Mick Hartley

From Kenan Malik in the Observer:

When Musa al-Gharbi first arrived in New York in 2016, what he most noticed was the operation of a “racialized caste system” under which “disposable servants… will clean your house, watch your kids, walk your dogs, deliver prepared meals to you”.

The “disposable servants”, who earned “peanuts for their work”, were inevitably mainly black or Hispanic, the ones being served, almost exclusively white. No one remarked upon this; it was taken to be “the way normal society operates”.

Al-Gharbi was not describing the uber-rich Upper East Side or the billionaires’ hangout of Scarsdale. He was a freshman at Columbia University. Those profiting from the “racial caste system” were fellow students, many of them vocal about social justice, but largely indifferent to the needs of those at the bottom of the social hierarchy on whose labour their lives rested.

Four years later, many of these same students joined Black Lives Matter protests. Al-Gharbi watched as they demonstrated on Broadway in New York’s Upper West Side, oblivious to the “homeless Black men who didn’t even have shoes” sharing the same space. The protesters “were crowding the benches that homeless people were using”, insisting that “Black Lives Matter”, but apparently not “the Black guys right in front of them”.

This constant disparity between the professed beliefs of liberal students agitating for social justice and actions that revealed an indifference to the material injustice surrounding them led Al-Gharbi to write a book to try to make sense of it. We Have Never Been Woke has just been published in America and will soon be out in Britain. If you want to understand what just happened in the US election, it is one of the more useful starting points. For the story of the election can be viewed from one perspective as that of the division between those who can see the disparity that so struck Al-Gharbi and those who can’t or won’t.

Given that the Columbia activists were ignoring the tangible injustice all around them, why did they adopt the language of social justice? Or, to put it another way, what role does that language play in a world in which real injustice and inequality are ignored? Those were the questions that bugged Al-Gharbi as a student and lie at the heart of his book.

His answer is that the language of social justice – “wokeness” if you will – is not about social justice at all but acts rather as an ideological glue binding together a section of the elite that want to keep climbing the ladder of privilege but don’t want to see themselves as part of the elite….

The key to understanding wokeness, Al-Gharbi insists, is the struggles of “symbolic capitalists” – “professionals who traffic in symbols and rhetoric, images and narratives, data and analysis, ideas and abstraction”. In other words, writers and academics, artists and lawyers, museum curators and tech professionals. It is a social stratum that attempts to entrench itself within the elite, elbowing out others already there, by using the language of social justice to gain status and accrue “cultural capital”. Theirs is a struggle within the elite presented as a struggle against the elite on behalf of the poor and the dispossessed.

This is not simply cynicism or hypocrisy, Al-Gharbi argues. Symbolic capitalists have constructed myths about their social roles that allow them genuinely to believe in fairness and equity while entrenching inequality and injustice, myths that have been accepted by many social institutions and power-brokers. The consequence is that the language of social justice has helped “legitimize and obscure inequalities”, allowing sections of the elite to “reinforce their elite status… often at the expense of those who are genuinely vulnerable, marginalized and disadvantaged”.

Out here on the 19th.