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- [00:01]
A
Thank you so much for being a loyal listener to the Good Fight. The podcast has expanded significantly over the course of the last few years. We have millions of downloads a year at this point and it is all thanks to you. But our hard working team that edits these conversations and prepares the transcripts for them needs a little bit of a holiday. So for these two weeks we are rerunning some of the conversations from the last months and years of which we are most proud that we think you might enjoy listening to again. We will be back at the beginning of September with two weekly conversations about big ideas and a regular, perhaps weekly new format of A Good Fight Club in which I invite some of my favorite thinkers and podcast guests to discuss the political events of the past week. I hope you two are enjoying the rest of the summer and I very much look forward to welcoming you back at the beginning of September with our new content. In the meanwhile, if you want to support the podcast, please consider going to yashamunk.substack.com and becoming a paying subscriber.
- [01:39]
B
A lot of times what people do if they want to know what say LGBTQ people or Hispanic people or whoever think about a given topic is they won't try try to look for nationally representative survey data or they won't go out in the street and kind of talk to normies about. Instead, what they'll do is they look for some kind of concentrated elite spokesperson like Hannah Nicole Jones or Ta Nehisi Coates or someone like that. And again, the problem with that move is that those spokespeople are often not necessarily represented how most other people in that population think.
- [02:10]
A
And now the Good Fight with Yasha Monk. My guest today is Musa Al Ghabi. He is the author of we have Never Been the Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, which is out in October with Princeton University Press, and he is a professor of Sociology and Media Studies at Stony Brook University in New York. We talked about how to make sense of what we mean by woke, about the contradictions of an elite class that competes for social status by claims of how woke they are while ignoring the extent to which they themselves profit from the injustices in American society. And we talked about how it is that we can respond to the asymmetrical multiculturalism of this moment in a more productive way. How to recognize the genuine interests that different people have without encouraging a zero sum conflict between different groups. We also had a really interesting conversation. One of the areas on which we perhaps had more areas of disagreement about the nature of antisemitism in the United States today, and whether you should be more concerned about antisemitism on the campus of Columbia University or or in nearby Harlem. If you want to have access to that really interesting part of our talk, please go to yashamonk.substack.com and become a paying subscriber. That's yashamonk.substack dot com and that's also going to give you access to all bonus content to a monthly mailbag episode, and all of that without having to listen to annoying ads. Musa Gabi, welcome to the podcast.
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B
It's great to be here. Thank you for having me.
- [04:23]
A
So your book is called we have Never Been Woke, and that raises two obvious questions. The first is one that we've discussed in this podcast before that I'm sure my listeners have thought about, which is what is the meaning of a word woke? But I know that every person writing this topic has a slightly different understanding, a slightly different take on a how we should think about what this movement or ideology is. So I'd love to hear what you think about that to start off with.
- [04:46]
B
Sure. So in the book, as you said, people have all sorts of different definitions or they seem to be talking about different things. And sometimes people seem to be talking past each other when they evoke that term. For my part in the book, what I do in the intro is, rather than trying to just pick, create simply another definition that's also going to be unsatisfactory in some ways and things like this. Instead of doing that, I try to walk readers through both the history of the term woke in the discourse and some of the different things that people seem to be meaning when they evoke the term. And I highlight at one point in the intro a set of beliefs and dispositions that people across the spectrum do seem to kind of loosely agree on when they evoke the term woke up. Take, for instance, the idea of trans inclusive feminism. Probably most, most people on the left or the right would agree that someone who was not trans inclusive or who was not a feminist would not be woke. In the intro of the book, I try to lay out a few cases like that where people seem to have agreement kind of across the spectrum when they're trying to evoke that term of what they mean. But it is a highly contested term. And so through most of the book, whenever I use the term woke, I usually put it in quotation marks just to signal that it's a highly contested term. So yeah, you're absolutely right. And maybe to the frustration of Some readers, I don't provide a nice clean definition. In fact, what I try to do is again, highlight just how much disagreement and uncertainty there is about the meaning of that term. And I just let the book live with that uncertainty.
- [06:26]
A
Yeah. So I'm trying to think about that as a strategy. I certainly agree that the term woke is used so loosely that many of its applications are unhelpful or thoroughly misleading. Right. I mean, if you go on Twitter, or even if you read some parts of the conservative press, or for that matter the liberal press, people will call certain things woke that don't seem to be particularly novel, that don't seem to be particularly radical. And there's this overinflation of that term. Of course, that's true of many other contested political terms or ideologies as well. Right. So both the things that people have called socialist, particularly in the United States, go from genuinely wanting the proletariat to have control over the means of production to giving people two weeks of maternity leave after they birth a child. Right. And of course, what people themselves mean by socialism radically differs as well. There's revolutionary socialist parties that want to bring down bourgeois democracy, put the avant garde of the proletariat in charge, and there's the French Socialist Party, which is a kind of center left political party roughly, very roughly equivalent to the Democrats. But it still seems to me like it's useful to get at the core of what we might mean by socialism, and perhaps we'll mean something different by it in slightly different contexts. When we talk about the Socialist Party of France, we mean something different than when we talk about 19th century socialists. But. But there seem to me to be some core to the ideology that is helpful to excavate. And so I just wonder if people start using the term woke for something completely different next year, that's worth taking note of. But isn't there a set of ideas that is genuinely novel here? Isn't it worth grappling with that ideology on substantive terms beyond just chronicling who uses the term when, in which context?
- [08:22]
B
Okay, so my intuition's pulled in a couple directions here. So one of the things that I was trying to. That anyone who writes on these topics has to deal with is there is this move that people make where they say, basically, if you can't provide some kind of crisp analytic definition of the term that is like uncontestable and holds across context and whatever, then you don't even know what you're talking about. You can't even define the term. This is a Common move on all sides. Like right now on the right, for instance, they're like, oh, you. On the left, you can't even define, define what woman means. And then on the left they're like, well, you can't even, you're criticizing wokeness, you can't even provide it. But as I talk about in the book, Ludwig Wittgenstein actually kind of, to my mind, provided a pretty devastating response to that kind of rhetorical move in Philosophical Investigations and a lot of his other work where he highlights like a lot of terms that we use all the time are actually really tough to actually to define in kind of this crisp analytic way. If you try to have people explain to you what red is, define red. Define red such that someone who was born blind or who has absolutely no conception of red would be able to go pick it out in the world using only analytic definitions, never pointing to anything and saying that's red. Right. That's actually tough. It's tougher than people think. I do this in my class to highlight and a lot of the students blows their mind how hard it is to define even simple words. And then when you talk about more highly contested words, as analytic philosophers of demonstrated now for centuries, a lot of the words that are some of the most important words to us, things like love or justice or truth, we actually don't have kind of a universal understanding for. But that doesn't mean when I say I love my wife or I love my son that I don't know what I'm talking about. Well, maybe Socrates would disagree, but, but I disagree with Socrates there. And so I think, you know, it is worth, maybe there is something useful about that enterprise. So for instance, I don't think we should just burn down analytic philosophy, which spends a lot of time trying to wrestle with what does love mean, what does truth mean? And in the same way you could wrestle with like what does woke mean? I, I think there's some value to that enterprise, but it's kind of orthogonal to the project of this book.
- [10:34]
A
So that's fair. Right? But it seems to me like you're sort of dodging the question of what woke us in a way that goes a little bit beyond the way that we might dodge the question of what love is. So I take the analytical point, but it's very hard to give a clear two sentence analytical definition of love that everybody will recognize and that is going to be uncontrovers and that's going to hold across cultural contacts and so on and so forth. But if you wrote A book about love, you would sort of say some things about what love often entails. And, you know, one idea of Wittgenstein says that one way of doing that is through a set of family resemblances, right? So there may not be the sort of one characteristic of a concept that always holds, but there's sort of seven or eight characteristics. And by and large, people have five or six of those characteristics that fall into that class. That might not give you the one definition that everybody is going to recognize, but it gives you a very clear set of substantial characteristics that you can use as a checklist. And if something fulfills a lot of them, then it seems to qualify. And if it doesn't fulfill very many of them at all, then it doesn't really seem to qualify. So I try to do that in my book in two ways. One is to save it as a set of themes that are sort of rooted in the intellectual history of this new ideology that many people who are woke rhyme with in various ways, right? So it's a skepticism towards universal truth. It is a use of discourse and analysis as a kind of political tool. It is the idea of strategic essentialism that even though we should be skeptical in theory of certain kind of group identity categories, actually for strategic purposes, they're really useful. We should not just embrace them, but encourage them. It's a deep skepticism about the idea that our society has made progress on key injustices, particularly as they relate to various groups. And then it's the idea of rejecting universal solutions, of saying that actually, a lot of the time the solution is going to be in treating members of different groups differently on the basis of the membership. And finally, it's some idea of intersectionality, which is often interpreted to mean that there's genuine sort of barriers to how I can understand you, you can understand me, if we're from different identity groups. Now, not every woke person qualifies for every one of these. But it does seem to me that a lot of woke discourse draws on a lot of these themes, that somebody, a thinker, a writer, a political activist, who we'd consider to be woke, would perhaps not check every single one of these boxes, but they check a whole bunch of them. Do you think that's the wrong approach? Or how would you give substance to the set of things we're talking about? By the way, in my book, I also then try to distill a definition that goes a little bit more. That perhaps is closer to saying, here are some of the axioms there, too. I don't think that Every thinker is going to subscribe to every single one of them. But that helps, I think, readers to sort of have a sense of, okay, what are we actually talking about here? Do you think that's the wrong approach? Or what would you say are the themes? Is this roughly the right list of themes? Is it the wrong list of themes?
- [13:31]
B
Well, I think one thing that's interesting, looking at kind of intellectual trends, one, is that a lot of the kind of postmodern assumptions and modes of discourse and engagement and things like this are increasingly being picked up by people on the right. So Matt McManus, the political scientist, social theorist Matt McManus has a great book on this called Postmodern Conservatism. And I talk about this briefly in the book how a lot of contemporary right wing intellectuals are actually really engaging a lot with people like Foucault and stuff like this right now. And Tyler Austin Harper has a new article in the Atlantic called something like the Woke Style of American Politics that highlights how a lot of people on the right are increasingly really leaning into this kind of victimhood, grievance kind of narratives and even some of the ideas about how there are no universal solutions and how, you know, one size fits all approach to governing and politics. This is a strain of thought that actually can be traced to Edmund Burke and others on the right as well. And so, but this kind of like thing that I just did is like inevitable. You know, there's no way around, around that. And so what I do, what I do in the book is I do something a little similar to what, to what you just described. So again, I tried to list at least a few things to give a sense of what people seem to be talking about when they talk about wokeness. So I include the example of trans inclusive feminism. I include the example of people believing that we all carry inside of us these kind of deep seated biases towards other people that we can never truly cleanse ourselves of, but we have to do the work anyway. This kind of mystical approach to identity where a lot of things are socially constructed but are also not permitted to be changed. So race isn't real. But if a white person carries themselves as a black person, that's improper. If a black person tries to pass off as white, that's improper, and so on and so forth. A mysticism related to identity. And highlighting that mysticism is not intended as a critique. I'm a Muslim. I have lots of mystical beliefs about free will and predetermination, for instance, but so it's just A description rather than a critique. But I do in the intro walk through a few of these kinds of things just to that I think there seems to be broad agreement of kind of across the spectrum that. And one of the things that I highlight in the book is that the, the constellation of dispositions, beliefs, etc, whatever that we collectively refer to as woke today went by other names in the past. So before it was woke, it was politically correct. And as I, as I show in the intro, a lot of the same kind of battle lines, a lot of the same characterizations about politically correct people, PC people and things like this was kind of the rage in the late 80s to early 90s. And there were other terms before that. And in fact a lot of other phenomena that we talk about today, like cancel culture and cancellation was called trashing back in the 60s and 70s, but it was very similar phenomena carried out in very similar ways and things like this. And so that's another thing that I try to flag in the book is that this set of things that we're mapping out when people talk about wokeness is actually a lot older than people think. It's not something that just started in the 2010s. A lot of these ideas, like for instance, asymmetrical multiculturalism, which is the term coined by Eric Hoffman, which is an idea that it's good and appropriate to celebrate non whites and that non whites are, should organize according to their race and ethnicity, et cetera. But whites, when they do the same is bad and white. You know, you celebrate non whites, you villainize whites. So that tendency actually goes back to the 1920s. It's a very long standing pattern of behavior and discourse among knowledge economy professionals that becomes more popular during certain periods. And so a lot of these ideas and discourses and mannerisms are kind of in the background a lot. And then there are these moments where they become really salient and really prominent. And. And so that's one of the things I trace out in the book, is that one that a lot of what we're experiencing now, a lot of the things that we're talking about now and fighting over now are actually not as new and novel as many people maybe presume. And I try to spend a lot of time just providing more context.
- [17:54]
A
So perhaps here we come to the heart or the beginnings of an interesting disagreement, because I agree with you that a lot of the things that we're seeing now have genuine roots and precedents. But I don't know, that deflates the novelty of this moment quite as much as you Imply. Right. So let's give two examples. The first is that I think what's called cancellation now, what was called trashing in the past, is an ever present danger in human societies, one that of course, John Stuart Mill recognized as the greatest impediment to genuine freedom in On Liberty, where he emphasizes that for all of the censors that existed at the time, for all of the pressures from the state that existed, what he really worried about was the tyranny of social opinion and the ways in which people can get ostracized and in which when somebody is accused of behavior that is worthy of ostracism, that then puts secondary pressure on anybody else not to associate with them in case you too become morally blemished. That is something you see from villages all across the world when somebody breaks the moral code of that village, to instances like the Cultural Revolution in China, to our contemporary public sphere, the extent and the nature of the punishment differed from situation to situation. Certainly the extent of the punishment in the Cultural Revolution was much more extreme than the extent of punishment over the last 10 years in the United States. But some of the mechanisms are the same, and that, I think, just must be rooted in some set of psychological dispositions that humans have acquired over the course of their evolutionary history. The second point I broadly agree with is that perhaps the United States has had a particular form of moralism that I think is rooted in a secularized Protestant culture. So when Europeans look at the United States, they sort of often think that the inheritance of the Puritans is most visible in the Bible Belt in Missouri or something like that. And I think that's just a misunderstanding that actually the places that continue to be most shaped by the Puritans are the places that in fact have historically been Puritan, like Cambridge, Massachusetts. It's just that the set of views that you are supposed to have has changed completely. But the sort of the threat, the sense that we have a moral community here and that you must agree with the stipulates of the moral community and that if you don't, then you're a threat to our moral purity. And something must be done about that, I think is rooted in that Puritan culture in a way that would be very hard to recognize in Catholic countries like Italy or Spain, for example, where moral purification works in a very, very different kind of way. So that might take the form of political correctness in the 90s. It might take a form of wokeness today. And again, I recognize the historical antecedents. Where I disagree, I think, is that I still think that sort of, there is a genuinely new ideology now that is a competitor from the left to liberalism, which is different from the previous left competitor liberalism, which was communism. And that that really changes the situation that even though this new ideology obviously has roots in our human nature, roots in Puritan culture of the United States, roots in previous left movements, the way in which it has come together is in fact new and poses a new kind of challenge. So would you agree with that claim? Would you disagree with that claim, the latter? Why do you disagree?
- [21:18]
B
One thing that I do talk about in the book is that this period of rapid normative and discursive shift that we've seen after 2010 is actually a case of something. And so I show in the. I argue that there were, over the course of the 20th century, there were three periods, three other periods of similarly dramatic rapid and normative and discursive change shifts among how knowledge economy professionals talk and think about social justice, how they engage in political activism, things like this. One thing that I highlight in that chapter in chapter two is there's a section called Theories of Failure where I talk about how one thing that is different from cycle to cycle is that as each of these cycles kind of starts to wane, people come up with these kind of different theories about why the revolution didn't happen now as. As expected, and kind of how activism and advocacy and things like this should be kind of rethought and reconceived to, to make sure that the next time, you know, that the next time it'll succeed or whatever. And so there are these changes from cycle to cycle that happened. And I, and I kind of trace out, I try to trace out in the book how that plays out. But for all of that, there are a lot of continuities. And I do. I'll just put a quick note that one thing that I talk about in the first part of the, in chapter one of the book, I think there is a kind of deep story about how a lot of what we characterize as wokeness is in a deep sense a heritage of the Puritans. I think there's a really kind of sloppy, borderline bigoted way that people talk about this. Like people who are not religious or anti religious say wokeness is a new religion. Religion is terrible, therefore wokeness is terrible. That kind of a thing. I think that's not super helpful. Or the Puritans were bad. Wokeness is similar to Puritanism, therefore wokeness is bad. Like that's the way that I see this kind of thing deployed a lot. But I think there's a much more interesting way that you can talk about this relationship where I think there is, There is something there. There is something to that. For instance, you can see in some of the data that the people who are most likely to subscribe to the set of beliefs and identity. Identity, character. So people who are most likely to self identify as anti racist or feminist or environmentalist, et cetera, are highly educated white people who live in urban areas. And when you look at the religious affiliations of this block of people who identify with these other beliefs, one thing that you see is that they are the same block of society that has been most aggressively moving away from religion. And according to a lot of studies, it does seem like politics. Political issues are part of the reasons why they're moving away from religion. Perception among many that religion is incompatible with their political leanings. And when they come into conflict, they side with social justice over their faith. And there is evidence that people are increasingly using things like protests as ways of having these kinds of shared communal moments and things like this in a way that they're not getting from things like church anymore. And so I think there is, there is some. There is something like really interesting and important about that point that you made. And I delve into it a little bit in chapter one. But yeah, so I just wanted to nod. I broadly agree with you on that, on that point.
- [24:51]
A
And I think we probably both are on one side of a debate about the religious nature of wokeness, where John McWhorter, who's an amazing writer, friend of persuasions, would be on the other side. He makes the sort of religious analogy most explicitly. And I think that where he's right is both that sociologically this may take the form of substituting for some of the religious beliefs that used to structure a certain stratum of American society that has mostly stopped being religious in that kind of way. That some believers in extreme political ideology have quasi religious characteristics. But the argument that I made in response to John, including on this podcast, was to say that that is also true of Marxists. It's also true of a certain brand of nationalists. There's all kinds of people who fuse with political cause in a way that makes them behave in certain ways similarly to certain kinds of religious believers. But I don't think that that is unique to this particular sort of ideology. If we roughly agree on a broad set of things that we might imply by Wokeness, even if perhaps we have some methodological disagreement about how exactly to define it. But I think probably when we sort of look at 100 Twitter feeds, we would roughly agree on which 20 of them should be considered woke. Right. Why are you saying that we've never been woke? It feels like we are going through this great awokening. You put it borrowing from Met Iglesias. Clearly, some of these ideas have come to have tremendous influence on our social institutions. At the very least, the way in which the American elite expresses itself has come to be deeply inflected with some of these basic ideas. So clearly, the title of your book is a little bit of a provocation, but what is behind the provocation? Why are you saying, but we never have been woke up?
- [26:46]
B
Yeah. So the title of the book is a nod to a different text by Bruno Latour, a sociologist who wrote a book called we have Never Been Modern. And in that book, Latour argues that the stories that we moderns tell ourselves about what sets us apart from other people, about what makes us unique, these narratives that we tell ourselves actually obscure the nature of the modern world and make it difficult for us to address the problems of modernity. And so, in a similar way, I'm arguing in the book that the stories that we knowledge economy producers, symbolic capitalists, the stories that we tell ourselves about how we're advocates and allies for the marginalized and the disadvantaged, how we're on the right side of history, et cetera, these stories that we tell ourselves about why we deserve power and status and those people, those evil people, deserve to be marginalized and excluded and so on and so forth. These stories actually obscure the nature of contemporary inequality. They actually make it harder for us to. To understand who benefits from racialized inequality, from gendered inequality, from socioeconomic inequality, who the winners and the losers are, how these inequalities come about and persist, and what can be done to address them. And so that's one of the nods to the book that generated the title. And in the same way that Bruno Latour tried to argue for a symmetrical anthropology, he called it so we should analyze people in contemporary and modern societies the same way that we analyze people in developing nations, et cetera, I try to model and emphasize and argue for reflexivity, which is a social scientific principle that states that the kinds of theories that we have about the world should also apply to the theorists themselves and to the institutions and environments, communities that the theorist himself participates in. So oftentimes, for instance, when we. When sociologists try to understand social problems, we analyze different groups asymmetrically, so we analyze the behaviors of whites and non whites in completely different ways. We analyze the behaviors of men and women in completely different ways. We analyze the behaviors and relationships in institutions that we like in completely different ways than we analyze the institutions and people that we're more sociologically distant from. So in this book I tried to kind of turn the analytic lens towards us and analyze us using some of the same tools and methods that we would normally use to analyze people who are more sociologically distant from us.
- [29:21]
A
And what does that reveal that we didn't see earlier? How is it that that sort of more self critical regard sort of reveals something about I guess either the nature of a woke or the nature of the anti woke or the nature of American political discourse in 2024 that wouldn't have been obvious without this kind of reflexive lens.
- [29:40]
B
Well, one thing that becomes clear I think over the course of the book is that there's a big tension. And the big tension is that the people who are the most likely to condemn what you might call ideological racism, people thinking or feeling or saying the wrong thing about race or gender or sexuality or something. But the people who are most concerned about ideological forms of prejudice also happen to be the people who benefit the most from what sociologists describe as systemic or institutionalized racism or sexism. When you look at who's actually benefiting from these inequalities, who's benefiting from the fact that non whites or women are paid a lot less than, than people in dominant groups, who benefits from the fact that there are this large groups of desperate and vulnerable people who are kind of exempt from a lot of laws and subject to predation from people who are better off, things like that, who benefits from that? It's us. And I walk through at length how our lifestyles and social positions are actually premised in a deep sense on the exploitation and maintenance of the very inequalities that we conspicuously condemn. And, and so that that's one thing that you see by taking this reflexive turn is that there is this kind of deep tension where the people who are the most concerned about racialized or gendered or other forms of inequality are actually the primary beneficiaries and perpetuators of those same inequalities. And we actually leverage social justice discourse to deflect blame to people who actually benefit a lot less from the system. So for instance, when you look at who are, who are the. So we actually blame a lot of the losers in the knowledge economy, the people who are suffering, who are excluded, who don't have a lot of influence over society. We blame them for the problems that we ourselves are benefiting from and perpetuating. And so that's one of the things that you can see by taking this more reflexive approach. And it's a discomforting finding. I think a lot of people who read the book will be uncomfortable as they research certainly some of those sections that highlight that walk through some of that stuff in great detail. And there are a few other kind of tensions or paradoxes that are kind of revealed by adopting this kind of approach too. And I talk about some of those in the introduction. There's about four of them to walk
- [31:58]
A
us through them because these are interesting. It stands to reason, by the way, that if you're going to self flagellate, you better have something to self flagellate about. And sort of the insight that as you mentioned earlier, actually the people who we might call progressive activists are disproportionately white, disproportionately affluent, disproportionately highly educated is one that has been rightly in discussion for a number of years. And there clearly is something sort of strange about the most privileged people in the United States liking to find either other members of the same elite circles who on some identity dimension are marginally more privileged, and then sort of telling them how privileged they are, or often finding people outside of that circle of privileged people, but who on a purely identity based analysis, somehow have some advantage in telling them that they should be ashamed of the advantages they were born into. I think one of the problems of privileged discourse is a really thoughtful political philosopher like Elizabeth Anderson has recognized in the last years, and we talked about that on the podcast a few months ago, is that structurally the person who is going to be on TV or on stage at a fancy conference telling others how privileged they are is virtually always going to be leading a better life than the person that is receiving that message. It is certainly true in the United States that on average African Americans have less privilege than white people, for example. That doesn't mean that the average African American who has the megaphone to talk about privilege on CNN has a worse life than the average person who, you know, in the living room at 8pm switches on CNN. And that's sort of one of the strange aspects of this system. So what are some of these paradoxes and how do they sort of add to this set of insights?
- [33:40]
B
Well, I'll briefly just note one thing that the book talks about at length is the fact that, so in a lot of elite spaces, you'll look at, say, the pay of professors or doctors or lawyers or something like this. And it is the case that lawyers and doctors and software developers and stuff who are black or Hispanic tend to earn less than whites and Asians. So you do see these racialized inequalities even within these knowledge professions, even among elites. But what happens a lot of times is people who point this out lose sight of the fact that they're still elites, like the people who are. Like, it might be the. In fact, it is the case that black lawyers make less than white lawyers on average, but it's also the case that black lawyers make much more than the typical white person in America than make much more than the even much, much, much more than the typical black person in America. And so oftentimes, elites focus on these disparities to the extent that they somehow lose sight of the fact that they are elites, that they are themselves elites. They're marginally less elite than the white elites, but that doesn't change the fact that they're elites. And so this is one of the ways where sometimes social justice discourse gets deployed in ways that kind of mystify the actual relationships that are at play rather than clarifying. And in a similar way, one thing that's really interesting about the case of a lot of these non white spokespeople or just minority spokespeople in general. But in the, in the book, I do spend some significant time talking about African Americans in particular, because I am myself black. And so it might be more salient to my own experience than whatever. But one thing that's definitely the case is a lot of the people who portray themselves as spokespeople or representatives of various marginalized populations are demonstrably not representative of the groups that they claim to represent. So the things that they feel, the things that they want, the things that are important to them are clearly out of step with what most other people in that group believe and feel and think and want and so on. And so this creates problems sometimes where these elites from minority groups advocate for things that are actually harmful or that the people who they're trying to, who they purport to speak on behalf of actually don't want. And it makes those people worse off in order to cater to the preferences of elites from those groups.
- [36:05]
A
And as a brief interjection, I think there's a kind of secondary problem where the American elite has now become quite diverse. And so members of the white elite in the United States do have friends and certainly colleagues and acquaintances that come from various underrepresented minority groups. But because the kind of spaces that dominate the American elite are quite politically homogeneous and because not all, but some of the people who enter those think of themselves as being spokespeople for a group, even as they're not particularly representative. I think that huge numbers of well intentioned members of white American elite have this deep down conviction rooted basically in the psychological availability bias towards saying, well, of course the average black person, of course the average Latino person is woke because this person I know from college and that person I know from grad school, they're woke and they seem to believe adverse spokespeople for their group. So in my personal experience, it is true that all the members of this group are woke. So that must be true. And then you look at any opinion poll or you look at any focus group and you very quickly disabuse of that notion. But most people don't do that last step.
- [37:17]
B
Yeah, they don't. In fact, what they do is if a lot of times what, what people do, if they want to know what say LGBTQ people or Hispanic people or whoever think about a given topic is they won't try to look for nationally representative survey data or they won't even. Or they won't go out in the street and kind of talk to normies about. Instead what they'll do is they look for some kind of consecrated elite spokesperson like Hannah Nicole Jones or Ta Nehisi Coates or someone like that, and what are they saying? And again, the problem with that move is that those spokespeople are often not necessarily representative of how most other people in that population think. And there's this also this kind of interesting move that a lot of elites who lay claim to minority group affiliation do, where they take advantage of the vagueness inherent in certain terms to make themselves seem more disadvantaged than they are. So for instance, when we talk about black elites, for instance, most black people who are in elite spaces are either half white like myself, or there are people who are Afro Caribbean or of recent African origin. They're kind of first or second generation immigrants from Afro Caribbean. And this matters because people from either of immigrant black background or of multiracial black background tend to have far fewer disadvantages compared to monoracial non immigrant black people in the United States. But we often kind of appeal to the generic label black to kind of obscure those differences and put ourselves in the same bucket in the same boat as other people who are much less advantaged than ourselves. And so I was at a recent talk, for instance, and There were four black people at this conference talking about polarization, including a panel discussion on race. And the four people, of the four of the four of us, there was me, who's half white, there were two people who were Jamaican, and then there was someone who was a reporter who's of Nigerian descent, and that kind of a constitution. So there was not one person who was a monoracial, non immigrant black person in that kind of situation where you'll have a whole bunch of black elites sitting around talking about race or something, and there's not one representative who meaningfully, who's. Who's like even remotely characteristic of the modal person in that group, even looking. And again, that's just looking ethnically. Even just ethnically, the black elite is not representative of the modal black American. Setting aside things like beliefs and things like this. And as I show in the book, there are similar moves that are made with a lot of other these kinds of generic labels. So when you look at how elites who identify as lgbtq, for instance, appeal to the vagueness of that broad bucket kind of label to obscure the fact that that people like them are often actually not at a disadvantage. A lot of the statistical disadvantages you see between LGBTQ versus straight people are driven by a very specific subset of LGBTQ people who face immense difficulties in society. But a lot of elites who lay claim to these labels are actually from subgroups that are statistically more likely to succeed than average. So the odds were not stacked against them. The odds technically, statistically, are in their favor even for people who identify with that particular label and who hail from those kinds of backgrounds. And so this is a move elites do a lot. As we try to make ourselves seem less elite, we try to make ourselves seem disadvantaged by appealing to these kinds of generic labels and laying claim to represent groups and interests that we are not, in fact, particularly representative of.
- [41:12]
A
So why is it that that is so useful to people in our culture? Right. I mean, people do that on your analysis, as I understand, because they have an incentive to do that. And you have this term of symbolic capitalist, which I think is related to what we've been talking about. Why is it that invoking your victim status, trying to oversell the extent to which you have some organic connection to a group that really might be disadvantaged, claiming to be somebody who experiences all of this discrimination, is it that that gives you capital and status in our society? How, in this reflexive manner, should we reflect the sort of structural conditions in our society that encourage and produce that kind of behavior?
- [41:56]
B
Yeah. So this is one of the tensions that the book is. This is another example of one of these kind of paradoxes is that to the extent that it truly is a disadvantage to be lgbtq, to be black, to be Hispanic, to be disabled, to be neurodivergent, to the extent that those really are stigmatized identities, then why on earth are elites so eager to lay claim to those identities? Why are they so eager to portray themselves as either those things or as representatives or advocates for those people, even to the extent of bending the truth in many cases, like lying or just distorting the reality in order to do that? So that's one of the things the book explores. And a kind of nutshell answer is that it's not all Americans who tend to do that. It's a very specific subset of Americans. And it's especially likely. These kinds of moves are especially likely for people who are what I call symbolic capitalists. So those are people who work in industries that are related to the manipulation of data and statistics, images and rhetoric, people who are not providing physical goods and services for people. So think lawyers, doctors, consultants, academics, journalists, so on and so forth. The thing about symbolic capitalists and the reason they're called symbolic capitalists, nodding to the work of Pierre Bourdieu, is that the way we make money, basically the way we have status, the way that we earn a living, is by building and leveraging what Bourdieu called symbolic capital, getting people to defer to our authority, getting people to trust our expertise, getting people to follow our plans, take our guidance, and things like this within these professions. I argue part of the reason why people in these professions kind of have always aligned, leaned heavily into social justice discourse, and increasingly try to kind of even portray themselves as marginalized and disadvantaged people, is that from the outset, a lot of these professions were created and justified. They were created as and justified. The autonomy that we enjoy, the pay that we enjoy, the respect and deference that we enjoy, is fundamentally premised on the idea that we're altruistic professions, that we're professions that serve the greater good and especially the least among us. So doctors, for instance, have formal codes that codify this idea. Lawyers, academics, and academics are supposed to follow the truth wherever it leads, without favor and fortune, and so on and so forth. Journalists are supposed to hold the powerful to account, to speak truth, to power, to be a voice for the voiceless, and so on and so forth. So a lot of our professions are kind of rooted in altruism. The pay that we enjoy, the power that we enjoy, the authority that we enjoy is rooted in the fact that we do this good for society, especially the vulnerable and the disadvantaged. And so this has been part of the reason why from the outset we've tried to that the fact that our authority and our social position is premised on this creates an axis of competition, basically, where we try to justify ourselves as being more worthy than our competitors of authority, of deference, of prestige, of pay, of job security and so on, by arguing that we are better representative, that we better embody these altruistic and noble things, and that those people that we're competing against are actually not that. And so this is part of the reason why from the outset, for. For more than a century now, symbolic capitalists have been doing these kinds of moves to try to make themselves seem like advocates for the marginalized and the disadvantaged. Now, one thing that's happened over time is that as the symbolic professions have opened up and they've grown more diverse, this has created. And by the way, the fact that they've grown more diverse is actually an important contribution of this book, is to highlight that fact. Because a lot of the discussions, especially in my field in sociology and the sociology of elites literature, they focus overwhelmingly on white elites, especially on cisgender heterosexual white men. And to the extent that we only focus on that narrow slice of society when we want to understand elites and that people who are women, minorities, LGBTQ people, neurodivergent, disabled, so on, so forth, anyone who lays claim to some kind of marginalized identity is excluded from analysis, then we'll have an increasingly impoverished understanding because more and more and more and more of the elite identifies with one of those terms. And in fact, we're coming up with new labels and new modes of disadvantage all the time.
- [46:29]
C
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- [47:00]
A
I have two questions I want to put to you before we I'm enjoying this and you're enjoying this. But the danger of that is that we over try the patience of our listeners who hopefully are enjoying it too. One question relates to what we're just talking about. And it goes back to both Eric Kaufman's diagnosis of asymmetric multiculturalism and the question of what to do about it. So I think that he's right, that there's something strange and probably just empirically unstable about a society which says if you are a member of these various minority groups, go take great pride in your ethnic or religious identity, go congregate among yourselves. And this is something that we're going to encourage and reward and celebrate. But if you're part of a majority group, don't you do that or you're a terrible, terrible bigot and racist. Now Kaufman's solution to this is to encourage a form of symmetrical multiculturalism. As I understand it, at least in the book Whiteface, he says, well, so therefore white should also celebrate the culture. They should also stick together for their ethnic interests and so on. Right. I admire the analytical clarity of that suggestion, but I deeply disagree, fundamentally disagree with a prescription. I precisely worry that the natural outcome of the form of left wing identity politics, if it really is instituted in the institutions in a deep way, is to encourage a form of zero sum conflict that leads to Kaufmann's solution. But I don't think that's going to be a good thing for society. I don't think it's going to be good for anybody. And it's certainly not going to be good for the minority groups that then I think would face a mobilized majority bloc that for all the reasons they like to point out, would actually have a lot of power and influence in society. That's why I find it so dangerous when things like vaccines are given out in certain contexts directly or indirectly on the basis of race. Because you don't want white people to think, well, if we want to be first in line, we better vote for the white interest party. That is exactly not the politics we should have. So what do you think is the solution to the asymmetrical things you've pointed out? Is it to push back against these forms of identity based mobilization? Is it to change the nature of them? And I think when they're making claims for inclusion in universalist institutions, that's something I'm comfortable with, but that's sort of subform of it. Or is it to push back against it entirely? How do we sort of having recognized the effect of asymmetrical multiculturalism, respond to it in a coherent way?
- [49:24]
B
Yeah. So I think Eric is right in his diagnosis that it is unstable, it's unsustainable, like to say, yes, all these other groups, all These other non white groups are free to not only celebrate themselves, but like organize on the basis of their racial or ethnic background with a specific purpose of taking this other group down, of enhancing their position relative to this other group. And people in that other group are supposed to say, well, I don't care if I lose out. I don't care if my children, my wife, my neighbors and friends who share this identity. We're all just going to take one for the team. There'd be something noble about the fact if people were willing to say, well, gosh, you know, we've benefited from this undeserved advantage in the past, so maybe we'll just take one for the team. Sure, there might be something noble about that, but that's not really like a realistic thing that you should expect from anyone to kind of lower their own standard of living and that of their children and loved ones and neighbors and friends for the sake of people who are sociologically distant from themselves. There's just absolutely zero reason to expect that's a likely outcome. Much more likely, as you said, is that increasing the salience in this way will lead people to think that what they actually need to do is kind of organize in a militant way, not just to protect their own interests, to preserve their own status, but maybe even to the point of taking down these other people a peg or two. And so that's not constructive. The problem that Eric fled, and part of the reason he arrived at the, the conclusion he did, which is a kind of bold conclusion for an academic to publish, is because to his mind, he thinks that an approach that strikes, that's colorblind or something like that, that, that kind of alternative view where instead of leaning into our identity, our identitarian stuff, we just try to adopt a universalist, neutral position where all people are treated, where we actually attend less to these things or not at all. He thinks that project is dead. He thinks it had its time in the sun, it's been thoroughly debunked and destroyed. Like there's, there's no traction for it, there's no appetite for it. There's no way. He, he's just very cynical about the prospect of having a kind of color blind, colorblind or gender blind or et cetera, approach to social justice or, or anything like that. He just thinks that that's gone, time has passed, it's not coming back. So the question is, in a world where that's not going to be even on the menu in a meaningful way, kind of, what can we do? And so he arrives at this conclusion that maybe the best thing is to try to find some way of some form of white identity that's not toxic, that's not terrible, that's celebrating good things that things that people should actually be proud of and ways of taking pride in your identity that aren't necessarily zero sum and things like that. And so he's kind of hoping that there might be some way to do kind of white identity politics that's not the Klan or something like the Klan.
- [52:41]
A
And it's worth pointing out for context that Eric himself is not white. So it's not like this is sort of a crypto white nationalist case, even though it's one that I disagree with. But what do you think is the solution? I mean, well, to very briefly sort of sketch mine, I think I dislike the term identity politics because it's too broad. I think it's perfectly fine to have certain identity based movements that are fighting against real injustices, that are asking for inclusion under universal rules and norms. But to me the solution is to have a set of liberal standards that treat everybody equally, irrespective of a group of which they're a part. Something that would vastly decrease the incentives to engage in that kind of symbolic capitalism, to engage in those kinds of thetisman upmanship games, to worry about where exactly I see you or you see me in the hierarchy of victimhood. And that's certainly reconcilable with a deeply diverse society, with a society in which people have pride in their cultural origin, in which they have deep religious beliefs. Again, I think it's reconcilable with certain form of identity based political mobilization. But it very clearly draws the line at the kind of woke, if you like, vision of politics in which how we should have this conversation, how we should treat each other, how the state should treat all of us, how our employers should treat us, how we perceive basic situations in society is forever mediated through this prism of identity. How do you sort of, when you see Eric Kaufman's solution, sort of my solution, a bunch of others. Where do you fall in what we should do?
- [54:10]
B
To my mind, I think the big problem, or one of the big problems is that especially on the left, but maybe this is just true broadly of Americans in general and a lot of other people, people as we've come to de emphasize and in fact are in some ways uncomfortable in some ways with appealing to superordinate identities, common shared goals, common values. There's a lot of research that shows that actually it's a lot easier for people to get into differences between them. If you start by foregrounding things that people have in common. So if you start by foregrounding that we're all part of the same country or we're all part of the same, like we're all Americans or we're all Christians or something like this, if there's some basis of common ground, it's actually a lot easier to get into the differences without thinking of that person as the enemy, as some kind of outsider, as some kind of a threat. I think one thing that can be really important and useful, especially in a world where some of these identitarian, tribalistic frames of talking and thinking are maybe not going away, if we're just going to concede that point to Eric, then I think one important path forward is to find ways of appealing and justifying and affirming superordinate values, superordinate identities, common goals, shared interests, things like this and appealing to. And as part of that, you know, I think a good North Star would be like what Adolf Reed Jr. Repeatedly flags in a lot of his work about how the goal of social justice should be that everyone has a decent standard of living, everyone has a voice in the stake in institutions, and it doesn't matter who you are, there's a way to pursue that kind of a goal where everyone has a voice in the stake that everyone is treated equally in a non colorblind way maybe, or a non gender blind way or whatever. Maybe there's a way to get there. But I think as far as the North Star goes about what we should kind of aim for, I think that it's that everyone should be able to live a decent life and should enjoy, you know, respect and be able to participate in these institutions without regards to. But I think that a key, a key thing that might help is building up people's affirmative capacities instead of their critical capacities. So instead of what's wrong, what's bad, talking about what actually works, why does it work, how does it work, what's good about the prevailing order, what progress have we made? Things like that. Building up our affirmative capacities is actually really important for then the second half of my suggestion, which would be appealing to these superordinate identities and common values and shared goals. If you can't build things up, if you're only focused on criticizing and deconstructing and problematizing and tearing things down, it's really impossible to meaningfully sustain these kinds of superordinate identities and shared goals and shared values. And this is actually one way in which I think a lot of our institutions and educational institutions and knowledge institutions more broadly kind of misserve a lot of people as there's too much emphasis to my mind in things like criticism and deconstruction and problematizing and not enough on building out people's affirmative capacities.
- [57:21]
A
Musa Al Ghabi thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
- [57:24]
B
Thank you so much for having me. It's been a lot of fun.
- [57:26]
A
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the podcast. Musa and I also had a really interesting conversation about the nature of antisemitism today. If you want access to that part of the conversation and to all of the bonus content and bonus episodes of the Good fight, go to yashamunk.substack.com and become a paying subscriber today. Thank you so much for listening to the Good Fight. Lots of listeners have been spreading the word about the show. If you two have been enjoying the podcast, please be liked. Rate the show on itunes, tell your friends all about it, share it on Facebook or Twitter. And finally, please mail suggestions for great guests or comments about the show to goodfightpodmail.com that's goodfightpodmail.com
- [58:19]
B
this recording carries a Creative Commons 4.0 International License. Thanks to Silent Partner for their song Chestnut Pieces.