Cosplaying social justice is the new elitist way of elbowing out the working class
Why Read This
What Makes This Article Worth Your Time
Summary
What This Article Is About
Kenan Malik reviews Musa al-Gharbi’s book We Have Never Been Woke, which argues that liberal professionals use social justice rhetoric while perpetuating the inequalities they claim to oppose. Al-Gharbi observed Columbia University students—vocal about racial justice—relying on predominantly Black and Hispanic “disposable servants” earning minimal wages, then later protesting for Black Lives Matter while ignoring homeless Black men occupying the same spaces. This persistent gap between professed progressive values and actual behavior prompted al-Gharbi to examine how social justice language functions in contemporary elite culture.
Al-Gharbi identifies “symbolic capitalists”—professionals trafficking in ideas, rhetoric, and cultural production—as deploying wokeness not for genuine justice but to accumulate cultural capital and entrench elite status while appearing to challenge it. Malik contextualizes this critique alongside similar arguments from Catherine Liu and Olúfémi Táíwò, acknowledging its explanatory power for understanding why working-class voters abandon progressive parties. However, he warns against overlooking material power structures and historical context: 1930s radical activists faced real violence organizing sharecroppers and workers, unlike today’s Broadway protesters. The fracturing of cross-racial class solidarity movements enabled this degradation of activism into performative elite positioning.
Key Points
Main Takeaways
Performative Activism’s Material Blindness
Columbia students championing social justice relied on exploited Black and Hispanic service workers, later protesting systemic racism while ignoring homeless Black men directly beside them.
Symbolic Capitalists as New Elite
Professionals in ideas, culture, and abstraction use social justice rhetoric to accumulate cultural capital and secure elite positions while presenting themselves as anti-elite.
Legitimizing Inequality Through Justice Talk
Social justice language doesn’t challenge structural inequality but obscures it, allowing elites to reinforce privilege while claiming to fight for the marginalized.
Cultural Elite Eclipses Material Power
Critics risk making symbolic capitalists the primary problem rather than underlying material structures, mirroring the mistake of focusing on representation over economic inequality.
Historical Context Matters Crucially
1930s Communist organizers faced violence and death building cross-racial solidarity movements, unlike today’s Broadway protesters—this historical shift explains contemporary activism’s degradation.
Working-Class Political Realignment
Democratic and social democratic parties increasingly serve educated elites rather than workers, explaining working-class voter exodus toward parties that acknowledge their material concerns.
Master Reading Comprehension
Practice with 365 curated articles and 2,400+ questions across 9 RC types.
Article Analysis
Breaking Down the Elements
Main Idea
Elite Appropriation of Justice Rhetoric
Malik argues through al-Gharbi’s work that contemporary social justice activism has been appropriated by educated professionals—symbolic capitalists—who use progressive rhetoric to secure their own elite status while remaining materially indifferent to actual inequality. This performative activism explains political realignments where working-class voters abandon progressive parties, yet Malik warns against focusing solely on cultural elites rather than underlying economic structures and the historical erosion of genuine solidarity movements.
Purpose
Critical Synthesis with Cautionary Framework
The article functions as both sympathetic book review and ideological intervention. Malik validates al-Gharbi’s critique of performative activism while adding crucial historical and theoretical caveats to prevent the argument from becoming what it criticizes—a cultural analysis that ignores material power. By connecting the book to the US election and broader political trends, he demonstrates its explanatory power while warning against analytical traps.
Structure
Concrete Anecdote → Theoretical Framework → Historical Correction
Malik opens with vivid examples of Columbia students’ contradictions to establish the problem experientially before introducing al-Gharbi’s theoretical concept of symbolic capitalists and cultural capital accumulation. He then contextualizes this within similar critiques by Liu and Táíwò, acknowledging explanatory power for contemporary political puzzles. The structure pivots to warnings about analytical dangers before concluding with historical comparison to 1930s organizing, arguing that understanding the fracturing of genuine solidarity movements is essential for rebuilding transformative politics.
Critical, Measured & Historically Grounded
Malik writes with analytical clarity that sympathetically presents al-Gharbi’s argument while maintaining critical distance through strategic qualifications. His tone balances appreciation for the critique’s insights with concern about potential misapplications. The historical comparison between cosplaying Broadway protesters and 1930s activists facing real violence provides moral weight without descending into nostalgia, demonstrating how serious political work differs from status-seeking performance.
Key Terms
Vocabulary from the Article
Click each card to reveal the definition
Build your vocabulary systematically
Each article in our course includes 8-12 vocabulary words with contextual usage.
Tough Words
Challenging Vocabulary
Tap each card to flip and see the definition
Completely unaware or unconscious of something happening around you, especially when you should notice it.
“Al-Gharbi watched as they demonstrated on Broadway, oblivious to the homeless Black men who didn’t even have shoes sharing the same space.”
Lack of interest, concern, or sympathy toward something that should matter, especially regarding others’ suffering or needs.
“Those profiting from the racial caste system were fellow students, many vocal about social justice, but largely indifferent to the needs of those at the bottom.”
The act of speaking about something or someone in a way that shows you think they have little value or importance.
“‘Woke’ is not a particularly useful term, more often used in disparagement than in analysis.”
To accumulate or receive something over time through gradual growth or addition, often used for benefits or advantages.
“It is a social stratum that attempts to entrench itself within the elite by using the language of social justice to gain status and accrue cultural capital.”
Deserving hatred and contempt; morally reprehensible or extremely unpleasant in character or behavior.
“The US Communist party was an opportunist organisation with often despicable policies, tied to a brutal regime in Moscow.”
The breaking or splitting apart of something previously unified, especially social movements or coalitions into competing fragments.
“It is the fracturing of those movements of solidarity that has allowed for the degradation of social justice campaigns.”
Reading Comprehension
Test Your Understanding
5 questions covering different RC question types
1According to the article, al-Gharbi observed the racialized caste system primarily among ultra-wealthy residents of New York’s Upper East Side.
2According to al-Gharbi’s thesis, what primary function does “wokeness” serve for symbolic capitalists?
3Which sentence best captures Malik’s warning about the dangers of critiquing symbolic capitalists?
4Evaluate these statements about 1930s activism compared to contemporary protest:
1930s Communist party activists helped organize sharecroppers and laid foundations for the postwar civil rights movement despite facing violence.
Al-Gharbi argues contemporary woke politics represents the latest in an identical series of awakenings dating to the 1930s.
Malik distinguishes 1930s activists who faced real danger from Broadway protesters who were “cosplaying” without material risk.
Select True or False for all three statements, then click “Check Answers”
5What can be reasonably inferred about Malik’s view of the relationship between cultural and material analysis of inequality?
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
Cosplaying refers to adopting the superficial appearance of social justice activism—the rhetoric, symbols, and performances—without embodying its substance through material sacrifice or risk. Like costume players who dress as characters without being them, contemporary activists according to Malik adopt progressive language while maintaining elite privilege. The Broadway protesters chanting “Black Lives Matter” while crowding out homeless Black men exemplify this: they perform concern for racial justice while ignoring the concrete suffering directly in front of them, maintaining their comfortable position within hierarchies they claim to oppose.
Symbolic capitalists—writers, academics, lawyers, museum curators, tech professionals—traffic in ideas, rhetoric, and cultural production rather than owning factories or financial capital. They accumulate “cultural capital” (education credentials, taste, social connections, progressive credentials) rather than purely economic capital. Unlike traditional economic elites who openly pursue profit, symbolic capitalists present themselves as challenging inequality while using social justice language to secure their own elite status. This distinction matters because it reveals how elite positioning now operates partly through moral and cultural claims rather than only through wealth, making the class dynamics harder to perceive.
This historical comparison establishes that meaningful political activism requires material commitment and risk, not just rhetorical positioning. Despite the Communist party’s many failings, 1930s activists organizing sharecroppers and millworkers in the Jim Crow South faced vigilante terror, police violence, imprisonment, and death. They built cross-racial solidarity movements that laid foundations for civil rights advances. By contrast, Broadway protesters face no consequences for their activism, which remains compatible with elite privilege. This distinction reveals what’s been lost: the fracturing of genuine solidarity movements enabled activism to become performative elite positioning rather than transformative political work.
Readlite provides curated articles with comprehensive analysis including summaries, key points, vocabulary building, and practice questions across 9 different RC question types. Our Ultimate Reading Course offers 365 articles with 2,400+ questions to systematically improve your reading comprehension skills.
This article is classified as Advanced difficulty due to its sophisticated sociological analysis requiring familiarity with concepts like cultural capital, class stratification, and historical political movements. It demands readers track Malik’s multi-layered argument: presenting al-Gharbi’s thesis, contextualizing it within similar critiques, acknowledging its explanatory power, then adding crucial caveats about analytical dangers and historical context. The piece requires understanding how contemporary phenomena connect to broader class dynamics and how cultural critique can illuminate or obscure material power structures—comprehension that extends beyond surface-level understanding to grasp implicit argumentative moves.
Malik warns against treating contemporary performative activism as just another iteration of eternal patterns rather than understanding what historical changes produced this degradation. Al-Gharbi’s argument about cyclical “awokenings” risks missing how the fracturing of genuine cross-racial working-class solidarity movements—which once built real political power through material struggle—created conditions for elite appropriation of justice rhetoric. Understanding this historical transformation matters for rebuilding effective movements: we need to grasp not just that activism has been corrupted but what specific political, economic, and social shifts enabled this corruption, particularly the collapse of institutions and movements that once connected progressive rhetoric to material class struggle.
The Ultimate Reading Course covers 9 RC question types: Multiple Choice, True/False, Multi-Statement T/F, Text Highlight, Fill in the Blanks, Matching, Sequencing, Error Spotting, and Short Answer. This comprehensive coverage prepares you for any reading comprehension format you might encounter.
