Is Wokeness An Elite Boondoggle? Sociologist Musa al-Gharbi drops a truth bomb

The Unspeakable Podcast

Meghan Daum

Society & Culture

4.8 • 784 Ratings

🗓️ 9 December 2024

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What purpose does “wokeness” really serve? Is it a way of thinking that helps lift up marginalized groups? Or is it a convenient way for elites to pay lip service to social justice while maintaining the status quo that benefits them? This week, I’m joined by sociologist Musa al-Gharbi to discuss his new book We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions Of A New Elite. In addition to distilling his ideas about wokeness as “cover for elites,” we talk about Musa’s love for French theorists, the value of his community college education, and the culture shock he experienced when arriving at Columbia University. We also explore whether women are overrepresented in elite workplaces and how this might affect perceptions of gender inequality and male dominance.

GUEST BIO

Musa al-Gharbi is a sociologist and assistant professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University. His research primarily focuses on the political economy of knowledge production and the “social life” of scholarly and journalistic outputs. He is a columnist for The Guardian, and his writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Atlantic, among other publications. al-Gharbi’s first book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, was published by Princeton University Press in October 2024.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	When growing numbers of people who grew up expecting to be elites find that the visions that they had for their lives are just not going to materialize or seem like they're not going to materialize and so on.
0:14.0	What they do is they try to indict the order, the social order that they think failed them, and they try to tear down some of the
0:22.2	existing elites to make room for people like themselves. And you can definitely see social justice
0:27.6	discourse being used in precisely this way. Welcome to the unspeakable podcast. I'm your host,
0:36.4	Megan Down. My guest is sociologist Musa Algarbi. He's here to talk about his new book. We have never been woke, the cultural contradictions of a new elite. This is a fascinating conversation, and it covers a lot of ground. Musa has been making the rounds of some of the heterodox podcasts over the last couple of months,
0:58.7	but I think you'll find this conversation is really fresh and cover stuff.
1:04.3	Pretty sure you haven't heard elsewhere.
1:06.4	So I am excited to bring it to you.
1:10.0	I will also tell you just a little bit of housekeeping as we wrap up the year that the
1:15.8	unspeakiesie, my heterodox women's community, has a lot of events coming up next year.
1:22.4	We've got several retreats in places like Texas, Los Angeles, the Catskill Mountains.
1:29.5	We're going to do at least one co-ed retreat next fall. So go to the unspeakeasy.com to find out what we are doing there. And now
1:39.0	I will bring you my conversation with Musa Al Garby. Enjoy.
1:48.8	Musa Al Garby, welcome to The Unspeakable. It's great to be here. Thank you so much for having me.
1:52.6	So lots of books about elite over production and that sort of thing are floating around and we've read a lot about them
2:03.1	and I tend to talk about them on this podcast. But they're often written by people who were
2:08.5	born into the elite. And you're coming at your book, we have never been woke from an outsider's
2:16.3	perspective. You are an academic.
2:18.0	You did wind up at Columbia University.
2:20.7	But before we get into the meat of the book,
2:22.9	which I really enjoyed, by the way, I found totally fascinating.
2:26.8	Musa, why don't you tell us a little bit about your background?
	...

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