Executive Editor Meagan Levinson has acquired World rights, including audio, to We Have Never Been Woke: Social Justice Discourse, Inequality, and the Rise of a New Elite by sociologist Musa al‑Gharbi. Andrew Stuart at the Stuart Agency handled the deal.
Posing unnerving questions about what it would take to meaningfully address social inequality, We Have Never Been Woke explores the paradox of how a new woke elite committed to social justice and the marginalized has risen to prominence while establishing a social order that is fundamentally premised on exclusion and exploitation. Al‑Gharbi examines the rise of Trump, tensions over identity politics, and worsening social inequality as indicative of broader social and cultural conflicts between those who control the knowledge economy, including members of progressive institutions, and those who feel excluded from these spaces. In the spirit of Anand Giridharadas’s Winners Take All and Richard Reeves’s Dream Hoarders, We Have Never Been Woke shows that many of the people who produce and consume content on antiracism, socialism, and feminism also benefit from the same inequalities they believe they’re fighting. In order to see how we contribute to the problem, al‑Gharbi takes apart self-serving, popular narratives about who wins and who loses in the inequitable, if well-intentioned, culture of social justice.
We Have Never Been Woke is slated for publication in 2023.
About the Author
Musa al‑Gharbi is a Fellow in the department of Sociology at Columbia University. He has written about politics for a number of outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Nation, The Guardian, Columbia Journalism Review, among others. Find him on Twitter @Musa_alGharbi