Roundup: reviews of Musa al-Gharbi’s ‘We Have Never Been Woke’

Few terms over the past few years have been thrown around in as confusing and contradictory fashion as “woke”–except maybe “Christian Nationalist.” At times, these have been reduced to simply words one uses when looking for something to accuse someone one doesn’t like–an extreme case in point is Meg Basham’s recent book, which accused of wokeness every conceivable evangelical institution and leader. Needless to say, by the time someone accuses Tim Keller and The Gospel Coalition of wokeness, rolling your eyes in response is a perfectly acceptable reaction.

But such overuse of the term only makes Musa al-Gharbi’s recent book, We Have Never Been Woke, particularly timely. We may yet run a review of it at Current, but for the moment, here is a roundup of representative coverage elsewhere.

1. Aaron Weinacht’s review in Front Porch Republic. A taste:

By the end of the book, it is hard to think of a faux-sacred cow al-Gharbi has failed to expose as appealing to self-interest. Feminism, environmentalism, LGBTQ matters, diversity departments in corporations: the list goes on. In each case al-Gharbi concludes that there are compelling practical reasons for our elites to publicly support these causes with words and equally compelling reasons not to support them with deeds, as in his trenchant observation that identifying as something other than heterosexual

"do[es] work for the growing numbers of elites who identify as queer, bisexual, or nonbinary but who partner overwhelmingly or even exclusively with people of the opposite biological sex....The share of Americans under thirty who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or queer is now nearly twice the share of Americans who report having actually engaged in nonstraight sexual encounters—and the gap has continued to grow....The growing divergence between sexual orientations and behaviors seems to be particularly pronounced among highly educated and left-identifying young women." (233)

For a Columbia University sociologist, this strikes me as something like throwing down the gauntlet.

2. Carrie McKean’s review in Christianity Today. A taste:

For anyone genuinely curious about why working-class, culturally conservative Americans, many of them evangelical Christians, remain so loyal to Trump, We Have Never Been Woke is required reading. 

In a book that’s both granular in its detail and panoramic in its perspective, al-Gharbi builds a tightly argued case for how the “Great Awokening” is neither particularly novel nor particularly helpful to the marginalized and disenfranchised of American society. Drawing on both his working-class background and the experiences and expertise afforded by his access to some of the most hallowed halls of American academia, al-Gharbi understands that we can’t reduce the current political moment to a battle of blue heroes and red villains.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t offer a road map out of our political predicament. Yet for Christian readers, Never Been Woke’s conclusions suggest the church is uniquely positioned to help repair our divided society—if we can return to our first love (Rev. 2:4) and the love Jesus commands of us (Matt. 22:34–40).

3. Jesse Smith’s review in Law & Liberty. A taste:

The phenomenon colloquially known as “wokeness” has been subject to a number of analyses in recent years. For the most part, these focus on the development of woke ideas and how they have gained social influence. Some accounts point to left-modern liberalism, others emphasize postmodernism or critical theory. Some see the spread of wokeness as a grassroots phenomenon facilitated by social media, while others highlight the role played by public intellectuals, legal institutions, or major corporations. While these interpretations vary in important ways, they typically share an assumption that the defining feature of wokeness is its ideas, which commentators tend to view as both radical and pernicious.

In his new book from Princeton University Press, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, sociologist Musa al-Gharbi challenges this notion, arguing that wokeness is ultimately a manifestation of a particular set of social conditions. What is important about woke ideas (an inchoate blend of identity politics, therapeutic sensibility, fixation on unconscious bias, obsession with group disparities, and a “somewhat mystical” understanding of identity, espoused in a moralistic and quasi-religious manner) is not their content, but rather who uses them and how. Wokeness is not a problem of pernicious ideas taking root, but rather one of elite overproduction.

4. Darel E. Paul’s review in Public Discourse. A taste:

We Have Never Been Woke is a work of, by, and for the American professional class. According to its author, Musa al-Gharbi, this is a social class defined by its manipulations of symbols and its distinctive symbolic culture. 

During the Great Awokening of 2011 to the present, America’s elite seemed to descend into wanton self-flagellation. Millions purchased copies of books telling them that they were racists. Employers across the country shuffled their employees into training sessions to work on their “bias” and “privilege.” Activists sought to transform their workplaces, institutions, even all of society through a project for equality. Yet in al-Gharbi’s view, the Great Awokening was not an equality project at all, but instead, a project to empower and legitimate the professional class itself. Per the book’s title, that class—“we”—have never been woke.

5. Oliver Traldi’s review in City Journal. A taste:

What is a theory? In philosophy, we usually think of it as a set of propositions. These propositions might be challenged directly, or they might turn out to generate empirical predictions or logical consequences that could be challenged instead. But we can also think of theories as things that live in people’s minds—ideas that shape our vocabularies, our maps of the world, our attunements to perceptions, our instincts about what jumps out as important in our environments. Thinking this way, a theory’s measure is its number of adherents. What ought to be evaluated is how they think when gripped by the theory, not what the theory’s abstract implications might be.

Theories of politics in particular seem apt for this sort of evaluation. Some political philosophies do not specifically entail that horrible things ought to be done. But if such a theory’s adherents always seem to do horrible things once they get power, that should count against the theory.

Musa al-Gharbi’s book We Have Never Been Woke presents an account of the character and causes of woke politics. It fills a gap in this regard: al-Gharbi, primarily a sociologist, gives a different kind of perspective than, say, Yascha Mounk’s relatively centrist history of wokeness as rooted in radical academic ideas or Richard Hanania’s relatively right-wing history of wokeness as rooted in activist jurisprudence and the administrative state. But at a further remove, We Have Never Been Woke is a story of how theories—both the woke theories criticized and the more classically leftist theories used to criticize them—simultaneously open our eyes to some things while blinding us to others.

6. Finally, an interview about the book between Yascha Mounk and Musa al-Gharbi.