contradiction. People like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., for instance, were very strong in pointing out this contradiction and the ways it adversely affects African Americans. Black people have consistently faced this: There are these folks who claim they want to be our allies to equality and emancipation and freedom, and they seem really committed when they’re trying to attack Republicans or something like that, but when it comes to making actual changes to their own societies and their own lifestyles and their own institutions, then all of a sudden there’s this wall that gets hit where it’s like, “Oh, actually, this is just really complicated.”

It was important for me to draw from that tradition because it’s one of the traditions that informed my own thought and helped orient me toward these questions in the first place.

One of the most stunning affirmations of your thesis — that social justice discourse is a form of elite social currency that is alienating the people in our society who are most marginalized — is perhaps best demonstrated by Trump’s gains among Black and brown voters. Still, some on the Left continue to argue that “wokeness” is both popular and effective as it relates to creating a more just society. And yet as you demonstrate in your book, data shows that there is no meaningful relationship between “awokenings”and material gains for the disadvantaged or attitudinal changes among the public. Why do you think it is that “wokeness” remains appealing to some on the Left, despite the evidence?

I think there’s an investment, because I think if we recognize that all of this sound and fury around social justice accomplishes nothing or might even be counterproductive, that’s just a really tough thing for us to reckon with — especially for those of us who have taken part in these movements and really believe in them. I think if we just acknowledge that these awokenings probably don’t do anything then that raises uncomfortable questions about what would be a more effective path. And at the end of the day, the likely answers to that question are going to be things that we just don’t want to do. They are going to be uncomfortable and costly and difficult things for us to do. This is one of the things I stress throughout the book: There is a kind fantasy that has preoccupied symbolic capitalists since the beginning of our professions that is basically that if we just tax people like Elon Musk hard enough, we can solve all the world’s problems without changing anything about ourselves, without sacrificing anything ourselves.

It’s a very convenient thing for us [to look only at the 1%]. Because the alternative is to fold ourselves into the picture and to have to reckon with the fact that there’s not a way to achieve a lot of these goals that we profess without us [personally] changing and sacrificing.

In Christian social justice circles, which are primarily the waters that I swim in, one of the things that I’m starting to think is that the discourse around Christian nationalism is becoming a sort of social currency. I say that not to dismiss Christian nationalism as an issue, but to interrogate our insistence that this belief system can explain many, if not most, of the United States’ problems. What do you make of the discourse surrounding Christian nationalism? 

I think you’re absolutely right. [Sociologists Jesse Smith and Gary J. Adler Jr.,] published a paper on this called “What Isn’t Christian Nationalism.” One of the things in my field, and in a lot of adjacent social science fields, is that basically anything they don’t like about society they blame on Christian nationalism, even when the relationship is pretty tenuous, and the connection doesn’t make a lot of sense.

There are a couple of important things to note about Christian nationalism. One, Christian nationalism has actually played an important role and an ambivalent role. In some cases, it’s been on the good side and in other cases it’s been on the bad side of various social dilemmas. People like King, or even James Baldwin, espoused a kind of Christian nationalism, where they were kind of patriotically [pointing] back to America’s founding ideals and Christian ideals to advocate for why social justice, including racial equality, was important.

Another thing that I think is that people have had a hard time processing that Christian nationalist beliefs have been growing less prevalent in society. So, if you look at the course of Donald Trump’s first tenure in office, for instance, Americans became less likely, including Republicans, to hold beliefs that to be a true American you should be a Christian, or that the U.S. government should make Christianity the official religion of the United States. So, you can’t really use it to explain a lot of the things that we want to explain. 

To the extent that Christian nationalist beliefs are continuing to flourish, it shifts among nonwhite voters and nonwhite Americans. That’s a thing that we don’t discuss a lot because when we talk about evangelicalism or Christian nationalism, we do it in this really racialized way that’s convenient for us. 

Also, there’s a sense in which the focus on Christian nationalism is too narrow. As I showed after the 2020 election, some of the biggest gains that Republicans made from 2016 to 2020, for instance, were among Muslims. Muslim-ban Donald Trump made huge gains among Muslim voters and a lot in 2020.

As you mention there is evidence that Christian nationalism is on the decline or a minority opinion, but as you note in your book, it is possible for a minority perspective to define systems or institutions. So, I wonder how you think about that, particularly as it relates to Christian nationalism.

One of the things I flag is that often a minority opinion, even an opinion that’s held by, say, just only 5 percent of people within a system, can end up dominating that system if you’re in a situation where the minority in question is really organized and intolerant toward dissent and they’re surrounded by a bunch of other people who are less organized, less militant, and especially if they’re sympathetic but not fully on board. Within the symbolic economy institutions, you often have people who are espousing versions of antiracism that a lot of symbolic capitalists think are weird or overextending or just seem like they wouldn’t work but a lot of people who hold those beliefs feel discomfort expressing their concerns because they agree with the goals of antiracism, and they certainly don’t want to be seen as being against antiracism, so they just keep that to themselves. So then you have this situation where this position that most people in the system don’t actually hold ends up dominating the system.

Okay so turning the analytic lens the other way: I think it is the case that Christian nationalists punch above their weight within the Republican Party and aligned institutions today. 

One of the questions you ask toward the end of the book is this: “Why are growing numbers of working-class, racial and ethnic minority, and religious minority voters ‘voting against their interests’ (as we tend to see it) and aligning with the political Right?” What are some of the answers to that question you have found thus far?

One thing is that there is this kind of problem of emphasis in the Democratic Party and in progressive circles. There’s this great report by Jacobin and YouGov called Commonsense Solidarity.

One of the things that they find is that there’s this assumption that working-class people don’t care about Blacks, they don’t care about women, they don’t care about LGBTQ+ people and so on. But what they find in this study is that’s actually not a correct way to understand what’s going on with working-class voters at all.

One of the ways in which symbolic capitalists are different from working-class voters is that we really like to focus on identity, on differences between people, we want to foreground those differences. So if we’re passing a policy, we want to highlight how it benefits African Americans in particular or LGBTQ people and we really like to focus on these differences.

This isn’t the way that most other Americans tend to think. Most other Americans prefer messaging and policies that focus on common goals, shared values, and overarching interests. [Working class Americans] don’t actually like policies that are specifically targeted toward particular groups, and they don’t like policies where the messaging is oriented around how it’s going to benefit particular groups. They would rather it just be a good policy.

And this is true also for Black people. Symbolic capitalists tend to talk and think about policies and design policies and messages that actually alienate a lot of the people that we want to help. This is one way in which we go awry: We think if we don’t talk about race and gender and stuff, then we’re not being “real.” But the truth is, if you design a policy that’s oriented around helping the poor, and African Americans are disproportionately likely to be poor in America because of historical [and continued inequality], that’s going to disproportionately benefit African Americans, but you can advocate for that policy in a way that that doesn’t necessarily focus on race per se, that’s a kind of structure of policy that Black people like better and reduces resistance and alienation from white people as well.

If you design a thing that’s supposed to help poor and desperate people, but it’s oriented towards African Americans in particular, then that’s the same as saying, “Hey, you’re poor and desperate, but you’re white. Suck it up, make the best of it.” A lot of Black people look at a policy like that and go, “So, that seems unfair, right?”

I’m interested to know, what is something from the Quran that you’re meditating on this Ramadan? 

There’s this quote from the second surah of the Quran: “And it’s said to them to not sow chaos on the earth, and they say, ‘Oh, but we are but peacemakers.’” The verses that follow are about how a lot of people who think of themselves as doing social good are actually causing injustice. They’re lying to themselves or lying to other people about what it is they’re actually doing in the world. And so that those verses are burned into my brain. And they’re really relevant right now because I’m talking about this book all day.

Great, now a question about Jesus: Is Jesus God? 

[Both laughing.]

But seriously, you write beautifully about Jesus and so I want to ask: What does Jesus mean when he says, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled”?

I think the message of Jesus stands in stark contrast to a lot of [symbolic capitalism]. Jesus was very consistent about being wary of practicing righteousness before men. If you do this kind of public display of righteousness, then you’ve already had your reward.

I think that people who are consumed with trying to advocate for God’s will in this world and in their own lives but in a non-showy-conspicuous kind of way — you might not get the fame that you’re looking for, you might not get the status that you’re looking for. Actually, people may think that you’re a bad person or hate you or disagree with you or spit on you. But what we’re aiming for as believers is not fame or status or being respected and held in high esteem by our peers. It’s not bad per se, but the thing that we should be focused on is, “Am I doing the right thing? Am I trying to help? Am I promoting the vision of the world that’s laid out in the scriptures?”