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

"Yes, as I understand it, the book came out of the essay. Táíwò argues that there is a confusion in how we talk about identity politics. On the one hand, in its original formulation by socialist Black feminists in the Combahee River Collective, it was about using our positions in society—our identities—to foreground important issues that could lead into coalition politics. It was a framework for respecting people’s experience and history and using that to help make large-scale collective change possible. On the other hand, it has become a kind of watered-down demand to just support anyone of a particular identity because you happen to share that identity or believe it should be supported. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Táíwò gives the long history of this shift, and shows how ‘elite capture,’ or the process by which those in power are able to coopt a message to their own ends, explains how identity politics shifted its meaning. More than taking the term back, however, he wants us to rethink how we do politics in general. It should not be about symbolic gains for individuals with particular identities. But rather a general transformation—rooted in how we think about the world—toward a future of egalitarianism in both wealth and power. One of the things that struck me about the Boston Review essay was that it ended with the idea of ‘consciousness raising.’ The concept returns in the book form, and gets extended analysis through discussions of education and culture. Crucial to Táíwò’s argument is that we too often forget our agency not just to make small changes within a system, but to question the system itself. We can make bigger changes by coming together, and we only do that because of an understanding of ourselves. As he writes, it is “vulnerability that connects me to most the people on this earth. It comes between me and other people not as a wall, but as a bridge.” He is saying that inward-looking self-help about personal traumas is all well and good, but it won’t solve the deeper problems that perpetually recreate trauma. Imagine the possible successful self-help here: not only working through your difficulties by bonding with others but also helping to achieve victory over what harmed you by ensuring that it never happens again."