The Gray Area with Sean Illing The contradictions of wokeness
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Apr 13, 2026 
Musa al-Gharbi, a journalist and Stony Brook professor who studies inequality and elite culture, digs into what “woke” actually names. He explores why the term resists definition, how elite ambition and public frustration fuel moral awakenings, why woke and anti-woke politics mirror each other, and how representation, institutions, and class tension collide.
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Why Woke Resists A Clean Definition
- Musa al-Gharbi argues woke is a contested cluster term, not something that needs a crisp analytic definition to describe a real social phenomenon.
- He compares it to political correctness in the late 1980s and 1990s, where a self-description became a term of derision after activists and the right fought over it.
Why Awokenings Keep Returning
- Awokenings happen when elite overproduction collides with popular immiseration, giving frustrated elite aspirants both motive and mass leverage.
- People who did everything right expect elite lives, then indict the social order when scarce positions and worsening conditions block them.
Why Symbolic Workers Misread Their Class Position
- Symbolic professionals often imagine themselves as near-ordinary, but al-Gharbi says their incomes, status, networks, and aspirations place them closer to elites than to normies.
- He uses adjunct professors and journalists to show they reject ordinary work and increasingly come from affluent pipelines that shape coverage and loyalties.
