I’ve been reading an extraordinary book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of Our Time, by Musa al-Gharbi. Okay, I saw your eyes glaze over; for sure we’ve been hearing much too much about “wokeness,” and this sounds like another polemic about the gulf between Us and Them. But bear with me, because it’s not.

I’d like to talk about how this book has changed some of my understandings of life in 2025—not only through what he writes, but through my internal dialogue with his words.

Let’s start with al-Gharbi. His central observation is that influential elites support various causes generally known as “woke,” yet don’t do much to make life better for anyone else.

Attitudes and dispositions associated with "wokeness" are primarily embraced by symbolic capitalists (…)"social justice" discourse seems to be mobilized by contemporary elites to help legitimize and obscure inequalities (…) often at the expense of those who are genuinely vulnerable, marginalized, and disadvantaged in society.

He describes these elites as “symbolic capitalists,” a phrase he borrowed from Pierre Bourdieu. They are

professionals who traffic in symbols and rhetoric, images and narratives, data and analysis, ideas and abstraction (as opposed to workers engaged in manual forms of labor tied to physical goods and services). For instance, people who work in fields like education, science, tech, finance, media law, consulting, administration, and public policy are overwhelmingly symbolic capitalists.

And while symbolic capitalists may be sincere in their beliefs, those beliefs, he argues, have little bearing on their actual behaviors and priorities.

He gives an example of that gulf early on in the book when describing the reactions of his undergraduate students at Columbia to the November 2024 presidential election. Students were overwhelmed, not showing up to class, gathering together to discuss their feelings and reactions, etc. Meanwhile, the very people directly affected—the university kitchen staff, cleaners, landscapers, and so on—weren’t out protesting with the students; they were showing up and doing their jobs because they needed the jobs. They didn’t have the luxury of talking about their situations; they were living their situations.

That understanding explains a lot to me—not least of which are the power dynamics in my own community in Provincetown—and it’s changed the way I look at and think about my own involvement in social justice issues.

But that’s not to say there’s nothing with which to find fault in al-Gharbi’s book. He’s happy to criticize adherents of woke ideas, but never really takes on the ideas themselves on their own merits. And while he’s correct in blaming symbolic capitalists for a kind of hands-off champagne socialism, his view appears to be that they’re the people actually responsible for the exploitation of the poor.

(For example, al-Gharbi argues that high-end restaurants “try to keep their prices relatively affordable (for professionals, at least) by paying subpar wages to ‘back of house’ workers.” Okay; that’s undoubtedly true. But it doesn’t explain fast-food outlets that also exploit their workers: conditions and wages at any McDonald’s are just as appalling. And their clientèle doesn’t feature symbolic capitalists.)

At the end of the day, low wages in commercial kitchens, the gigification of delivery work and rideshares, and other exploitative labor practices are the fault of actual capitalists—mega-corporations and market competition. That’s where we need to place the blame for the inequities of class structure. Symbolic capitalists aren’t history’s driving force; the capitalistic system is.

Still, with all its faults, We Have Never Been Woke has forced me—a symbolic capitalist myself—to look closely at the causes I champion, the poetry and essays and novels I write, the places where I share my money and my time, and see if there might not be some changes I can make for the betterment of the world.

And that alone is well worth the price of admission. Reading really can change you—if you allow it to.

Jeannette de Beauvoir is a novelist and poet who lives and works at Land’s End (Provincetown, Massachusetts).

Reading Can Change You

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