Elite Capture - How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else)

A powerful indictment of the ways elites have co-opted radical critiques of racial capitalism to serve their own ends.

List of contents

Chapter One: Identity Politics, 2021 

Identity Politics: It’s Not What You Think It Is 

Elite Capture: The Bigger Problem

Chapter Two: What is Elite Capture?

E. Franklin Frazier

Who Run the World? Elites

Does Democracy Matter?

Capture at Every Scale

Chapter Three: Reading the Room

Carter G. Woodson

The Ground We Stand On

The Theory of Mis-Education

Elite Capture: Game It Out

Chapter Four: Being in the Room

Introduction

The View from Inside the Room

Better Blueprints

Chapter Five: Building a New House

Changing Rooms: Paulo Freire

Rebuild the House: The PAIGC

We’ve Got This 

Getting Out the Hammers 

Building a New House 

Chapter Six: The Point is to Change It 

Andaiye 

What the Constructive View Asks of Us

About the author

Olúf¿¿mi O. Táíwò is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University and a fellow at the Climate and Community Institute. He is the author of the critically acclaimed book Elite Capture, a contributor to Greta Thunberg's The Climate Book, and a past recipient of a Marguerite Casey Freedom Scholar fellowship. Táíwò's public philosophy, including articles exploring intersections of climate justice and colonialism, has been featured in The Guardian, The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Nation, Boston Review, Dissent, Al Jazeera, Foreign Policy, Hammer & Hope (where he is a member of the Editorial Team). His writings have been translated into Brazilian Portuguese, French, German, Italian, and Korean, among other languages.

Summary

A powerful indictment of the ways elites have co-opted radical critiques of racial capitalism to serve their own ends.

“Identity politics” is everywhere, polarizing discourse from the campaign trail to the classroom. But the “identity politics” so compulsively referenced bears little resemblance to the concept as first introduced by the radical Black feminist Combahee River Collective. While the Collective articulated a political viewpoint grounded in their own position as Black lesbians with the explicit aim of building solidarity across lines of difference, “identity politics” is now frequently weaponized as a means of closing ranks around ever-narrower conceptions of group interests.

But the trouble, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò deftly argues, is not with “identity politics” itself. Through a substantive engagement with the global Black radical tradition, Táíwò identifies the process by which a radical concept can be stripped of its political substance and become the victim of elite capture—deployed by political, social, and economic elites in the service of their own interests.

Táíwò’s crucial intervention both elucidates this complex process and helps us move beyond a binary of “class” vs. “race.” By rejecting elitist identity politics in favor of a constructive politics of radical solidarity, he advances the possibility of organizing across our differences in the urgent struggle for a better world.

Additional text

“Olúfémi Táíwò is a thinker on fire. He not only calls out empire for shrouding its bloodied hands in the cloth of magical thinking but calls on all of us to do the same. Elite capture, after all, is about turning oppression and its cure into a (neo)liberal commodity exchange where identities become capitalism’s latest currency rather than the grounds for revolutionary transformation. The lesson is clear: only when we think for ourselves and act with each other, together in deep, dynamic, and difficult solidarity, can we begin to remake the world.”
—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination


“Among the churn of books on ‘wokeness’ and ‘political correctness,’ philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s Elite Capture clearly stands out. With calm, clarity, erudition, and authority, Táíwò walks the reader through the morass, deftly explicating the distinction between substantive and worthy critique and weaponized backlash. Understanding the culture wars is essential to US politics right now, and no one has done it better than Táíwò in this book.” —Jason Stanley, author of How Fascism Works 



“With global breath, clarity and precision, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò dissects the causes and consequences of elite capture and charts an alternative constructive politics for our time. The result is an erudite yet accessible book that draws widely on the rich traditions of black and anticolonial political thought.” —Adom Getachew, author of Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination

Product details

• Authors: Táíwò, Olúf&&mi O. Táíwò, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò
• Publisher: Ingram Publishers Services
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 03.05.2022
• EAN: 9781642597356
• ISBN: 978-1-64259-735-6
• No. of pages: 150
• Subjects: Social sciences, law, business > Sociology > Sociological theories; POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Ideologies / Radicalism, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Social Classes & Economic Disparity, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Discrimination