Woke Is Over. Is Anti-Woke About to Go the Same Way?

The idea of “woke” has animated US politics over the last few years. The word and the concept have become shorthand for the culture wars. At the Oscars, for instance, actress Jane Fonda offered her own definition, saying “woke just means you give a damn about other people.” Two days later, in his speech to a joint session of Congress, President Donald Trump declared “wokeness is trouble, wokeness is bad, it’s gone and we feel so much better for it, don’t we?” Sociologists and historians can often make better sense of political and social trends than journalists and the book We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite by Musa Al-Gharbi attempts to make sense of the woke and the post-woke era. Al-Gharbi is an assistant professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University. This transcript has been edited and condensed.

Nia-Malika Henderson: Who is the ‘we’ in the title of your book?