It is a harmless pantomime, as they cloak themselves in the culturally appropriated korowai of perpetual grievance and benefit from the Kiwi reluctance to cause unnecessary offence.
This is the natural evolution of a wider, global, cultural movement that sociologist Musa Al-Gharbi noticed when he arrived at Columbia in 2016 to do his PhD, fresh from Donald Trump’s victory in the that year’s election.
Why were the elite students and professors traumatised while the working poor just went back to work?
If Trump was an existential threat to the poor, why had so many of them voted Republican and why were those who stood to benefit from his ascendancy inconsolable at the outcome?
Why were the elite students and professors traumatised while the working poor just went back to work?
If Trump was an existential threat to the poor, why had so many of them voted Republican and why were those who stood to benefit from his ascendancy inconsolable at the outcome?
If Donald Trump was an existential threat to the poor,
why had so many of them voted Republican?Alex Brandon / AP
Al-Gharbi looks behind the slogans and signs to study woke ideology in his recent book, We Have Never Been Woke. He is touring New Zealand thanks to the Free Speech Union and last week I sat down to interview him.
The book begins with defining a cohort of knowledge workers called Symbolic Capitalists. Those who work with data, not their own capital, to earn a living. Lawyers, accountants, public servants, teachers and, well, insolvency practitioners.
Keep these folks in mind and consider the growth in tertiary education since the 1980s. There was a time, not that long ago, when you needed to be bright or wealthy to get a degree. Now a tertiary education is as common as an electric vehicle in Ponsonby. They have lost their cachet but not the expectation that comes with earning one.
If you have ground through five years of lectures on social justice and two years of field work on the impact of climate change on the Manawatū dung beetle, you expect a job commensurate to your new status as an MA in Esoteric Sciences.
Except…
If half of the world’s plumbers were lost in the Rapture, we’d notice. If ninety percent of sociologists vanished who would report them missing? To which, these recent graduates find themselves competing with their equally educated peers for jobs that, a decade past, a labrador with a good attitude could have secured.
This, for the entitled offspring of the muddling classes, is a shocking realisation. They are not important. They are not special. They are not, in truth, entitled to anything more than their inheritance which, thanks to their parents’ regimen of yoga and boiled legumes, is slowly receding along with their own hairlines.
This is intolerable for the Tristrans and Imogens of Parnell, Khandallah and Fendalton. A great injustice, to be sure, but not one for which there is an easy remedy.
What is needed is a strategy to displace the incumbents, to elbow out the competition, to raise your own profile in a zero-sum game of status; and here is where the analysis of Al-Gharbi comes into focus.
As he looked at the BLM protesters he observed: “There didn’t seem to be any connection at all between the cause these demonstrators were claiming to support and the means through which they were choosing to support it.”
Al-Gharbi looks behind the slogans and signs to study woke ideology in his recent book, We Have Never Been Woke. He is touring New Zealand thanks to the Free Speech Union and last week I sat down to interview him.
The book begins with defining a cohort of knowledge workers called Symbolic Capitalists. Those who work with data, not their own capital, to earn a living. Lawyers, accountants, public servants, teachers and, well, insolvency practitioners.
Keep these folks in mind and consider the growth in tertiary education since the 1980s. There was a time, not that long ago, when you needed to be bright or wealthy to get a degree. Now a tertiary education is as common as an electric vehicle in Ponsonby. They have lost their cachet but not the expectation that comes with earning one.
If you have ground through five years of lectures on social justice and two years of field work on the impact of climate change on the Manawatū dung beetle, you expect a job commensurate to your new status as an MA in Esoteric Sciences.
Except…
If half of the world’s plumbers were lost in the Rapture, we’d notice. If ninety percent of sociologists vanished who would report them missing? To which, these recent graduates find themselves competing with their equally educated peers for jobs that, a decade past, a labrador with a good attitude could have secured.
This, for the entitled offspring of the muddling classes, is a shocking realisation. They are not important. They are not special. They are not, in truth, entitled to anything more than their inheritance which, thanks to their parents’ regimen of yoga and boiled legumes, is slowly receding along with their own hairlines.
This is intolerable for the Tristrans and Imogens of Parnell, Khandallah and Fendalton. A great injustice, to be sure, but not one for which there is an easy remedy.
What is needed is a strategy to displace the incumbents, to elbow out the competition, to raise your own profile in a zero-sum game of status; and here is where the analysis of Al-Gharbi comes into focus.
As he looked at the BLM protesters he observed: “There didn’t seem to be any connection at all between the cause these demonstrators were claiming to support and the means through which they were choosing to support it.”
Sociologist Musa Al-Gharbi examined who the Black Lives
Matter protests were for.Hollie Adams / Getty Images
Who, he wondered, were these protests for, because they were not going to have any impact on the lives of black men like Al-Gharbi himself.
His realisation, or more precisely his thesis, is that the purpose of this activism was to enhance the prospects of those doing the protesting, by claiming for themselves the benefit that would accrue to the underclass if the placard wavers were giving positions of authority.
Cloaking yourself in the ideology of social justice allows you to assert your claim to power, to the corner suite, to political office. Not for yourself, obviously, but to advance the underprivileged.
The assertion of was buttressed by an implicit, and sometimes explicit, claim that there was something inherently virtuous about those whose ancestors were the victims of past injustice; that they have greater insight and possibly moral worth as a consequence of suffering.
Being woke, both for the individual and for the organisation, is a means of advancement when the resources being allocated are finite and the demands by the under-employed symbolic capitalists unconstrained.
Where this proves insufficient the temptation arises to search within your whakapapa for a totemic claim to not only represent the dispossessed, but to embody them. This was carried to the absurd across the Pacific with multiple prominent figures becoming caught in the genealogical equivalent of stolen-valour.......The full article is published HERE
Damien Grant is an Auckland business owner, a member of the Taxpayers’ Union and a regular opinion contributor for Stuff, writing from a libertarian perspective
Who, he wondered, were these protests for, because they were not going to have any impact on the lives of black men like Al-Gharbi himself.
His realisation, or more precisely his thesis, is that the purpose of this activism was to enhance the prospects of those doing the protesting, by claiming for themselves the benefit that would accrue to the underclass if the placard wavers were giving positions of authority.
Cloaking yourself in the ideology of social justice allows you to assert your claim to power, to the corner suite, to political office. Not for yourself, obviously, but to advance the underprivileged.
The assertion of was buttressed by an implicit, and sometimes explicit, claim that there was something inherently virtuous about those whose ancestors were the victims of past injustice; that they have greater insight and possibly moral worth as a consequence of suffering.
Being woke, both for the individual and for the organisation, is a means of advancement when the resources being allocated are finite and the demands by the under-employed symbolic capitalists unconstrained.
Where this proves insufficient the temptation arises to search within your whakapapa for a totemic claim to not only represent the dispossessed, but to embody them. This was carried to the absurd across the Pacific with multiple prominent figures becoming caught in the genealogical equivalent of stolen-valour.......The full article is published HERE
Damien Grant is an Auckland business owner, a member of the Taxpayers’ Union and a regular opinion contributor for Stuff, writing from a libertarian perspective
3 comments:
Arch-opportunists... but they have seen the potential gains and gone for them. Pity the apathetic dimwits left behind.
Ngati Pakeha, Black Lives Matter [or Not Matter] - a pack of under educated [even with degrees in woolley matter] are the dimwits in fact. The tide is slowly turning against them... Oh Dear, Kia Ora, Tina Cocoa and all the rest. The world slowly wakens to the rot within.
I despair at the woke white, watching them follow, unthinking, from their Labour roots to supporting the Maori radicals because of peer pressure.
Family members turning up at family functions wearing a lump of Chinese greenstone strung around their necks with a piece of flax - it just sends the message that they have been fully indoctrinated.
Especially the academic family members.
Up goes the chant from the rentamob - "BLM, BLM, black lives matter"
Actually, All Lives Matter, but to them the skin color has become paramount.
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