You Ask, I Answer: We Have Never Been Woke FAQ

Since the publication of We Have Never Been Woke, I’ve been blessed to travel around the U.S. and abroad and talk to different stakeholders about the book and its themes.

Through in-person events, social media engagement, and this Substack, I’ve gained a window into how folks are processing the arguments of the text. I’ve done tons of interviews with journalists and podcasters of all sorts of backgrounds to think through the implications and applications of the work. And the book has been reviewed widely, from prestige outlets, to political sites, to ideas focused publications, and beyond. I’ve been honored to discover that both the critical and commercial response has been overwhelmingly positive.

It's been raucous and contentious at times. It’s been alternatively exhausting and exhilarating. It’s been gratifying to see this thing that was a file on my computer now existing as an actual object in the world – an object that lots of people are engaging with, learning from, and making use of in their own domains.

Put simply: it's been a real privilege to think with all of you over the last five months about how the rise of the rise of the symbolic professions has transformed U.S. politics, economics and culture – and to wrestle over the historical, current and ideal future role of symbolic capitalists in society. Across all these discussions and domains, there were a handful of objections, and ideas that have consistently surfaced. This post will highlight questions and concerns that I think are most interesting and/or important to respond to. In the process, I’ll get to double-click on a few points that, in retrospect, I wish I’d have delved into a little more within the text itself.

Why focus so intensely on symbolic capitalists for understanding contemporary society? What about the politicians, military leaders, and so on? Aren’t they the ones with the real power?

The “we” in We Have Never Been Woke is a constellation of elites that I call symbolic capitalists – professionals who work in fields like finance, consulting, law, HR, education, media, science and technology. Starting in the interwar period, and accelerating after the 1960s, there were changes to the global order that radically enhanced the position of these elites and their professions in society — transforming the contours of social inequalities, their bases for legitimation, and much more.