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Society appears more inclusive than ever, yet social and economic inequality has reached alarming heights. In We Have Never Been Woke, Musa al-Gharbi explores how these paradoxical trends connect, focusing on the rise of “symbolic capitalists”—an elite working with words, images, and data—who publicly champion progressive causes while unintentionally profiting from the very inequalities they decry.
Join us on Tuesday, February 4, as SNF Agora faculty member Steve Teles and Musa al-Gharbi discuss this provocative new book. Al-Gharbi sheds light on how genuine beliefs in social justice can inadvertently reinforce inequality and spark backlash. A book signing with the author will follow.
This event is co-sponsored by the Heterodox Academy Campus Community and the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. Come be part of the conversation!
Speakers:
Musa al-Gharbi is a sociologist and assistant professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University. His research primarily focuses on the political economy of knowledge production and the social life of scholarly and journalistic outputs. He is a columnist for The Guardian, and his writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and more. al-Gharbi’s first book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, was published by Princeton University Press in October 2024.
Steven Teles is Professor of Political Science at the Johns Hopkins University, and Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center. He is the author of The Captured Economy: How The Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth and Increase Inequality (with Brink Lindsey, Oxford 2017); Prison Break: Why Conservatives Turned Against Mass Incarceration (with David Dagan, Oxford 2016), The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law (Princeton, 2008) and Whose Welfare: AFDC and Elite Politics (Kansas, 1996). He is also editor of Conservatism and American Political Development (with Brian Glenn, Oxford, 2009) and Ethnicity, Social Mobility and Public Policy: Comparing the US and UK (with Glenn Loury and Tariq Modood, Cambridge, 2005). He has published widely in more popular outlets, from Democracy Journal, The Nation, and The American Prospect, to National Affairs, The Public Interest, and National Review. He is currently working on a book, under contract with Oxford University Press (with Rob Saldin) on Republican opponents of President Donald Trump.
He received his PhD in government and foreign affairs from the University of Virginia in 1995, and his BA in political science from George Washington University in 1989.