"A book that explores the disconnect between the ideals of the Great Awokening and the
realities of fixing structural inequality. This book aims to explain how a new elite has risen
to prominence and established a social order that is fundamentally premised on exclusion
exploitation and condescension even as its members define themselves in terms of their
commitments to uplifting the marginalized and disadvantaged. The book will illustrate how this
core tension within the new elite explains a number of trends we've seen from the Great
Awokening to growing political polarization and beyond. We Have Never Been Woke will draw from
and build upon al-Gharbi's work over the last six years that has examined the rise of Trump
the crisis of expertise tensions over 'identity politics' and growing social inequality. It
will demonstrate each of these domains as a 'front' of a broader social and cultural conflict -
a conflict between those who have come to dominate the 'knowledge economy' and institutions of
cultural production and those who feel excluded therefrom. It will highlight the ways symbolic
analysts - those elites who have not attained their social position by owning material assets
but by trafficing in symbols and rhetoric images and narratives data and analysis - deploy
wokeness as a weapon in this conflict often at the expense of those who are actually
marginalized and disadvantaged in the prevailing order. As We Have Never Been Woke will
demonstrate the Americans who are the primary producers and consumers of content on antiracism
socialism feminism etc. also happen to be the primary beneficiaries of gendered racialized
and other forms of inequality - and not passive beneficiaries. We are active participants in
exploiting and reproducing inequalities. However it is difficult for us to 'see' how we
contribute to the problem -- precisely because of our deeply felt commitments to social
justice. This book aims to deflate these self-serving narratives while dismantling popular (and
self-serving) narratives about the 'losers' in the system - leaving readers with a totally
different understanding of how social inequality is produced (and by whom) and unnerving
questions about what it would take to meaningfully address it"--
