Intro

Sociologist Musa al-Gharbi joins Geoff Shullenberger to discuss his new book We Have Never Been Woke. A great deal of discussion of wokeness attempts to trace it to the influence of certain thinkers and ideas: Foucault, Critical Race Theory, and so on. Al-Gharbi offers a different approach, focusing on the social stratum in which woke ideas became salient—that of "symbolic capitalists"—and how ideas function as a currency of social legitimation and status competition. 

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