In 2014, while teaching at the University of Arizona, al-Gharbi became a target of right-wing backlash after Fox News highlighted a
Truthout article he wrote criticizing
American policy in the Middle East. He turned to
retail, selling shoes at a
Dillard's store. He was refused a promotion to shoe department manager because a district manager thought he was overqualified. In 2016, after moving to New York City to attend Columbia, he took notice of a particular culture which he would later explore in his writing. On the
Upper West Side, an area known for its progressive politics, he found a "racialised caste system" whose bottom tier consisted of a class of "disposable servants who will clean your house, watch your kids, walk your dogs, deliver prepared meals to you". In 2023, al-Gharbi became an assistant professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at
Stony Brook University. In 2021, al-Gharbi's book
We Have Never Been Woke: Social Justice Discourse, Inequality, and the Rise of a New Elite, was acquired by
Princeton University Press. It was published in 2024. He argues in the book that the contemporary "
woke" movement had not begun during the mid-2010s
matriculation of Generation Z into college, but in 2011 during a surge in media discussions of various forms of prejudice and discrimination. He argues that contemporary American society is dominated by a professional class of "woke elites" he calls "symbolic capitalists", whom he describes as "professionals who traffic in symbols and rhetoric, images and narratives, data and analysis". According to him, these symbolic capitalists support social justice movements in order to amass
social currency to further their own interests. == Views ==