Hey, it's Sean. Today we're running one of my favorite episodes. It's with Musa Algarby. He's a professor at Stonybrook University and the author of We Have Never Been Woke. The book, Like the Conversation, isn't really about the ideology of wokeness, whatever that is. It's more about the language and the symbols around the movement and how elites have co-opted them, which as you say, this is much more than a superficial critique of woke politics. Anyway, it's terrific and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. There are several terms in our political vocabulary that have been stretched to the point of incoherence.

Marxist and Orwellian spring immediately to mind, but at this moment, I'm not sure any term can compete with woke. Whether you're on the left or the right, whether you're pro or anti-woke, or even if you're not especially political and don't follow this stuff, woke is a word you simply cannot escape. The problem is that woke has become a catch-all term, often deployed in bad faith to smear or dismiss anything that has any vague association with progressive politics. As a result, anytime you venture into an argument about wokeness, it becomes hopelessly entangled in this broader

cultural battle. However, wokeness is not purely a figment of the reactionary mind. Even if we can't quite define it, it refers to something actually happening in the world. And if we can cut through all the and all the bad faith, it's worth understanding what it is and where it comes from. I'm Sean Elling and this is the gray area. Today's guest is Musa Algarvey. He's a journalist, a professor at Stony Brook University, and the author of a very interesting new book called We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite.

Musa's book is a serious effort to understand this movement and the effects it is having or not having on our society. And whether one agrees with all of his conclusions or not, it's impossible to read this book and not walk away feeling like you know more than you did before you read it. So I invited him on the show to talk about what wokeism means, why it's not as new and unprecedented as people think, and why the social and economic forces driving it are so complicated. Musa Algarby, welcome to the show. It's great to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

I'm glad we're finally doing this. Um, wokeism is a topic I've mostly avoided on the show. Uh, not because I don't think it refers to a real thing happening in the world, but because most of the discourse around it is so tedious and circular and or bad faith. Um, and if your book was merely a defense of wokeness or an attack on it, I don't think I would have invited you on. But it's so much more than that. In your mind, what makes it a fresh contribution? I think one of the big contributions of the book is that it helps contextualize the present moment in a different way.

It shows that what's happening after 2010 is actually a case of something. And in fact, there have been um three other previous awakenings. And by comparing and contrasting these cases, we can actually get a lot of insight into questions like why do these awakenings come about? Why do they end? Do they change anything? Um and these kinds of questions instead of trying to just explain things that are happening today in terms of other things that are also happening today. Um to kind of uh step back and take a more kind of structural look at what's happening. So I think that's one of the big values. primarily what it's trying to do is this deep study of contemporary

inequalities um how they come about who benefits from them and how and uh and here I think it makes an important contribution as well because especially in symbolic capitalist spaces so spaces like uh higher ed journalism and so on uh when we tell narratives about how various social problems come about and persist and so on the stories that we tell are kind of self- serving and uh and in particular, we tend to focus on basically uh the millionaires, the billionaires, the multinational corporations, and also those damn Republicans. And it's not like those stories are uh false, per se, but they're also like really, really, really incomplete. And um and so part of what I'm trying to do

in this book is kind of uh is hit those missing notes to show people like even if we want to explain the actions of the millionaires and the billionaires and the multinational corporations for instance um it's actually impossible to explain how any of the stuff that those actors do actually happens um without us. It's with us and through us that they accomplish those goals. And then the last contribution I think is it's a cool study of the political economy of the knowledge professions. Uh so how does the changing kind of power and wealth of the symbolic uh professions and the people who take part in them?

How does that relate to our changing kind of moral and political narratives and our and the ways that we behave politically in society and our ideological alignments and things like that? I want to get into the meat of the case you're making here. Let's just do a little bit of table setting um to ground us. And I realize every interviewer is probably asking you to define wokeness. And in the book, you don't offer a precise definition because it's a contested term. And like many contested terms, it can't be clearly defined. However, I do think it will help if you explain why you resisted defining it and then at least give me the most general account you can of wokeness so that we

at least know what we're talking about for the rest of this conversation or people know what you're talking about. Yeah, absolutely. So, uh, so yeah, there's this move in the discourse that I think is really unhelpful. Um that's basically like um if you can't provide a crisp analytic definition of something then you just don't know what you're talking about. Um you're not talking about anything. There's no there. It's a moral panic or whatever. And um I think that's a really bad way to think about how language works. Like the idea that we need necessary and sufficient

conditions for something um in order to understand what it is just false. So what I don't do in the book is provide that. Um, but I do provide kind of a rich thick description about what people what different stakeholders seem to mean when they refer to wokeness. And there's actually a lot of agreement. Um there are a whole bunch of things that kind of people across the political and ideological spectrum seem to have in mind when they're talking about this contested term. I don't think they cohhere into a definition but it is the case that stakeholders kind of across the political and ideological spectrum there is a kind of broad zone of agreement of

kinds of things um that we're talking about when we talk about wokeness and I'll say during the last period of awakening in the late ' 80s to early '90s uh instead of talking about wokeness they talked about political correctness but it was um but it was the ve like the same constellation of attitudes and dispositions more or less and um and the dynamics of how that word played out in the public uh unfolded in much the same way. So at first there was a lot of people who identified as politically correct in an unironic way to mean my views, my moral and political views are correct. Um and uh other people started to associate PC culture with this kind of sanctimonious purely

symbolic form of activism. And then gradually the right seized upon this dispute within the left and started attacking anything they didn't like as PC. And uh then it became difficult for anyone to associate unironically with the term politically correctness. And the term political correctness became almost purely a term of derision and even to be politically incorrect took on a somewhat positive veilance. So you had people like Bill Maher who had a whole show um political politically incorrect or something like that. And you see the same thing playing out with woke today.

Um so uh increasingly no one selfidentifies as woke um in an unironic way. Um and so the same kind of uh dynamic that we saw playing out in the last awokening around political correctness is now um playing out in a very similar way around the term woke. And in the next awokening um the term woke probably won't be part of it. uh there will be some probably some other term as this one some other term that activists use to define themselves and their approach to politics and so on. Okay. So we're in the midst of the fourth awakening according to you that we've had in this country. We there's one in the 20s or 30s. There's another one in the 60s. There's the one you're

just talking about in the 80s 90s and then this current one. What do all these periods have in common? What is the thread that ties them together? Um the tweet length answer is um that these uh periods of awokening happen when there's um when there's a big crisis for elites where they are expecting a certain life and uh it seems like they won't be able to live that life. One thread that cuts across all four awokenings um is that they tend to occur during these periods of elite overproduction. And so um elite overproduction is a term that's taken from sociologist Jack Goldstone and

historian Peter Turchin. And it refers to a condition where society is producing more people that have a reasonable expectation to be elites um than we have the capacity to actually give them the elite lifestyles and positions that they're expecting. So, you have growing numbers of people who did everything right. They got good grades. They went to college. They went to the right colleges. They studied the right majors. And um and they're expecting six figure salaries and to be able to have a house and to get married and settle down and have kids and a standard of living that's close to or better than what their parents experienced. And all of a sudden,

they're not able to do any of that. um when you have growing numbers of people in that kind of a condition, what they tend to do is indict the social order that they think failed them and try to tear down some of the existing elites to make space for people like themselves. So that's at their core what I argue is happening in awokenings. The two factors that cut across all four awoken um are the uh elite overprouction and this other factor uh popular emiseration. So elite overprouction um one reason why that's not enough to predict awakenings, why it's it's not sufficient is because um often when elites are having a tough time, it's hard to get anyone to care. And that's because

there's this phenomenon where the fortunes of elites and non- elites tend to operate counterylically. When elites are having a tough time, it's hard to get anyone to care. No one's breaking out a tiny violin and going, "Oh, poor elite guy. He has to live a normal life and get a normal job like everyone else. Oh, let me play you a sad song." Right? Um, so if times are pretty good for everyone else, but bad for elites, no one cares. Um, but there are these moments um when the trajectories get collapsed, when things have been kind of bad and growing worse for ordinary people for a while and all of a sudden they're bad for a lot of elites, too. Those are the

moments when awakenings happen because um the frustrated elite aspirants not only have a motive but they also have a means to really uh mess with the system because there's this huge base of other people in society who are also really frustrated with the way things are going also have a bone to pick with the people who are kind of running the show and so they have a more leverage these frustrated elite aspirants have more leverage over the system than they otherwise might. Let me push on something for a second. The case you make in the book is that the elites and you and I are technically part of this group because of what we do like to imagine that we're part of the 99% and

it's the 1enters who are the real elites when in fact it's really the top 20% who are hoarding most of the power and wealth. Isn't it true though that like much of what you call the symbolic capitalist class, that's a term we're we're about to define right after this. But for now, let's just say people like me and you and journalists, academics, bureaucrats, lawyers, corporate management types, and so on. Like most of us exist in a kind of procarity that is much closer to the lived experience of the middle and working classes than it is to the tech CEOs or the hedge fund managers. You and I have much more in common with uh a school teacher or a firefighter or a retail manager than we

do with Mark Zuckerberg or Jay-Z or whoever the hell is running Goldman Sachs these days. It seems to me that in theory at least there's more convergence of interest here than your thesis might suggest. What am I missing? I mean I think that's definitely how we like to think of ourselves. But as I show in the book, um, one of the problems that we have is that we compare ourselves, I think, too much to people like Mark Zuckerberg and go, "Oh, well, I'm just a normie." Rather than comparing ourselves to norm. So, I gave I'll give an example I talk about in the book is um when you look at like adjunct professors. So, adjunct professors relative to tenure line

professors are clearly exploited. They make a lot less money for doing the same kinds of work. Um, they have no say over faculty governance. They have really precarious labor contracts. They have no academic freedom to speak of, as I discovered firsthand when I did that job. I was one. It sucked. Uh, and um, but it's also the case that um, if you are a full-time adjunct instructor, on average, you make much more than the typical uh, American worker. And you also have much better working conditions. You have much higher social status and so on. And this is part of the reason why people choose to adjunct instead of becoming a manager at Waffle House or something is because

they don't want to be those people. They don't like the idea of working as a manager in a Waffle House or something like that. They would rather struggle as a as an adjunct uh you know at Berkeley um than to be a shoe salesman. Um they don't see themselves in the same boat. They don't want to be in the same boat. Um they passionately don't want to be in the same boat. and even in terms of um things like culture um in many respects actually we are closer to people like Mark Zuckerberg and those folks and in fact inc increasingly the millionaires and the billionaires are drawn from us anyway uh Zuckerberg being a great example or like for instance take journalists um so

journalism used to be a job where you had decent numbers of workingclass people that's not the case so much anymore um both because of credential requirements ments like journalists are increasingly focused on um only people with college degrees can be journalists and especially people who graduate from elite schools. And uh and so like in a world where you need to have a college degree and a college degree in the right majors and from the right schools in order to be a journalist and in order to be a journalist you also have to basically work for free in really expensive cities to get your foot in the door and so on. Then the only people who can really be

journalists are people who are relatively affluent. Um and that has important implications for the way we do our job. Uh so for instance, it's it's holding the elite to account plays out much different if the people you're supposed to be holding to account are your classmates and your friends and your lovers and your neighbors um versus if you have this kind of sociological distance between you and the elites. Um and the perspectives of non- elite people are also not particularly present in our institutions. So, a great example, uh, there's an essay by Bertrand Cooper called Who Gets to Create Black Culture? And in this essay, he points out like if

George Floyd was alive, um, after he was killed um, that, you know, he became ev the New York Times, the Washington Post, HBO, everyone. George Floyd, George Floyd. If George Floyd hadn't been killed, but he wanted to write for the New York Times, there's zero chance he would have had to he would have been able to write for the New York Times. The New York Times doesn't care what people like George Floyd think about anything. Um, their perspectives uh are not valid. Uh, they're not valued. Uh, ironically, George Floyd became someone who mattered to us after he became a victim of state violence and we could use his death in our power struggles. Until that point,

George Floyd and his perspectives don't matter to us. People like George Floyd don't matter to us. We don't engage with those people. We don't uplift their perspectives. Um, and so actually I just don't think it's true that we have a lot in common um with ordinary not only do we not have a lot in common with ordinary people in terms of um our interests and social networks and things like that, but we don't want to. Even when you look at things like our moral and political views, our moral and political views and the ways that we engage in politics are far out of step with the way that um the rest of Americans talk and think about these social issues, but are actually much

closer to the ways that millionaires and billionaires and those kinds of people talk and think about politics. Do you think the New York Times doesn't give a about George Floyd until he's been killed by the state? or is it that the audience won't pay attention until that's the case? I think it's kind of both. And part of the reason it's both actually. Um I talk about this a bit in the book is that the people who produce and consume these um narratives are bas are increasingly the same people. Um it's the same slice of

society that's producing almost all of this work in the symbolic professions. and they're the almost the exact same as the audience that's consuming them in terms of where they live, the professions they work in, what their values are, the kinds of educational background they have, and so on. Um, it's this really incestuous relationship increasingly between writers and audiences where they're they're virtually identical. So, I think it's the case that a lot of the writers don't really um and editors and stuff don't really have their pulse on the their finger on the pulse of normies, but I think it's also true that the audience of the New York Times

doesn't particularly care about normies and their problems either. I think there's just something undeniably true about that. You know, there's a particularly depressing section of the book for me at least, where you're talking about how much of what we think of as the discourse, you know, non-fiction books, newspapers, journals, magazines, is mostly just elites talking to other elites with the pretense that it matters to or is even seen by the rest of the country. But it really isn't for the most part. So, a lot of it is just masturbatory. Yeah, it matters especially for the work that's trying to understand and mitigate um social problems um because a lot of the people

that we're trying to help are just not part of the conversation. So, this would be a good time to explain this term symbolic capitalism because the thing people are constantly puzzling over is that the elites in our society who benefit most from the systemic inequalities, mostly highly educated white liberals, are also the ones most exercised about all of these inequalities. Now this appears to be a contradiction on the face of it, but it's really not for you, right? Like this is just a game symbolic capitalists play with each other.

It's not just a game. Uh so one of the ways I think the discourse sometimes goes ary is that there's this kind of narrative tendency that we have where we think if we can expose that someone is has an interest in doing something or believing something that they must not be sincere. Right. Um not true. Yeah. And I think that's a bad way of thinking about thinking because our cognitive and perceptual systems, I argue, are kind of fundamentally geared towards perceiving and thinking about the world in ways that enhance our interests and further our goals. And if we take that research seriously, then we would see that there's actually not a contradiction between sincerely

believing something and also uh mobilizing that belief in the service of your self-interest. In fact, if you had an interest in believing something, you would believe it even more sincerely. Um, and you would probably try to get other people to believe it as well. Um, I just take it for granted that when we say we want the poor to be uplifted, that we want people who are marginalized and disadvantaged in society to live lives of dignity and inclusion. I don't think we're being insincere about that. Um, but that's not our only sincere commitment. We also sincerely want to be elites, which is to say, we think that um our voice and our preferences

should matter more than the person checking us out at stop and shop or the uh gas station attendant uh when we fill up the tank. Um we think that we should have a higher standard of living than someone who's uh flipping burgers at McDonald's or selling shoes at Dillards. We strongly want our children to reproduce or have an even stronger social position than ourselves. And so these drives are in fundamental tension though like the drive to be an egalitarian and the drive to be an elite don't sit easily with each other. You can't really be an egalitarian social climber, right? Um and this kind of tension um has been with the symbolic capitalists from the beginning. it's

it's a tension that kind of defines our um this elite constellation from the beginning through the present. Um so yeah, I don't think it's the lack of sincerity. I think it's just that we have these other sincere drives and this desire to be elite when they do come into conflict as they often do. So symbolic capitalists are aligned pretty disproportionately with the political left for reasons you can explain and you certainly do in the book. But you also write that at bottom the anti-woke and the woke actually subscribe to the same fundamental worldview. I'd love for you to explain why that is because I think it's important.

Yeah. Um so one of the things that's true of both the uh woke and the anti-woke crowd is that they um they both think that things like symbols and rhetorics and beliefs and hearts and minds and um things like the names on buildings and uh you know what kinds of things um are taught to ch like that these kinds of struggles over culture and symbols and rhetoric and so on are like the most important things more important than a lot of breadandbut issues that normal people um have to deal with in their day-to-day life. Um like a lot of the anti-woke people describe wokeness as this kind of major threat to the to western civilization to the prevailing order like they're

they're also engaged in this kind of cosmic struggle in their minds. Um, and so their ways of thinking about the world and politics are not much different than the people they're criticizing. As I show in the and I also argue later in the book that um, one thing that you see one of the big impacts of awokenings um, they don't tend to change much in terms of allocations of resources for the genuinely disadvantaged in society and so on. They don't tend to help the wretched of the earth in a meaningful durable way. Um, one thing that does tend to happen though is that uh these moments of awakening tend to devolve into culture wars and they result in

these non-trivial gains for the right typically at the ballot box and then often the creation of uh alternative knowledge economy infrastructures um and uh kind of durable mistrust of mainstream institutions. Okay. So, why does this happen? So, during these periods of awakening, um, symbolic capitalists shift a lot. Like the ways that we engage in politics, the way we think about things and so on shift in these really radical ways. And so, the gap between us and everyone else gets bigger than it normally is. Um, and we recognize that and we assume often that it's because those people are growing more racist or sexist or whatever, but actually when you look at

the trend lines, um, they're not. it's that we've shifted a lot while they've been pretty steady. Um, but so the gap gets bigger and people care about it more and they care about the gap more because we become more militant during these periods of villainizing and demonizing and mocking and trying to censor and so on anyone who disagrees with us. So people notice this gap more because we're becoming more confrontational uh towards people that we disagree with. And so this gap and the fact that people care about the gap more, it creates an opportunity for like rightal aligned political entrepreneurs to basically campaign by running against us by bringing people

like us under control. Narratives start to circulate like oh well the mainstream media is just a propaganda arm for the Democratic party or uh colleges and universities are in the business now of just indoctrinating young people rather than teaching them useful knowledge and skills. And so um there tend to be these kind of movements by right-aligned political folks then to campaign against people like us and you usually see efforts to curb our autonomy, cut lines of funding and things like that. Uh and you also see the creation of these alternative infrastructures. So after the awakening of the 1960s and '7s for instance there was a perception that higher ed was lost. Can't fix it. It's

just captured. It's capt it's ideologically captured. And so what did people do? Well, they launched these right align think tanks starting with the KO Institute and the Heritage Foundation and so on. And then um in the late 80s, early 90s there was a perception that the media was lost. Um and so what did they do? They launched Fox News in the aftermath of the third great awakening. Um and then finally uh in the current moment you see these moments to uh like Elon Musk trying this anti-woke takeover of Twitter, Donald Trump trying to launch truth social. And the thing about it is these alternative knowledge economy infrastructures, they have an existential stake. Like the

way they make money, the way they keep viewers is by sewing consistent mistrust in mainstream institutions. So Fox News, their bread and butter is all day, every day telling people the mainstream media is lying to you. They don't care about people like you. They don't share your values. They're not giving you the whole story. Like that's how they make money. this all day, every day sewing trust in mainstream institution in order to capture part of our market share. And um and so to the extent that we create an opportunity um a market for these alternative infrastructures because of the ways that we conduct ourselves during awokenings um one consequence of that tends to be kind of durable

mistrust and kind of reduced influence in a long-term way. We live with the consequences of that for a long time, right? And another consequence is that um the power structure basically remains the same. Yeah. Can you steal man the case for a minute at least for what we're calling wokeness as something potentially more materially significant than maybe we're giving it credit for? Right. Is there a politics is downstream of culture argument that the focus on symbolism and representation and the rest of it will create the kinds of cultural changes today that will lead to concrete material improvements in people's lives

tomorrow? Or have you seen enough historical evidence to suggest that just doesn't happen? by a lot of measures like things like black white income gaps, mass incarcerate, like a lot of these kinds of social problems that people were con uh upset about in the 1960s are the same or worse today. Um, now that said, I do think that there are some ways in which society and culture changed um that are just beneficial um and that are sometimes these changes are kind of orthogonal to the in fact they're typically orthogonal to the great awakenings but they are sometimes changes that were done by symbolic capitalists sometimes in between awokenings so not during the awakenings

but like actual good uh things that have happened in institutions that we should celebrate. So for instance, one of the things that bugs me out in a lot of the conversations around DEI and uh you know merit in higher ed is that um there's this kind of wild ahistorical narrative that seems to be at play. So people will say things like the implicit argument is like back in the day we used to make decisions based on things like their people's merit for hiring and promotion in academia and today we pay so much attention to things like identity and it's like and that's kind of a ridiculous ahistorical argument. So until somewhat recently in um US history, um pretty much the

only people who could be professors were like straight white men, especially Wasp men. Um and there were uh if you were black, if you were a woman, if you were like explicitly gay, if you were uh even Jewish in many cases, um then you were not eligible um to be a professor. And it wasn't even hidden. No one was ashamed of this. Like these were jobs for Wasp men. Um, a lot of jobs weren't even it wasn't until the 1990s, um, when departments were actually forced to conduct open searches and list their open positions publicly. Until that time, people would just give lifetime appointments to people in their network um, and with no competition, meritocratic or otherwise. And so before

during this period, the good old days, uh it was definitely the case where when the only people who could even be considered for a job were straight white men, that no one talked about race, gender, or sexuality in hiring and promotion decisions. Cuz why would you? What was there to talk about? Um but that didn't mean that hiring and promotion wasn't identity based. It was more identity based. You had to belong to this very specific slice of society to even be considered for the job. So to say that's not identitarian is wild. It was only when we stopped taking for granted that the profess that professors were straight white men that the question of who does get to become a

professor and in virtue of what becomes a live question. Well, well, can't we also say to the extent that what you just said is true, and it is, that is in fact a victory of these sorts of social and cultural movements that did produce an actual change in society that was materially significant. Yeah. I mean, I mean, frankly, uh, like the upshot is that hiring and promotion today is actually much more standardized. It's much more transparent. It's much more um metrics focused than basically it ever has been. But the thing about it is a lot of these changes um they again they weren't necessarily the product of awokenings and you can see this for

a lot of other positive changes. So Colleen Erin, a colleague of mine who's a sociologist, she has this great book on the first step act. So the first step act was um for readers who are not immediately familiar, it was one of the most significant pieces of criminal justice reform that had been published in um that had been passed into law in decades. And um as Colleen shows in this book, the passage of the first step act was created through this careful process of consensus building across Democrats, Republicans, all these community organizations and legislators. There's this kind of gradual consensus building effort that took decades even before Black Lives Matter and the Great

Awakening and all of this kind of stuff in conservative and Republican spaces. There was growing awareness that there were problems in the criminal justice system. So, it happened to get signed into law under President Trump during the Great Awakening, but it wasn't caused by the Great Awakening. And in fact, um, because it happened to get signed into law during this period of heightened contestation over social justice, um, and there were a lot of symbolic capitalists who were kind of hot dogging, striking these really, um, extreme positions that were out of step both with what most people most of the people were trying to help want, like defund the police, close all the

prisons, and so on. um that this long period of decadesl long consensus building was destroyed by the way that symbolic capitalist conducted herselves during the great awakening. And so rather than the first step act being like the um a cornerstone upon which to build other criminal justice reform, it actually basically limped across the finish line and there hasn't been much change other than that. Which is to say there are good things that happen that symbolic capitalists often take part in. uh but they tend to be orthogonal to these periods of great awakening. If anything, often the periods of great awakening end up messing up um social reform movements

that are already underway for a whole host of reasons I discussed in the book. You know as well as I do that anti-wokeism has become its own little cottage industry on the right with the caveat that we obviously can't control what bad faith actors do with our work once it's out in the world. Do you worry about this book being misinterpreted and perhaps adopted as a cudgel in the culture war? Yeah, I talk about this in the book um that one of the perennial joys and terrors of putting ideas out in the world is after a while they cease to be yours to control. I worry about that as much as anyone else. But I, you know,

my what I tried to focus on for this book was trying to answer the questions that I had as kind of fully and comprehensively and kind of fairly as possible and kind of let the politics um play out how they do that. You know, that's not my job. Um, but that said, I also tried I think the a lot of the anti-woke uh kind of culture warriors are going to have a tough time uh really uh mobilizing the book the way they might hope. uh both because um it has a lot of very uh critical things to say about uh the anti-woke kind of people and the game that they're playing as well. I apply a very symmetrical lens to understanding them and their behaviors and actions. Um and the book also um you

know that the reality is a lot of work like in queer theory or critical race theory or feminist standpoint epistemology or postcolonial theory like these modes of scholarship um deeply inform my own thinking including on these questions about power and uh ideology and how they relate to each other. In a deep sense, what the book is doing is taking the arguments from these literatures um to what I perceive to be their logical conclusion, which should lead us to ask uh of our own ostensibly emancipatory ideologies, whether or not they might also reflect our class interests, whether or not they actually represent the values and interests of the people that we're

trying to help, and whether or not like there's no reason to think that our own belief systems are exempt. and a lot of these other related literatures and not to villainize them or mock them or demean them, but in fact to show how they can be valuable. Um, and so in this and a lot of other ways, I think the book is um not easily digestible into the culture wars in the ways that people might hope. You said something a second ago and I'm glad you did um because I wouldn't normally mention this. This is not in my little prep doc uh I have on hand, but it's relevant and you gestured to it just a second ago and

you also address it in the book. So, I'm going to broach it here. You're a black Muslim American challenging some of the orthodoxies on the left and the right. And there's this thing that often happens on the left, and I don't like it, where whenever a black person has views that aren't doctrinire or that aren't the views a white progressive thinks a black person is supposed to have, they get dismissed or attacked. And I think you even say in the book that you're emphasizing your blackness and the influence of black scholarship on the book to push readers to listen to you in a way they might otherwise not.

What is it that you want those readers in particular to hear that they might otherwise not? Yeah. So, um, so it's Yeah. So, the thing that they need to hear, um, is that the values and interests of uh of people like us are often out of step with those of the people that we want to help. our views of politics, the solutions that we have to social problems or you know are often out of step with what other people want and need in some ways uh and often in ways that cause them harm. So quick example, I was at a conference on political

polarization. They had four black people uh taking part in this conversation alongside the whites. And um uh the four of us um there was me who's half white. Uh there was um two AfroCaribbean folks and then there was someone who was Kenyan and Nigerian. Um so not one person uh in the out of the four black people who were part of this panel, not one person was a monorracial non-immigrant black person. They're the overwhelming majority of America uh of America's black population. They were nowhere represented on this panel. setting aside the class um dimension of it, but even just looking at ethnicity, um we were not even ethnically remotely representative of blacks in America. And

um in that panel, while unrepresentative of black America, was perfectly representative of how almost all of the spokespeople in symbolic capitalist spaces are. Uh almost all of the black spokespeople in symbolic capitalist spaces are either uh mixed race or recent immigrant uh black heritage and um and the few exceptions to that rule tend to be people who are themselves like from really relatively affluent backgrounds. Um and so the uh and so the problem with turning to people like myself um to understand uh like how all black America thinks is just that we're not a representative of black America.

Our experiences are not the same. Our challenges are not the same. Our values and interests are often very different from the moto black American. If you look at the moto black American, um, you know, black people in America vote overwhelmingly with the Democratic party, but not because they're super liberal. They're some of the most culturally conservative folks in the Democratic block. And in fact, this is one of the big problems that a lot of institutions have when they try to promote diversity and inclusion is that um we often create these spaces that are really hostile towards traditional or socially conservative or religious views in the

name of diversity and inclusion. But the people who are most affected by that are people who are already underrepresented in these spaces. the kinds of people who are already the dominant population. So relatively affluent, highly educated background, urban and suburban white people and so on. The people who dominate these institutions demographically also tend to share the dominant ideologies. They're products of the same kinds of childhood and institutions and so on. Um, if you look at the Americans who are most likely to self-identify as anti-racists, as feminists, as allies to LGBTQ people, as environmentalists, and so on, it's highly educated, relatively affluent

urban and suburban white people. Um, and so if we create an environment that if you're not those things, you're going to be suppressed or villainized or socially sanctioned and whatever, the people who are going to be most adversely affected by that are going to be non-traditional students, rural students, less affluent students, immigrants, um, non-white students, religious minority students, and so on. So, we do all of these policies in the name of diversity and inclusion that are often devastating for the people we want to help.

Well, look, I'm not going to ask you to solve all of our political problems. Um, but I guess I am curious what you think or what you see on the other side of this awakening. I mean, our politics feel pretty dysfunctional right now. It feels pretty stuck and hopelessly polarized. Um, do you have any reason based on how these previous eras have played out to think we might end up in a healthier place after all this? So, in the book I talk about how there are these things that are very much the same across awakenings. Uh, but there are also a couple of things that are different um that are different in an important way. like there's this for all the parts of the awakening that's

cyclical, there is actually this set of trend lines that I think matters a lot for thinking through what the legacy of this awakening might be and what the next one might look like. One thing that I think is importantly different that has been increasingly different each awakening is that the share of Americans who take part in the symbolic professions has changed. So in the 1920s at the time of the first great awakening symbolic capitalists were like 3% of workers. um uh and uh now it's about a third of workers and so still a minority not close to a majority um but a really big minority and that matters that matters because when you're only 3% of a population you can't just write off the

rest of America if you're a third of all workers though and you tend to be the most affluent workers and you're concentrated in these very particular communities and you're taking part in these really interconnected institutions like academia and the nonprofit sphere and policymaking circles and so on. Um, then it actually is you can you absolutely can. So you can just totally write off the values of most of America and make money handover fist. You can be a political party that increasingly alienates or is increasingly distant um from mainstream America and you can win lots of elections of national um city elections, state elections um all across the country, be flush with funds and

even be competitive on the national stage if you can just get enough normies um to kind of get along with you in addition to your kind of core constituency. Um and so uh and so one of the things that's become increasingly the case uh that's been different from awakening to awakening is that um symbolic capitalists have been a larger share of the uh overall workforce and uh more resources have been consolidated in our hands and as a result of that we have a lot more autonomy um from the rest of the public in a way that is sometimes pernicious. And more broadly, I just think that some of the current um bifurcation we see between us and most of the rest of society is probably

not sustainable. I think um one of the things that you see very clearly is that growing shares of Americans feel like they don't have a voice or a stake in our institutions. They think that their values are not represented in our institutions. And in fact, they think that our institutions are hostile to towards their interests. And there's lots of research in the United States and around the world that suggests that when people feel that way, what they do is they try to burn down those institutions. They try to marginalize them, defund them, um delegitimize them, and otherwise burn them down. And that's a very rational response. And it doesn't matter what the institution

is. If you don't have a voice or a stake in it and you think it's committed to the destruction of people like you, why would you not resist it? It would be crazy to actually conspire with that institution towards the your own destruction and emiseration, right? You would of course resist it. That's the natural normal thing to do. And it doesn't matter what that institution is. So often symbolic capitalists when we're met with distrust when we're met with this kind of resistance um we pathize it as like for instance anti-intellectualism and um instead of uh really reckoning in a serious way with the fact that a lot of people feel not wrongly in many cases

that they don't have a voice or a stake that people like us look down on people like them that people like us are actively hostile towards people like them that we write off their suffering And we actually hope in many cases that their suffering continues or grows worse because they think the wrong things or say the wrong things or vote for the wrong people and so on. And um and so I think this kind of this bifurcation is not sustainable in the long term. Something's going to give one way or another. And I hope that um you know it gives in a uh I hope that we can make choices that allow something to give in a way that's not highly destructive. I

I do want to say that I think this book is as intellectually honest as a book on this topic could possibly be. And for that reason I think it's it's a genuinely worthwhile contribution to this conversation. So I commend you for that. Thank you so much. Uh thank you once again. The book is called We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. Musa Algarby. Thank you. It's It's been great. Thank you for having me. All right. I hope you enjoyed this conversation. You know, I did. But as always, we want to know what you think. So, drop us a line at the gray area.com or you can leave us a message on our new

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