We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite
Musa al-Gharbi and Jon Shields
Musa al-Gharbi's research explores how people talk about, think about, and produce a shared understanding of contested social phenomena to include race, inequality, social movements, extremism, policing, national security, foreign policy and domestic U.S. political contests and more.
Al-Gharbi's second book, Those People, is slated for publication by Princeton University Press in late 2026 and will explore the causes and consequences of the growing social distance between the symbolic professions and growing swaths of the broader societies they are embedded in.
Musa al-Gharbi is Assistant Professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at the Stony Brook University. In addition to his scholarly work, Professor al-Gharbi is a columnist for The Guardian. His journalistic essays have been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, NBC News, The Atlantic, New Republic, The Nation, and many other outlets. He is also regularly tapped by other journalists to contextualize current events, including spots with NPR, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Bloomberg, The Economist, CNN, USA Today, Voice of America, and beyond. And independent of his own direct participation, his work is regularly discussed in mass media outlets.
Professor al-Gharbi’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Open Academy and The Kravis Lab for Civic Leadership, both at CMC.