On the finish of my final submit, I mentioned I’d be following up by describing each a few of Musa al-Gharbi’s modes of research and assumptions in his ebook 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 research he calls “analytic egalitarianism.” What he means by that is that each one social teams will probably be thought-about based on the identical guidelines:
The behaviors of white and racial and ethnicity minorities, women and men, and LGBTQ and “cishet” (cisgender, heterosexual) People will probably 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 similar conduct in very totally different lights based mostly on the identification group of these participating in that conduct:
For example, when racial and ethnic minorities display a desire to rent, promote, mentor, and in any other case do enterprise with coethnics, that is steadily analyzed by way of 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 means—virtually solely via 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. For example, hate crimes dedicated by African People are often 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 nicely intentioned, they’re additionally profoundly condescending—and the tortured explanations they produce are likely to obscure excess of 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 issues 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 commonplace based mostly on somebody’s (perceived) ancestry. That is roughly the definition we are going to 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 a substitute, any racialized double commonplace is “racist” on their definition, no matter its intent or purported beneficiaries…
As Karen and Barbara Fields put it, “Racial equality and racial justice usually are not figures of speech, they’re public frauds, political acts with political penalties. Simply as a half-truth isn’t a kind of reality however a kind of lie, so equality and justice, as soon as modified by racial, change into euphemisms for his or her opposites.”
However whereas al-Gharbi’s modes of research would possibly, as he suggests, appear pretty radical in comparison with commonplace sociological evaluation (a minimum of within the sense of being a really totally different method), there’s one vital respect wherein it not significantly radical – it really adheres extra carefully to lots of the scholarly works that social justice advocates usually declare as inspiration:
Consuming outstanding analyses of the post-2010 period, one would possibly achieve the impression that wokeness grew to become institutionally dominant as a result of big numbers of elites and elite aspirants learn a bunch of Marx, Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault, and Kimberlé Crenshaw, had been utterly satisfied by their respective arguments, and at the moment are 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, lots of the practices related to wokeness betray, if something, an absence of deep information or engagement with the literatures which can be 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 associated and mutually reinforcing.” Describing her work, he observes the way it has been cited in assist of “the concept some teams are uniformly and objectively extra oppressed than others on the premise of intersectional benefits and drawbacks,” in addition to “the widespread notion that people who find themselves probably the most oppressed can perceive society most clearly, and due to this fact those that establish with a better variety of, and extra severely oppressed, identification classes needs to be given extra 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 straight and unequivocally in Black Feminist Thought (the textual content that launched the Matrix of Oppression framework).
It is a often occurring theme all through al-Gharbi’s ebook. 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 individuals being indoctrinated into social justice activism via a deep studying of main texts like these…Critically, these superficially deep but substantively shallow modes of talking about sizzling matters, huge concepts, and influential thinkers are a product of enculturation, not finding out 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 danger of kicking off a unending collection of disputing definitions. With a purpose to keep away from this, al-Gharbi tries to make clear what he means by the time period and its utilization:
In fact, the present ambivalence within the which 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” won’t 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 in every single place true by advantage of the which means of the phrases used. The traditional 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 may 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:
The truth is, lots of the most significant phrases within the English language are tough to exactly outline, as analytic philosophers have been demonstrating for hundreds of years now. Think about “love,” “information,” “justice,” “freedom,” “magnificence.” 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 again a great distance” and appears to have originated within the 1860s with an pro-worker, antislavery group known as the Huge Awakes: “Within the parlance of the instances, to be ‘Huge Awake’ was to be alert to social injustice, and to be dedicated, militantly, to do one thing about it.” It will definitely turned to a phrase encouraging vigilance – to “keep woke” was to maintain oneself consistently alert to the dangers of injustice that abound. Specializing in its trendy 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 via 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 establish with some model of those beliefs – and can also view it as affordable 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 straight tied collectively; an “aesthetic embrace of variety and inclusion” paired with acknowledging previous wrongs towards susceptible populations; a “deal with identification, subjectivity, and lived expertise,” together with validating individuals’s particular person perceptions of the identical; a dedication to “express acknowledgement of assorted types of privilege”; a perception in “‘unconscious bias’ which creates the necessity to ‘work’ on oneself” however isn’t totally eradicable; and a “tight deal with disparities between teams,” though this focus is utilized in a means that’s asymmetrical. Thus, “disparities between women and men that favor males are presumptively seen as proof of sexism (whereas those who favor ladies are unproblematic),” and racial or ethnic disparities “that favor whites particularly are taken as proof of racism” however “if different racial or ethnic teams outperform whites on numerous measures that is usually ignored: the main target is on whites.”
Moreover, al-Gharbi notes that wokeness harbors an “method to identification that’s, for lack of a greater time period, considerably mystical.” Based on the woke, “race is held as a fiction in want of being abolished and transcended” and is “held to be biologically unactual,” but on the similar time race is alleged to be everlasting and immutable based mostly on the biology of your delivery, and “just about any social phenomenon needs to be analyzed and mentioned by way of race, and failure to do that is seen as an unwillingness to be ‘actual.’” Gender and sexuality, to the woke, are “fluid, nonbinary, and socially constructed” and are thus synthetic and even arbitrary social constructs, however on the similar time gender identification and sexual orientation are innate, unchangeable, and glued at delivery such that “individuals can basically be ‘born’ homosexual or born trans (i.e., ‘born within the mistaken physique’).”
Nevertheless, al-Gharbi makes it clear that he thinks this “mystical” method to identification isn’t in itself a critique of woke concepts:
The discursive affiliation of the aforementioned concepts with “wokeness” due to this fact implies nothing about their “rightness” or “wrongness.” The commentary on the “mystical” nature of beliefs about identification is likewise meant as an outline, not a critique. As a Muslim, I don’t essentially view it as a drawback to carry beliefs with these kinds of deep tensions (see: free will and divine windfall, for example) – nevertheless, it is vital to concentrate on, 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 gaggle of individuals he calls “symbolic capitalists”:
The People probably to profess beliefs related to wokeness are usually the People probably to change 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’s also known as ‘wokeness’ may be fruitfully understood because the ruling ideology of this more and more dominant elite formation.” Thus, wokeness is a motion not of the frequent individuals, however of the elites:
The genuinely marginalized and deprived in society usually are not the oldsters who are likely to embrace and propagate these concepts and frameworks. As a substitute, extremely educated and comparatively prosperous professionals related to the symbolic financial system are the probably to embrace (and implement) these norms, tendencies, and discourses.
The truth is, 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 individuals:
For example, many extremely educated white liberals, desperate to display their alignment to causes like Black Lives Matter, aggressively embraced “defunding the police,” though African People themselves usually rejected this aspiration…Nevertheless, publicly putting the “proper” posture on this concern appeared to matter extra to adherents than advancing the acknowledged preferences of Black individuals or constructing and sustaining viable coalitions that would obtain concrete change.
This extends past coverage variations to perceptions of day by day actuality:
After 2011, there have been dramatic adjustments 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 typical Black or Hispanic individual; they tended to understand rather more racism towards minorities than most minorities, themselves, reported experiencing; they expressed better assist for variety 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 wrong way (and white non-Democrats had been flat).
However earlier than going an excessive amount of additional down this line, it’s price 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 financial system,” what’s the “symbolic capital” utilized by this group of elites, and the way does it relate to woke ideology? These concepts will probably be outlined in additional element within the subsequent submit.