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Musa al-Gharbi is an assistant professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University. His most recent book is We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite.
In this week's conversation, Yascha Mounk and Musa Al-Gharbi discuss the tendency of certain elite groups to lay claim to marginalized identities as a form of symbolic capital; the challenges posed by “asymmetric multiculturalism,” in which we encourage certain groups to organize along identitarian lines while discouraging others from doing the same; and how we can apply greater consistency to our analysis of social dynamics.
The transcript and conversation have been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: Your book is called We Have Never Been Woke—why do you say that? Clearly, some of these ideas have come to have tremendous influence in our social institutions, or at the very least the way in which the American elite expresses itself.
The title of your book is a little bit of a provocation, but what is behind the provocation? What is it that we never have been?
Musa Al-Gharbi: The title of the book is a nod to a different text by Bruno Latour, a sociologist who wrote a book called We Have Never Been Modern. And in that book, Latour argues that the stories that we moderns tell ourselves about what sets us apart from other people, about what makes us unique, actually obscure the nature of the modern world and make it difficult for us to address the problems of modernity. And in a similar way, I'm arguing that the stories that we knowledge economy producers, we symbolic capitalists, tell ourselves about how we're advocates and allies for the marginalized and the disadvantaged, how we're on the right side of history, etc. actually obscure the nature of contemporary inequality and make it harder for us to understand who benefits from racialized inequality, from gendered inequality, from socioeconomic inequality, who the winners and losers are, how these inequalities come about and persist, and what can be done to address them.
I try to argue for reflexivity, which is a social scientific principle that states that the kinds of theories that we have about the world should also apply to the theorists themselves and to the institutions and environments, the communities that the theorist himself participates in. So oftentimes, for instance, when sociologists try to understand social problems, we analyze different groups asymmetrically. We analyze the behaviors of whites and non-whites, the behaviors of men and women, in completely different ways. We analyze the behaviors and relationships and institutions that we like in completely different ways than we analyze the institutions and people that we're more sociologically distant from. So in this book, I'm using some of the same tools and methods that we would normally use to analyze people who are more sociologically distant from us.
Mounk: And what does that reveal that we didn't see earlier? How is it that that sort of more self-critical regard reveals something about American political discourse in 2024 that wouldn't have been obvious without this kind of reflexive lens?
Al-Gharbi: Well, the big tension is that the people who are most likely to condemn what you might call ideological racism, people thinking or feeling or saying the wrong thing about race or gender or sexuality, who are most concerned about ideological forms of prejudice, also happen to be the people who benefit the most from what sociologists describe as systemic or institutionalized racism or sexism. When you look at who's benefiting from the fact that non-whites or women are paid a lot less than people in dominant groups, who benefits from the fact that there are these large groups of desperate and vulnerable people who are kind of exempt from a lot of laws and subject to predation from people who are better off and things like that. Who benefits from that? It's us. And I walked through at length how our lifestyles and social positions are actually premised in a deep sense on the exploitation and maintenance of the very inequalities that we conspicuously condemn.
And so that's one thing that you see by taking this reflexive turn is that there is this kind of deep tension where the people who are the most concerned about racialized or gendered or other forms of inequalities are actually the primary beneficiaries and perpetuators of those same inequalities. And we actually leverage social justice discourse to deflect blame to people who actually benefit a lot less from the system.
Mounk: I think one of the problems of privilege discourse is that, as a really thoughtful political philosopher like Elizabeth Anderson has recognized in the last years—and we talked about that on the podcast a few months ago—is that, structurally, the person who is going to be on TV or on stage at a fancy conference telling others how privileged they are is virtually always going to be leading a better life than the person that is receiving that message, right? I mean, it is certainly true in the United States that, on average, African Americans have less privilege than white people, for example. That doesn't mean that the average African American who has the megaphone to talk about privilege on CNN has a worse life than the average person who is in their living room at night and switches on CNN. And that's sort of one of the strange aspects of this system. So what are some of these paradoxes and how do they add to this set of insights?
Al-Gharbi: Well, it is the case that lawyers and doctors and software developers and stuff who are black or Hispanic tend to earn less than whites and Asians. So you do see these rationalized inequalities even within these knowledge professions, even among elites. But what happens a lot of times is people who point this out lose sight of the fact that they're still elites. it is the case that black lawyers make less than white lawyers on average, but it's also the case that black lawyers make much more than the typical white person in America and much more than the typical black person in America, and so oftentimes elites focus on these disparities to the extent that they somehow lose sight of the fact that they are elites. They're marginally less elite than the white elites, but that doesn't change the fact that they're elites. And so this is one of the ways where sometimes social justice discourse gets deployed in ways that kind of mystify the actual relationships that are at play rather than clarifying them.
In the book I do spend some significant time talking about African Americans in particular because I am myself Black and so it might be more salient to my own experience or whatever. But one thing that's definitely the case is a lot of the people who portray themselves as spokespeople or representatives of various marginalized populations are demonstrably not representative of the groups that they claim to represent. So the things that they want, that are important to them, are clearly out of step with what most other people in that group believe and feel and think and want and so on. And so this creates problems sometimes where these elites from minority groups advocate for things that are actually harmful or that the people who they purport to speak on behalf of actually don't want. And it makes those people worse off in order to cater to the preferences of elites from those groups.
A lot of times what people do, if they want to know what, say, LGBTQ people or Hispanic people or whoever think about a given topic is not to look for nationally representative survey data, or go out in the street and talk to normal people. Instead, what they'll do is they look for some kind of consecrated elite spokesperson like Nikole Hannah-Jones or Ta-Nehisi Coates or someone like that. And again, the problem with that move is that those spokespeople are often not necessarily representative of how most other people in that population think. And there's also this kind of interesting move that a lot of elites who lay claim to minority group affiliation do, in which they take advantage of the vagueness inherent in certain terms to make themselves seem more disadvantaged than they are. So for instance, when we talk about black elites—for instance, most black people who are in elite spaces are either half-white, like myself, or there are people who are first or second generation immigrants from Afro-Caribbean backgrounds. And this matters because people of either immigrant black background or of multiracial black background tend to have far fewer disadvantages compared to monoracial non-immigrant black people in the United States. But we often appeal to the generic label to obscure those differences and put ourselves in the same boat as other people who are much less advantaged than ourselves.
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I was at a recent talk, for instance, and there were four black people at this conference talking about polarization, including a panel discussion on race. And of the four of us, there were two people who were Jamaican and then there was someone who was a reporter who's of Nigerian descent. And so there was not one person who was a monoracial non-immigrant black person. In that kind of situation where you'll have a whole bunch of black elites sitting around talking about race or something and there's not one representative who's like even remotely characteristic of the modal person in that group. And again, that's just looking ethnically; even just ethnically, the black elite is not representative of the modal black American.
And so this is a move elites do a lot, as we try to make ourselves seem less elite, we try to make ourselves seem disadvantaged by appealing to these kinds of generic labels and laying claim to represent groups and interests that we are not in fact particularly representative of.
Mounk: So people do that in your analysis, as I understand, because they have an incentive to do that. And you have this term of “symbolic capitalist,” which I think is related to what we've been talking about. Why is it that invoking your victim status, trying to oversell the extent to which you have some organic connection to a group that really might be disadvantaged, gives you capital and status in our society?
How, in this reflexive manner that you suggest, should we reflect on the sort of structural conditions in our society that encourage and produce that kind of behavior?
Al-Gharbi: This is one of the tensions of the book: to the extent that it truly is a disadvantage to be LGBTQ, to be black, to be Hispanic, to be disabled, to be neurodivergent, to the extent that those really are stigmatized identities, then why on earth are elites so eager to lay claim to those identities? Why are they so eager to portray themselves as either those things or as representatives or advocates for those people, even to the extent of bending the truth, in many cases like lying or just distorting the reality in order to do that. So that's one of the things the book explores. And a kind of nutshell answer is that it's not all Americans who tend to do that. It's a very specific subset of Americans who are what I call symbolic capitalists. Those are people who work in industries that are related to the manipulation of data and statistics, images and rhetoric, people who are not providing physical goods and services for people. [These symbolic capitalists are] lawyers, doctors, consultants, academics, journalists, so on and so forth. The thing about symbolic capitalists and the reason they're called symbolic capitalists, nodding to the work of Pierre Bourdieu, is that the way we make money, basically, the way we have status, the way that we earn a living, is by building and leveraging what Bourdieu called symbolic capital—getting people to defer to our authority, getting people to trust our expertise, getting people to follow our plans, take our guidance, and things like this.Now, one thing that's happened over time is that the symbolic professions have opened up and they've grown more diverse. A lot of the discussions, especially in my field of sociology and the sociology of elites literature, focus overwhelmingly on white elites, especially on cisgender heterosexual white men. And if anyone who lays claim to some kind of marginalized identity is excluded from the analysis, then we'll have an increasingly impoverished understanding because more and more of the elite identifies with one of those terms and in fact we're coming up with new labels and new modes of disadvantage all the time.
Mounk: One question that I have goes back to both Eric Kaufmann's diagnosis of asymmetric multiculturalism and to the question of what to do about it. I think that he's right that there's something strange and probably just empirically unstable about a society which says, “If you are a member of these various minority groups, go take great pride in your ethnic or religious identity. Go congregate among yourselves. And this is something that we're going to encourage and reward and celebrate. But if you're part of a majority group, don't you do that or you're a terrible bigot and a racist.”
Now, Kaufmann's solution to this is to encourage a form of symmetrical multiculturalism as I understand it; whites should also celebrate their culture, they should also stick together for their ethnic interests, and so on. I sort of admire the analytical clarity of that suggestion, but I deeply, fundamentally disagree with the prescription. I worry precisely that the natural outcome of that form of identity politics, if it really is instituted in the institutions, is to encourage a form of zero-sum conflict. I don't think that's going to be a good thing for society. And it's certainly not going to be good for the minority groups that, I think, would face a mobilized majority bloc that would actually have a lot of power and influence in society. That's why I find it so dangerous when things like vaccines are given out, in certain contexts, directly or indirectly on the basis of race. Because you don't want white people to think, “Well, if we want to be first in line, we’d better vote for the white-interest party.” That is exactly not the politics we should have.
So what do you think is the solution to the asymmetrical things you've pointed out? Is it to push back against these forms of identity-based mobilization? Having recognized the fact of asymmetrical multiculturalism, how do we respond to it in a coherent way?
Al-Gharbi: I think Eric is right in his diagnosis that it is unsustainable to say, yes, all these other non-white groups are free to not only celebrate themselves, but to organize on the basis of their racial or ethnic background with the specific purpose of enhancing their position relative to this other group, and people in that other group are supposed to say, “Well, I don't care if I lose out. I don't care if my children, my wife, my neighbors and friends who share this identity, we're all just going to take one for the team.” There might be something noble about that, but that's not really a realistic thing that we should expect from anyone, to lower their own standard of living and that of their children and loved ones and neighbors and friends for the sake of people who are sociologically distant from themselves. There's just absolutely zero reason to expect that that's a likely outcome. Much more likely, as you said, is that increasing the salience in this way will lead people to think that what they actually need to do is kind of organize in a militant way, not just to protect their own interests and to preserve their own status, but maybe even to the point of taking down these other people a peg or two, right? And so that's not constructive.
The problem that Eric flagged, and part of the reason he arrived at the conclusion he did, which is a kind of bold conclusion for an academic to publish, is because he thinks that an approach that's colorblind or something like that, where instead of leaning into our identity, we just try to adopt a universalist neutral position where we actually attend less to these things or not at all—he thinks that project is dead. He thinks it had its time in the sun. It's been thoroughly debunked and destroyed. There's no traction for it. He's just very cynical about the prospect of having a kind of colorblind or gender-blind approach to social justice or anything like that. He just thinks that that's gone. It's not coming back. And so the question is in a world where that's not going to be even on the menu in a meaningful way, kind of what can we do? And so he arrives at this conclusion that maybe the best thing is to try to find some way of some form of white identity that's not toxic, that's not terrible, that's celebrating good things that people should actually be proud of. And ways of taking pride in your identity that aren't necessarily zero-sum and things like that. He's kind of hoping that there might be some way to do some kind of white identity politics that's not the Klan or something like the Klan.
Mounk: And it's worth pointing out for context that Eric himself is not white, so it's not like this is sort of a crypto-white nationalist case (even though it is a position I still disagree with). But what do you think is the solution?
To very briefly sketch mine, I dislike the term identity politics because it's too broad. I think it's perfectly fine to have certain identity-based movements that are asking for inclusion under universal rules and norms. But to me, the solution is to have a set of liberal standards that treat everybody equally irrespective of the group of which they are a part—something that would vastly decrease the incentives to engage in that kind of symbolic capitalism.
When you see Kaufman's solution, my solution, a bunch of others, where do you fall on what we should do?
Al-Gharbi: To my mind, one of the big problems, is that, especially on the left, but maybe this is just true broadly of Americans in general, is we've come to de-emphasize, and in fact are in some ways uncomfortable appealing to, superordinate identities, common shared goals, common values. There's a lot of research that shows that actually it's a lot easier for people to get into differences between them if you start by foregrounding things that people have in common—like we're all Americans or we're all Christians, etc. If there's some basis of common ground, it's actually a lot easier to get into the differences without thinking of that person as the enemy, as some kind of outsider, as some kind of a threat. And so I think one thing that can be really important and useful, especially in a world where some of these identitarian tribalistic frames of talking and thinking are maybe not going away (if we're just going to concede that point to Eric), then think one important path forward is to find ways of appealing and justifying and affirming superordinate values, superordinate identities, common goals, shared interests, things like this.
I think a good North Star would be like what Adolph Reed Jr. repeatedly flags in a lot of his work about how the goal of social justice should be that everyone has a decent standard of living, everyone has a voice and a stake in institutions, and it doesn't matter who you are. And there's a way to pursue that kind of a goal where everyone has a voice and a stake that everyone is treated equally. Maybe there's a way to get there. But I think a key thing that might help is building up people's affirmative capacities instead of their critical capacities. Instead of what's wrong, what's bad, talking about what actually works—why does it work, how does it work, what's good about the prevailing order, what progress have we made, things like that. And building up our affirmative capacities is actually really important. The second half of my suggestion would be to appeal to these superordinate identities and common values and shared goals. If you can't build things up, if you're only focused on criticizing and deconstructing and problematizing and tearing things down, it's really impossible to meaningfully sustain these kinds of superordinate identities and shared goals and shared values. And this is actually one way in which I think a lot of our educational institutions and knowledge institutions more broadly kind of misserve a lot of people; there's too much emphasis on things like criticism and deconstruction and problematizing and not enough on building out people's affirmative capacities.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Musa discuss the supposed rise of “multiracial whiteness”; the parallels between anti-immigrant sentiment and opposition to gentrification; and whether the highly educated are more or less anti-Semitic than other Americans. This discussion is reserved for paying members...
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