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Elite Capture

How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and Everything Else)

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Elite Capture

By: Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò
Narrated by: Jaime Lincoln Smth
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About this listen

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.

©2022 Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (P)2022 Blackstone Publishing
Politics & Government Racism & Discrimination Social Classes & Economic Disparity Thought-Provoking Identity Politics

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Changing how we play this rigged game

“Though we start from different levels of privilege or advantage, this journey is not a matter of figuring out who should bow to whom, but simply one of figuring out how best to join forces… we will need each other to get where we’re going. And getting there, after all, is the point.”

Táíwò’s clearly articulated and approachable text outlines the ways in which Empire and its class/political elites have learnt to weaponise the very tools that the oppressed have developed in struggle against it/them. This is not a case of lambasting “identity politics”, but rather a careful analysis of how co-optation might be identified and resisted, through Táíwò’s conception of a “constructive politics” of solidarity that avoids “deference” when what is truly needed is to find ways to combine forces and enact systems-level change.

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