Two Cheers for the Woke
Two Cheers for the Woke
There's a lot to criticize about symbolic capitalists and their social order. But it's not all bad news.
Starting in the interwar period (between World Wars I and II) and rapidly accelerating in the 1970s, there were shifts to the global economy that radically increased the influence of the “symbolic industries” – science and technology, education, media, law, consulting, administration, finance, non-profits, NGOs and advocacy organizations, and so forth. People who work in these fields traffic primarily in data, ideas, rhetoric, images instead of physical goods or services. These “symbolic capitalists” are also the Americans who are most likely to self-identify as antiracists, feminists, environmentalists, leftists or “allies” to LGBTQ people. And for good reason.
From the outset, these professionals have defined themselves and their jobs through a commitment to social justice and altruism. Journalists, for instance, are supposed to speak truth to power and be a voice for the voiceless. Academics are supposed to follow the truth wherever it leads, without regard to whether it serves others’ financial or political agendas. Symbolic capitalists successfully won higher pay, prestige and autonomy than most other workers under the auspices that providing us with these benefits serves the common good – including and especially helping the most vulnerable and disadvantaged in society.
In the years that followed, symbolic capitalists sought to enhance our influence further by arguing that if still more resources and authority were consolidated in our hands, we would usher in an age of unprecedented social cohesion, progress and prosperity. Under our rule, opportunities would be allocated according to merit. Resources would be redistributed according to need. Disputes would be adjudicated by disinterested experts, with decision making governed by reason and empirical facts. These experts would be mindful of the details and the big picture. They’d be oriented around the long term common good instead of myopic selfishness, the agendas of special interests or parochial and inflexible ideologies. And as a consequence, longstanding social problems and tensions would be ameliorated. We’d have an increasingly shared understanding of the facts of the world and the ‘correct’ course of action.
And, to a large degree, we got what we wanted: over the last half century, the global economy has been increasingly reoriented around the symbolic industries. However, to put it mildly, things have now played out as we’d predicted. Instead, the U.S. has seen slowing innovation, economic stagnation, rising inequalities, increasing affective polarization, a “crisis of expertise,” diminishing trust in one-another and social institutions, and, allegedly, epistemic chaos.
My forthcoming book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, attempts to figure out what went wrong. On the whole, the book is very critical of the symbolic professions. There is much to criticize about symbolic capitalists and the social order they preside over. There is much to critique about “wokeness,” the dominant ideology of symbolic capitalists, and how it is instrumentalized in struggles over power, money and status. However, it’s also critical to bear in mind that people are complicated. Societies, even more so. Social orders and ideologies tend to arise and persist for complex reasons, and should they fail, they leave behind complex legacies. The same is true of the symbolic professions and “wokeness.”
Compared to What?
It’s easy to see why many hate bureaucrats and administrators. They exert significant (often arbitrary) power over other people’s lives. They are typically unelected and largely unaccountable to the people under their jurisdiction. Their rules and box-checking seem to make everything harder than it needs to be. And sometimes, there are just too many rules.
However, the absence of these professionals and their protocols is no picnic either. Societies with weak institutions, or contexts where the rules are not transparent and consistently enforced, tend to have much lower investment, high levels of instability, lots of nepotism and corruption, and even more arbitrary roadblocks that people have to work around (which tend to be far less predictable to boot). And although overly powerful and centralized institutions can easily slip into tyranny, overly weak institutions can also create grounds for oppressive, exploitative, and likewise unaccountable non-state actors to fill the void.
If you travel the world, especially in the “Global South,” you can easily see what the world might look like without those busybodies and their rules. Most Americans, despite their complaints, would not want to make the trade. Instead, people from all over the world flock to America precisely because it’s a place where, far more than most other countries, people can count on relatively consistently enforced and transparent rules, functional institutions, and checks (if often inadequate) on “private tyrannies.”
These extraordinary features of American society – broad freedom of trade and individual liberties paired with consistently (if imperfectly) functional institutions and rule of law – may help explain why the U.S., despite being in a period of stagnation, continues to be economically far ahead of the rest of the world (and the gap keeps growing). Two cheers for the bureaucrats and administrators, loathed as they are condemned to be.
In a similar vein, there is much to criticize about mainstream media. As my book details at length, contemporary journalists and pundits tend to hail from (and live in) relatively affluent urban and suburban areas. They have something approaching an ideological monoculture – and their values are significantly out of step with those of most other Americans. Unavoidably, journalists’ idiosyncratic values and their backgrounds shape the kinds of stories they focus on and how they talk about those stories – often in ways that are unfortunate.
However, it’s also the case that mainstream media is generally reliable. And despite their myriad biases and blindspots, most journalists are committed to presenting readers with an accurate and fair-minded picture of the world (in a concise, compelling and accessible way). In this, they are lightyears ahead of their primary competitors.
Outlets like Fox News and Newsmax, for instance, also largely ignore people in flyover country, working-class people and local issues. They criticize the left for being elitist, but they are based in the same cities, drawing reporters who share similar demographic backgrounds, and cover the same types of stories (just with a different slant).
On top of this, they have an existential stake in villainizing mainstream media and perpetuating the culture wars – this is how they peel people off from other channels and keep them engaged – often in ways that are incompatible with telling the full and unvarnished truth, and often in ways that are pernicious for American society and culture.
Put another way, mainstream media has a lot of problems. But folks wouldn’t want to live in a world where outlets the New York Times didn’t exist anymore but sites like Breitbart News continued to flourish. That would not be an improvement. Certainly, alternative media can serve as a helpful check on mainstream reporting. They can also complement mainstream coverage, focusing on stories and perspectives that don’t get enough play. But they’re no replacement for the mainstream institutions they condemn. At present, there is no genuine alternative (and so, legacy media continues to limp on despite its myriad challenges).
Similar realities hold for higher education. There is a lot to hate: academic credentials are increasingly bound up with social status and inequality. Professors are drawn from a narrow and idiosyncratic slice of society, and research and teaching are often distorted by the ideological and demographic skew of the faculty. These are real problems. I’ve long been affiliated with an organization, Heterodox Academy, that seeks to raise awareness about these problems, and build momentum to address them.
However, it’s also the case that education, research, and credentialed expertise are of central and growing importance in virtually all spheres of contemporary life. Precisely the reason there is so much political contestation over K-12, higher-ed, and science and technology is because a lot seems to be at stake.
And, frankly, there aren’t good substitutes for mainstream colleges and universities. Think tanks, for instance, are often comprised of the same demographic strata of society as professors. They’re marginally more diverse ideologically, but they also tend to be explicitly oriented towards particular ideological or political goals in ways that may subvert and circumscribe their pursuit of truth. And although there are many problems with “academic capitalism” in higher ed, think tanks tend to be even more beholden to the whims of donors because they receive very little direct money from the government (although many receive foreign funding and others receive federal funds indirectly). Put simply, think tanks are an important complement to the knowledge production and dissemination roles that colleges and universities play, but they’d be terrible as outright substitutes.
Winston Churchill famously declared, “democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried.” The same thing holds for many of the symbolic professions. They’re deeply flawed, but they’re better than nothing, and better than most plausible alternatives too. They’re also better today than they were in the past, largely as a result of increased diversity and inclusion.
For instance, it’s definitely true that, in the past, “identity” wasn’t an explicit consideration in hiring and promotion decisions within the academy. But this didn’t mean these processes were not identity-based. They were, in fact, more identity based. Hiring was almost exclusively (and unabashedly) restricted to well-heeled WASP men. And within this set of folks, hiring was far from “meritocratic.” Instead, jobs were literally given away by well-connected professors to others in the “old boys club.” In fact, departments weren’t obliged to conduct open and competitive searches for faculty positions until the 1990s.
Put simply, it was only when colleges and universities stopped taking for granted that professors were straight white men that the question of who does get to be a professor, and on what basis, could gain salience. And wrestling with these questions has been, on balance, quite fruitful (if occasionally uncomfortable and sometimes wrongheaded). Hiring and admissions are today far more open, transparent, competitive, metrics-based and meritocratic than at virtually any point in the past – and this has been both a product and a driver of increasing diversity in higher ed.
And it’s not just academia where these dynamics hold:
Economists estimate that 20 percent to 40 percent of all economic growth in the United States since the 1960s was simply due to improved allocation of talent—particularly, the opening of more opportunities to highly talented women and minorities at the expense of less skilled, less “hungry,” and less innovative white men (who had largely taken their positions for granted prior but are now “hungry” as well, owing to heightened competition, which only enhances the bottom line further).
Indeed, as UBS Wealth Management Chief Economist Paul Donovan has shown, identity-based bias, prejudice, and exclusion tend to be quite expensive for institutions. In the hyper-competitive global spaces that many organizations operate in, the pursuit of profit maximization often aligns cleanly with the pursuit of greater diversity and inclusion. It increases the efficiency of capitalist enterprises to avoid losing access to talent, partnerships, or customers due to “irrational” discrimination. Properly managed, diversity provides a range of competitive advantages with respect to innovation, problem-solving, forecasting, knowledge production, and quality control.
There is, of course, a lot to complain about with respect to how institutions attempt to promote diversity and inclusion. Many popular approaches are demonstrably ineffective or counterproductive. Often they’re illiberal and borderline illegal too. In other cases, there appear to be important tradeoffs between incorporating a wider range of stakeholders versus other goods we care about (such as tenure, in the academic case). But for all that, in most cases and in most regards, contemporary institutions are straightforwardly superior than the status quo ex ante. The “good old days” were less meritocratic, less competitive, less open and transparent and less productive.
Changes Have Been Real, If Limited
As symbolic capitalists have grown in power and influence, we have dramatically reshaped the symbolic landscapes of the institutions and societies we preside over. Many of these changes have been unambiguously positive. Beyond the gains in meritocratic opportunity described above, overt and casual sadism against members of historically marginalized and disadvantaged groups is less common and less tolerated. There is increased awareness of the potential for unjust bias and discrimination even when people do not harbor ill will against members of minority populations. There is greater representation of nonwhites, women, LGBTQ people, and people with mental illnesses and physical disabilities in virtually all cultural domains. There is greater recognition and accommodation of the unique challenges faced by members of these populations. As the work of Michele Lamont has powerfully illustrated, these changes matter. They have been transformational for how beneficiaries understand themselves and the ways they experience the institutions and societies they are embedded in. Myself included.
At the time my father was growing up, segregation was still in place. All the way until 1973, 19 states had officially segregated higher education systems. “Miscegenation” (interracial unions, which I am a product of) was illegal throughout my father’s childhood. The idea that someone like me could attend a PhD program at an Ivy League school, sell a book in a competitive auction between prestige university presses before I even graduated, become a fixture of prestige media outlets, and a professor at a top research university – all while enjoying ethnically diverse collegial, friendship and romantic networks -- this was not even in the realm of plausible aspiration for young black men of my father’s time. My own children, however, take it for granted that opportunities like these could be within their grasp (should they choose to pursue them). This is no small thing.
It hasn’t all been good news, though. Lamont’s work has also highlighted that, even as identity-based stigma and discrimination have steeply declined in recent decades, socioeconomic inequalities and segregation have increased just as dramatically. And as formal barriers preventing people from flourishing have been dismantled, there is a growing sense that those who are unsuccessful deserve their lot. There is diminished solidarity across lines of difference, and a reduced willingness to make redistributive investments that serve others instead of oneself or the groups that one personally identifies with.
Something similar holds for “corporate wokeness.” As legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw emphasized back in 2020, “every corporation worth its salt is saying something about structural racism and anti-blackness, and that stuff is even outdistancing what candidates in the Democratic Party were actually saying.” It hasn’t been just words or high-profile donations to organizations like Black Lives Matter. Multinational corporations have also leveraged their political clout to defy and overturn laws perceived to disadvantage immigrants and racial and sexual minorities. Elite universities aggressively fought to preserve affirmative action. And so on and so forth.
This needn’t be reduced to genuine altruism or mere cynical gesturing—as we have seen, it is in the perceived material interests of many symbolic-economy institutions to become more diverse and inclusive and to resist external impediments to their ambitions in this regard. These bids are intimately bound up with institutional goals to recruit and retain the best talent in a highly competitive environment.
In the words of Jamie Dimon, current CEO of JPMorgan Chase and former chairman of the influential corporate lobbying group Business Roundtable, “I’m not woke. And I think people are mistaking the stakeholder capitalism thing for being woke... What we give a shit about is serving customers, earning their respect, earning their repeat business… Any senator or congressman who says that’s woke, they’re not thinking clearly because I want to win in the marketplace. I want the best employees, I want happy employees.” The point, in a nutshell, is not to change the world. It’s to make more money.
Of course, this approach to ameliorating social problems is also highly constrained, with commitments extending only insofar as they actually do enhance the “bottom line.” Interventions are designed to minimize costs and risks, and to maximize profits and opportunities, for those taking part in “benevolent” acts—often at the expense of the people and causes being championed. Meanwhile, approaches to “social justice” projected to significantly disrupt operations, threaten the business model, or undermine profitability are generally avoided or actively resisted—even if they would likely be far more effective at “moving the meter” on various social problems. Consequently, the marriage of identitarianism and capitalism has had a range of somewhat contradictory effects on U.S. society and culture.
As Enzo Rossi and Olufemi Taiwo highlighted, on one side of the ledger, most barriers that formally excluded women and minorities from elite spaces have been dismantled over the last half century. This represents a real and significant change to the prevailing order. However, they argue, while it is important to recognize this progress, it is also critical to acknowledge its benefits as quite limited—extending mostly to a small cadre of minority elites. These measures have helped elites from historically marginalized and disadvantaged groups preserve or enhance their elite social position, but they have not greatly expanded the share of minorities who can climb up the ladder (let alone reducing or altogether dismantling the hierarchies implied by the “ladder” metaphor).
Likewise, most of the benefits from the symbolic shifts highlighted by Lamont have accrued to a fairly narrow band of elites who also happen to identify with historically marginalized and disadvantaged groups. The most vulnerable, desperate, and impoverished in society have not been able to profit nearly as much. In many respects, their lives have been growing worse – including in the symbolic realm.
But here, we can walk and chew gum at the same time. We can recognize the highly limited nature of “progress” under symbolic capitalists, while also acknowledging that some real progress has been made.
As a prime example, let’s revisit the facts I highlighted at the outset, about how the middle class is shrinking while socioeconomic inequalities are growing. Part of this story is that growing numbers of middle class Americans are slipping into poverty. However, at the same time, an even larger share of Americans has been moving from the middle class into affluence. Too many elites, to be clear, can cause its own problems. But it’s important to bear both trajectories in mind when people talk about the shrinking middle class.
And even as many Americans are earning more than they used to, most physical goods are much cheaper than they were in the past -- and for those goods that are not lower in price, average incomes generally rose faster than costs. There are important exceptions to this rule, such as medical care, childcare and college (which have gotten more expensive). The housing market, at present, is also quite tight (which is great for homeowners but terrible for first-time buyers). But it’s nonetheless the case that, all things considered, many (albeit far from all) Americans are enjoying more prosperity than ever. Symbolic capitalists may be among the primary “winners” in these shifts, but they’re not the exclusive beneficiaries.
In fact, zooming out to the macro level, global inequality is at the lowest level in 150 years. And within the United States, socioeconomic inequality seems like it may be going down too – although the U.S. trend seems to be driven more by declines in higher income brackets rather than gains among lower and middle income earners (“Leveling down” is not the ideal path to equality, but it’s perhaps the most frequent manner that inequalities get reduced in practice).
All to say, there are some very real problems in the symbolic economy. However, there is also much to celebrate. Something similar holds in the realm of ideas.
Babies and Bathwater
Many views associated with “wokeness” seem to significantly diminish adherents’ psychological well-being – pushing them towards higher levels of anxiety, depression and cynicism than they might otherwise feel. However, this doesn’t mean said views are wrong. The truth is often unpleasant. Engaging in moral action often has costs. We can’t infer much about the “correctness” of views from the impacts they exert on believers.
And despite these risks, people aren’t stupid or crazy to find “woke” ideas compelling. They became popular for a reason. In part, my book demonstrates, some ideas caught on because they were useful in elite power struggles. But most also helped expose and address significant shortcomings in how others were seeking to understand and mitigate social problems at the time. It was precisely because they were analytically powerful and morally compelling that many sought to mobilize them in other arenas.
Theories are, however, fundamentally about ignoring certain data to see other things more clearly. Consequently, any theoretical approach that elucidates some important aspect of society will generally obscure other phenomena. It will handle some things well and explain other things poorly. Moreover, all theories are products of particular times and places, responding to particular needs and circumstances—and any theoretical approach may need to be refined and updated, or even eventually cast aside, as the “problem space” evolves. This is all to say, even powerful theories have their limits. A recognition of these limits does not diminish their power. On the contrary, it can help us deploy these ideas in cases where they are most effective and avoid applying them to cases where they are not particularly useful.
Many views associated with “wokeness” seem to be straightforwardly correct, even if they are often taken to excess. For instance, a key insight of the “discursive turn” in social research is that how concepts are defined, and by whom, reveals a lot about power relations within a society or culture. These definitions are not merely reflections of social dynamics. At scale and over time, they can impose their own independent sociopolitical influence: they can help legitimize or delegitimize individuals, groups, and their actions; they can render some things more easily comprehensible and others less so; they can push certain things outside the realm of polite discussion and introduce new elements into the “language game.” This is a genuine contribution to understanding the world.
That said, today many symbolic capitalists seem to attribute too much power to symbols, rhetoric, and representation. Many assert, in the absence of robust empirical evidence, that small slights can cause enormous harm. Under the auspices of preventing these harms, they argue it is legitimate, even necessary, to aggressively police other people’s words, tone, body language, and so forth. People from nontraditional and underrepresented backgrounds are among the most likely to find themselves silenced and sanctioned in these campaigns, both because they are less likely to possess the cultural capital to say the “correct” things in the “correct” ways at the “correct” time and because their deviance is perceived as especially threatening (because their heterodoxy undermines claims made by dominant elites ostensibly on behalf of historically marginalized and disadvantaged groups).
Overstating the power of language likewise leads symbolic capitalists to conclude that their symbolic gestures toward antiracism, feminism, and so forth mark significant contributions to addressing social problems when, in fact, they change virtually nothing about the allocation of wealth or power in society, and there is not really a plausible account for how they could. Campaigns to sterilize language, for instance, will never lift anyone out of poverty. Referring to homeless people as “unsheltered individuals,” or prisoners as “justice-involved persons,” or poor people as “individuals of limited means,” and so on are discursive maneuvers that often obscure the brutal realities that others must confront in their day-to-day lives. If the intent of these language shifts is to avoid stigma, the reality is that these populations are still heavily stigmatized despite shifting discourse.
In fact, the Americans who are most preoccupied with linguistic hygiene actively avoid personally interacting with the poor, convicted criminals, drug addicts, and others through strategies ranging from personal network choices to where they choose to live (and send their kids to school); their reduced use of public transportation; the zoning restrictions they typically support; their heightened use of police, personal security, and surveillance services against folks who violate their aesthetic sensibilities or behavioral preferences; and beyond. More broadly, gentrifying the discourse about the “wretched of the earth” doesn’t make their problems go away. If anything, it renders elites more complacent when we talk about the plight of “those people.” On this the empirical research is quite clear: euphemisms render people more comfortable with immoral behaviors and unjust states of affairs. This is one of the main reasons we rely on euphemisms at all.
Critically, however, pointing out unfortunate consequences of symbolic capitalists’ approach to language and social justice does not invalidate the idea that language matters. In fact, it powerfully illustrates that how we choose to talk and think about society, alongside the ways we try to influence others’ thoughts and discourse, actually can have important social consequences—for better and for worse.
The core idea behind intersectionality likewise seems both important and fairly uncontroversial: there are emergent effects, interaction effects, that are greater than, or different from, the effects of two phenomena studied independently. Indeed, Kimberlé Crenshaw’s 1989 landmark legal paper, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” paralleled a movement that had been advanced by statisticians since the mid-1970s—namely, to think in more sophisticated ways about how various “independent” variables interact with one another, and how that might systematically change the effects of these factors on some dependent variable. These effects are very easy to observe in the world. Let’s just stick with Crenshaw’s pioneering example of the intersection between gender and race:
Black men are far more likely to be victims of homicide or to be incarcerated than Black women or whites across gender. Black women are at near parity with white women with respect to many socioeconomic indicators, yet stark divides remain between Black and white men. Black men lag far behind Black women or whites across genders in terms of educational attainment and intergenerational social mobility. And yet, Black men tend to have higher median earnings than Black women.
This is all fundamentally consistent with the idea of intersectionality: the interaction of gender and race produces results not derivable from looking at either factor independently. However, and this is critical, the interaction effects of race and gender cannot be determined a priori because they do not trend in the same direction across all dependent variables. In many important respects Black women are significantly better off than Black men. In other respects, the opposite is true. In general, however, Black women and Black men tend to have very different life experiences, challenges, and prospects—both as compared with one another and as compared with white men and women. The only version of intersectionality that would be refuted by the foregoing examples would be analyses that run something like this:
With respect to a given outcome,
women < men
Black < white
∴ Black woman < Black man.
That kind of thinking would tend to do a bad job predicting or explaining most social phenomena—as would any approach wherein people simply tally up their different forms of perceived intersectional disadvantage as though they can be simply stacked on top of one another (e.g., “As a Latinx, bisexual, neurodivergent woman my perspective is more valid, and my needs more important, than yours—a white, cisgender, gay, neurotypical man”). Indeed, as We Have Never Been Woke details at length, those who make the most strident claims of intersectional disadvantage tend to be socioeconomic and cultural elites (it is almost exclusively symbolic capitalists who engage in this kind of discourse)—and claimants’ class position is virtually never part of their intersectional calculations. However, the fact that many engage in these kinds of self-serving and facile analyses does not mean intersectionality itself is wrong or should be discarded. The essential elements of the concept seem straightforwardly true and useful for social analysis.
In a similar vein, appeals to “systemic” or “institutionalized” racism or sexism are often used to mystify social processes rather than illuminate them. However, the core intuition behind systemic disadvantage seems straightforwardly correct: historical inequalities, paired with the ways systems and institutions are arranged in the present, can lead to situations where certain people face significant disadvantages while others are strongly advantaged. As a product of historical contingencies, these advantages and disadvantages can systematically track along the lines of race or gender or other identity dimensions—producing a situation where people from historically marginalized and disadvantaged groups can have a difficult time flourishing relative to people from more historically advantaged groups—even in the absence of formal discrimination or bigotry. A recognition of this fact can help, for instance, illustrate some of the core limitations of the “level playing field” approach to addressing inequality:
Some kids grow up in stable two-parent homes, in safe communities with good schools, and with parents who have the money, skills, connections, and bandwidth to help them develop and leverage their human capital (for instance, by supporting cultural enrichment activities and extracurriculars, or through additional investments in health and nutrition). They are thereby well positioned to flourish on “meritocratic” grounds. Most others lack these advantages. Some grow up in homes and communities that actively undermine their capacity to develop knowledge, skills, and experience that are valued in the symbolic economy. As a function of how events have played out in the United States up to now, there is a heavy skew along certain demographic lines with respect to who possesses these advantages and who does not. Consequently, although various natural capabilities and personality traits may be evenly distributed across groups, existing inequalities between groups would nonetheless tend to reproduce themselves—even in competitions that were rendered genuinely open and procedurally fair, and even in the absence of identity-based apprehension or animus. These are important insights that can flow from studying inequalities in systemic and institutional (rather than individualistic) terms.
Meanwhile, critical race theory, postcolonial theory, feminist standpoint epistemology, and queer theory have been extremely valuable in demonstrating ways positionality matters to knowledge production and highlighting the political dimensions of knowledge production. That said, it’s absolutely the case that advocates of these frameworks often fail to take their own starting premises to their logical conclusions. Taking positionality seriously should lead folks to interrogate the extent to which their own ostensibly emancipatory politics (and especially the homogeneity of these convictions within a field) may undermine their ability to understand certain phenomena, lead them to ignore key perspectives and inconvenient facts in the pursuit of their preferred narratives and policies, and drive them to pursue courses of action that do not, in fact, empower or serve the people they are supposed to be empowering or serving, nor reflect others’ own values and perceived interests.
Indeed, taking these ideas to their logical endpoint should lead more people aligned with the Left to question the extent to which their own “emancipatory politics” may, in fact, be a product of their own elite position, and may primarily serve elite ends rather than uplifting the genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged. The fact so many instead use these frameworks in nonreflexive ways—to reinforce their own sense of moral and intellectual superiority or confirm their prejudices about “those people” who do not profess, believe, or feel the “correct” things— this neither entails nor implies that said modes of analysis cannot be put to more productive use.
Finally, elites of color (and the white elites who look to them as spokespeople for the groups they ostensibly “represent”) often fail to recognize or account for the reality that they likely vary in systematic ways from most others in the groups they identify with, and this may undermine their ability to effectively channel the preferences, priorities, and perceived interests of most others in the groups they identify with and purportedly represent—let alone capturing the rich diversity of life experiences, and perspectives on shared experiences, within these populations. That is, when elites wonder what, say, African Americans think about an issue, their first instinct is not to go and talk to a bunch of ordinary Black folk, nor to conduct a large-sample and representative study to solicit the views of African Americans in the community or nationwide. Instead, they turn to “consecrated” Black intellectuals to see what they have to say, as though the opinions of Black New York Times columnists tells us anything at all about how most other Black people think or feel. In practice, by turning to these consecrated representatives, elites are seeking out confirmatory narratives under the guise of searching for truth. They’re getting told what they want to hear by people whose livelihood is contingent on telling audiences what they want to hear.
Pointing this out, however, does not invalidate the idea of “epistemic deference.” In fact, it makes a more rigorous point that it is not enough to have elites of all genders, races, creeds, and sexualities sitting around the table. It is also absolutely critical to find ways of folding in the perspectives of nonelites—including and especially when they are inconvenient for our preferred narratives and policies. History in the United States and abroad is replete with examples of grievous harm caused by well-intentioned technocrats and ideologues who failed to sufficiently consult and collaborate with the populations whose interests they were ostensibly seeking to advance. This should be at the forefront of symbolic capitalists’ minds as they are seeking to understand and address social problems—at least, insofar as they are primarily concerned with helping the marginalized and disadvantaged (instead of themselves).
Put simply, there is a ton to criticize about “woke” ideology and how it is instrumentalized by symbolic capitalists. But there’s also a lot that can be learned from engaging deeply and charitably with these modes of thought.
Looking Ahead
One thing I came to realize in researching and writing my first book – an insight that will form the basis of my next project – is that the primary divide in the U.S. today is between symbolic capitalists and those who feel alienated from our social order. The rise of Trump, the “crisis of expertise,” contemporary tensions around “identity” issues – these are all fronts in the same basic socioeconomic and cultural conflict.
Within the political sphere, the “diploma divide,” the “gender divide,” and the “urban / rural divide” are likewise proxies for the same core struggle, being waged between mainstream symbolic capitalists and people who feel sociologically distant from folks like “us.”
We Have Never Been Woke, for its part, is not a story about “good guys” and “bad guys.” It is not intended to promote some kind of clear social or political program. It does not conclude with a set of action steps or policy proposals. Rather than providing people with clean answers, its goal is to complicate readers’ picture of the social world and unsettle things that are taken for granted. What to do about the problems and dynamics the book highlights . . . that is something we’re going to have to figure out together.