[T]he most significant and enduring material legacy of the Great Awokenings has been the proliferation of what I have taken to calling ‘social justice sinecures’ — well-remunerated symbolic capitalist jobs explicitly oriented around helping organizations conspicuously conform with the latest fads in social justice signaling (thereby reducing their vulnerability to subsequent attacks by frustrated elites and elite aspirants).
That is from Musa al-Gharbi’s stinging post-mortem of our most recent national craze of social justice warriors fashioning themselves as the Woke. If you are old enough to recall when the Soviet Union collapsed, you will recall people coming out of the woodwork to declare that the USSR was never truly a communist state and thus the communist paradise is still a viable goal. Al-Gharbi is here to tell us something quite similar. We Have Never Been Woke is the title. The subtitle: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. Al-Gharbi documents that what we all just lived through was bad, but he insists we shouldn’t blame the Left for the actions of a large set of self-serving bureaucrats.
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