Should consecrated minority voices produce content that is genuinely challenging or threatening for mainstream symbolic capitalists–something that is actually unpleasant for them to engage with, something that powerfully calls into question rather than affirming their preferred values and narratives, something that threatens their interests–the offending intellectuals and creatives will often find themselves suddenly facing harsh criticism from the people who used to praise them and, sooner rather than later, widespread neglect from mainstream symbolic capitalists. Frustrated elites generally respond to unacceptable deviance not by rethinking their own positions but by consecrating and subsequently deferring to someone else instead–someone perceived to be more congenial to producing the kind of narratives they want to hear. And there is always some ambitious “diverse” person waiting in the wings to do just that.
These realities are not lost on consecrated cultural elites. It is precisely this implicit threat that led celebrated novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to rail against those “who claim to love literature–the messy stories of our humanity–but are also monomaniacally obsessed with whatever is the prevailing ideological orthodoxy…who ask you to ‘educate’ yourself…while not being able to intelligently defend their own ideological positions, because by ‘educate,’ they actually mean ‘parrot what I say, flatten all nuance, wish away complexity.’ People who do not recognize that what they call a sophisticated take is really a simplistic mix of abstraction and orthodoxy–sophistication in this case being a showing-off of how au fait they are on the current version of ideological orthodoxy…What matters is not goodness but the appearance of goodness.”
Musa Al Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke, 265-66.