Who benefits most from inequality in the U.S. today? According to Musa al-Gharbi, it’s the very people most likely to identify as anti-racist, feminist, and LGBTQ+ allies.
Al-Gharbi, a Stony Brook University journalism professor, outlined key arguments from his “We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite,” in a campus appearance earlier this month. The 2024 book holds that the 21st century’s left-leaning knowledge workers are sincere in their commitment to social justice. They just don’t acknowledge how those beliefs conflict with others they hold dear.
“We also think that our perspectives should count more than the person checking us out at Stop & Shop,” argued al-Gharbi, who earned his sociology Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2023. “We think we should have a higher standard of living than the people delivering packages to our doorsteps. And what’s more, we want our children to reproduce our own social position or to do even better than us.”
The “we” in the book’s title, al-Gharbi said, pertains to a subset of Americans he calls “symbolic capitalists.” The term, borrowed from the work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, refers to people working in fields like human resources, education, finance, law, and media.
“As a shorthand, you can think of people who don’t provide physical goods and services,” al-Gharbi said. “If you’re in this room, chances are you’re a symbolic capitalist — or aspiring to be one.”
“We think that our perspectives should count more than the person checking us out at Stop & Shop. We think we should have a higher standard of living than the people delivering packages to our doorsteps.”
The 21st century brought a shift in how these highly educated, mostly white professionals talk about race, gender, and sexuality, he said. The book uncovers a historic cycle of similar trends, including the “politically correct” fever of the late 1980s and early ’90s. Origins of the so-called “Great Awokening,” as al-Gharbi calls it, are situated in the Occupy Wall Street movement of the early 2010s, with its famous “We are the 99 percent” mantra.
But this framing obscures the true perpetuators of inequality, he said, as social scientist Richard Reeves argued in “Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It” (2017). The top 1 percent of earners owned 26 percent of America’s wealth in 2022, the year al-Gharbi used in his analysis. And the top 20 percent of earners accounted for 71 percent of the country’s wealth.
Many in this last group are symbolic capitalists who profit handsomely off the superrich. “Are the billionaires drafting their own PR to help absolve themselves of blame and paint themselves as solutions? Are they doing their own legal paperwork and moving the money around?” asked al-Gharbi.
Add to that the expert analyses employed in areas from court cases to news coverage, for a fuller picture of the group’s cultural primacy — and outsize influence. Symbolic capitalists also dominate all three branches of the federal government, with 100 percent of the judiciary, about 70 percent of the House, and more than 90 percent of the Senate, al-Gharbi pointed out.
“Here’s a fun fact,” he said. “Every single Democrat who’s won the White House since Jimmy Carter has been one variety of symbolic capitalist: a lawyer.”
“We Have Never Been Woke” opens with al-Gharbi’s first impressions of New York’s “racialized caste system” after moving from his conservative Arizona hometown in 2016.
“You have disposable servants who will clean your house, watch your kids, walk your dogs, deliver prepared meals to you,” he writes. “It’s mostly minorities and immigrants from particular racial and ethnic backgrounds who fill these roles, while people from other racial and ethnic backgrounds are the ones being served.”
So why don’t members of the latter group see themselves as elites? “A lot of our professions are explicitly oriented around holding the elites to account,” al-Gharbi explained. But researchers have found those within these fields perpetuate a form of credential inflation to protect their own status while excluding outsiders.
Using journalism as an example, al-Gharbi noted the high number of Ivy League graduates currently working at prestigious outlets like The New York Times. “This matters,” he said. “Because if the elites you’re supposed to be holding to account are your classmates from Harvard, or your neighbors, or your former lovers, then that radically changes how you go about the job.”
“Woke” discourse is an additional tool symbolic capitalists can use to advance their interests, al-Gharbi argued. Affluent suburban and urban professionals wield “mocking, censoring, and deriding” language not only to morally justify their own privilege. They use it to paint some of America’s most disadvantaged as undeserving racists, sexists, and homophobes.
“And this kind of behavior creates an opening for political entrepreneurs, usually associated with the right,” he concluded, with “political correctness” following a trajectory similar to the “woke” backlash unfolding today.
The Feb. 21 event was sponsored by the Center for American Political Studies and Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. During the Q&A session, a student asked what a symbolic capitalist can do to break the cycle.
“We haven’t really tried persuasion,” answered al-Gharbi, who writes for publications including the Guardian and the American Conservative. “If I want to convince people that, say, bombing Syria is a bad idea, it doesn’t do a lot of good to write in an outlet like Al Jazeera where everyone already agrees. You need to go to the people who want to bomb Syria and explain to them why that’s a bad idea in a way they will find persuasive.”
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