Elite Capture

How the Powerful Took over Identity Politics

121 pages

English language

Published April 10, 2022 by Haymarket Books.

ISBN:
9781642596885
OCLC Number:
1267687188

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4 stars (1 review)

“Identity politics” is everywhere, polarizing discourse from the campaign trail to the classroom and amplifying antagonisms in the media, both online and off. But the compulsively referenced phrase 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 and a critical understanding of racial capitalism, Táíwò identifies the process by which a radical concept can be stripped of its political substance and liberatory potential by becoming the victim of elite capture—deployed by political, social, and …

2 editions

a solid Haymarket, straddling academia and pop essay

4 stars

Elite capture conscripts non-elite into propagating the structures of the elite. Riffing on "regulatory capture", colonial capitalism's constant simplification of rich relationships to consumptive signalling, and weaving in accounts of Guinea-Bissau's liberation from Portugese rule, this emphasizes the need to return "identity politics" to "alliance across difference" and not accept the shape of the rooms we're given that are more "did this or that brand post a #BLM tweet quick enough?" than "what would societal structural changes look like to hear the marginalized?"