Overview

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.

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Reviews

Among the churn of books on 'wokeness' and 'political correctness, ' philosopher Olufe mi O. Taiwo's Elite Capture clearly stands out. With calm, clarity, erudition, and authority, Taiwo 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 Taiwo in this book. -- Jason Stanley, author of How Fascism Works Olufemi Taiwo 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 With global breath, clarity and precision, Olufe mi O. Taiwo 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

Author Information

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University. He is also the author of Reconsidering Reparations.

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