In their rush to save the world, woke celebrities actually cause more problems than they solve
Corporations, billionaires and celebrities are all shrill champions of social justice causes — so why haven’t the problems been solved?
That’s the central question that sociologist Musa Al-Gharbi aims to answer in his book “We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite,” out October 8.
“There are social movements that are happening at the local level all around the country to pass different kinds of legislation to address problems in concrete, successful and useful ways,” Al-Gharbi told The Post. “But the problem is a lot of times they become nationalized into a popular cause of elites — and then they stop being successful.”
Al-Gharbi, a professor of journalism, communication and sociology at Stony Brook University, explores how society’s elites are able to square idealistic notions of social justice with the rising economic inequality baked into their lives — and why they trip over themselves to champion the downtrodden.
He pinpoints the emerging knowledge economy class he calls “symbolic capitalists” — academics, consultants, journalists, administrators, lawyers, people who work in finance and tech — for perpetuating this hypocrisy.
“The people who work in these fields today are most likely to self-identify as anti-racists or feminists or environmentalists and so on,” he explained. “You’d expect that, as these people have grown in power and influence, you would see inequalities shrinking, social problems being resolved, greater trust in institutions — but instead you see just the opposite.
“There’s growing mistrust and dysfunction in institutions. Polarization and inequalities are growing. Social problems are growing,” he added. “The book is trying to figure out what went wrong.”
Al-Gharbi says a perfect example of elites co-opting and ruining a movement is criminal justice reform. For years, a bipartisan consensus about the need for changes in the prison system was growing organically, culminating with President Trump signing the historic First Step Act in 2019.
But, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in the summer of 2020, the movement became a virtue signaling opportunity for elites and lost its steam.
“A lot of symbolic capitalists started seizing on the issue as a way of signaling how pure they are, how committed they are, how much better they are than other people,” Al-Gharbi said. “When they try to outdo one another, things can move into a really extreme and impractical direction — like, for instance, defunding the police and abolishing prisons.”
The problem with social justice activism among elites, Al-Gharbi argues, is that they self-appoint themselves to leadership roles they have no right to be in.
“They think that they should be the ones setting the agenda and being the spokespeople, and they sometimes end up alienating a lot of longtime members [of social movements] who have been rolling up their sleeves and doing the work for a long period of time,” he explained. “They can end up discrediting the whole thing … by making it seem ridiculous and unpalatable to a lot of people who would have otherwise been on board.”
Al-Gharbi developed an interest in how elites operate in society while studying at Columbia University for his PhD after ascending the academic ladder from community college in Arizona: “Watching the Trump election and then Covid-19 play out as someone who is new to this culture and these elite spaces made me want to understand what was going on here.”
That’s when he became fascinated by how, for all their virtue signaling and professed concern for the downtrodden, elites have been so remarkably ineffective at actually moving the needle on solving issues of inequality.
“A lot of symbolic capitalists are sincerely committed to social justice and really want to see the poor uplifted and the oppressed be liberated. I don’t doubt the sincerity,” he said. “But the problem is it’s not the only commitment they have. They also tend to have this sincere feeling that other people should defer to them and listen to them.”
After all, it’s easy to advocate for defunding the police from your doorman building.
For Al-Gharbi, who did not grow up in elite spaces and is concerned about inequality, that tension is especially frustrating — and worth spending a book exploring.
“I don’t disagree with a lot of the aspirations that people have about seeing the poor uplifted, about seeing people who are oppressed live with dignity in society,” he said. “But the specific modes and methods that symbolic capitalists typically rely on to pursue those goals are not only ineffective but often harmful to the people they are trying to help.”
