Just over two years have passed since the murder of George Floyd, an event that unleashed massive protests and initiated a worldwide “racial reckoning,” the effects of which are still ricocheting. However, it’s safe to say that few of these effects have redounded much to the material benefit of people like Floyd, a precariously employed, opiate-addicted member of the black underclass. Instead, the impacts have been felt most powerfully in elite newsrooms, Ivy League universities, cultural institutions, endowed foundations, and corporate boardrooms. In all of these spaces, proclaiming a commitment to “anti-racism” has become practically obligatory.
As a result, two years into the post-Floyd reckoning, ironies abound. Not only did Floyd’s death have its most notable consequences in realms he could not have been more distant from in life, but the demands of the movement mobilized by his murder, such as “defund the police,” poll better among affluent white liberals than in the black community. In addition, the Black Lives Matter organization (as opposed to the mere sequence of words) took in record donations during 2020’s protests, over which it is now embroiled in controversy amid allegations that its leaders used much of this influx to enrich themselves.
The Nigerian-American philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, an academic rising star with a position at Georgetown, attempts to account for these and similar developments in Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and Everything Else). While Táíwò’s is not the first book to take on the question of how ideas and slogans once viewed as radical are now standard fare everywhere from Fortune 500 boardrooms to the CIA, it is probably the first critique of the embrace of identity politics at the highest levels written by an author sympathetic to the core premises of identity politics.
Previous takes on the elite embrace of “wokeness” fall into one of two categories. The first is that of influential anti-woke polemicists whose ranks include conservatives such as Tucker Carlson and Christopher Rufo, as well as the “classical liberals” of the so-called intellectual dark web. The second is from a faction of the Left: “class-reductionist” Marxists such as Adolph Reed, Walter Benn Michaels, and Catherine Liu. These two groups object to identity politics for different reasons. The first group believes it is an outside force that is now corroding the institutional and procedural bases of liberal democracy and free-market capitalism from within. The second considers it a top-down, divide-and-rule project that props up capitalism by disabling working-class solidarity.
A left-wing academic who seems to imagine the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism as the ultimate horizon of politics, Táíwò has greater affinities with the second group. His concern with the incursion of identity politics into elite spaces is not that it will undermine capitalism but that it has had detrimental effects on movements struggling against the capitalist system. However, he differs from Reed, Michaels, and Liu, who view identity politics as, in its essence, inimical to working-class power. Táíwò, in contrast, believes identity politics began as a salutary insurgent force but has been corrupted by its presence in elite spaces.
As it happens, Táíwò first outlined this argument in an essay in the Boston Review just a few weeks before George Floyd’s death. The events of subsequent months made his concept of the “elite capture” of identity politics more intuitive to people previously unfamiliar with debates on this subject within the Left. While Elite Capture is a short book (150 pages) marketed to nonacademic readers, much of Táíwò’s argument remains in an abstract, philosophical register. Hence, the book’s impact on mainstream discussions will likely revolve around the core concept that furnishes the book’s title: “elite capture,” which he defines as the process by which “political projects can be hijacked in principle or in effect by the well-positioned and resourced.”
Left-wing critics of identity politics often note that one factor in its embrace by the mainstream is the emergence of a more racially and religiously diverse American elite in the past several decades. Within elite spaces, the emphasis on group representation can help middle-class and upper-class minorities gain footholds in the C-suite and other realms where they were previously excluded while doing little for the George Floyds of the world. At various points, Táíwò also makes the point that the demand to defer to people of nonwhite backgrounds often favors high-status minorities. But at other times, he falls back into a crude identification of race and privilege and a simultaneous elision of class.
Táíwò does not elaborate in detail on his differences with left-wing skeptics of wokeness or respond to specific writers such as Reed and Liu. The closest he comes is in a passage where he refers to unnamed “critics and detractors” of identity politics who “claim that they reflect the social preoccupations of ‘rich white people’ or the ‘professional managerial class.’” This situation, he argues, is in fact “something that identity politics, wokeness, and the like have with everything else in our lives,” since “the increasing domination of elite interests” is a pervasive force in an unequal world. Hence, “It’s not just that wokeness is too white. It’s that everything is.” Táíwò’s slippage from “elite” to “white” reveals a certain vagueness in his definition of “elite.”
According to Táíwò, the Combahee River Collective, the black feminist group that originated the notion of identity politics in the 1970s, were themselves combating forms of elite capture prevalent in their day. The male-dominated black freedom struggle had marginalized women, while the feminist cause had marginalized black women, and both had largely neglected the discrimination facing gays and lesbians. But as Táíwò argues, contrary to common stereotypes about identity politics, the Combahee River Collective weren’t arguing that their identity gave them a privileged standpoint on the larger political predicament: “They weren’t establishing themselves as a moral aristocracy — they were building a political viewpoint out of common experience to work toward ‘common problems.’” Their aim, he argues, was to “forg[e] alliances across differences.”
For the Combahee group’s ideas to have been subject to “elite capture,” it would have to be the case that they originated in a nonelite space. Did they? Táíwò doesn’t directly address the question, but the answer is less clear than he seems to imply. The collective consisted mainly of college-educated writers and academics whose initial gatherings took place in two Massachusetts college towns. It seems hard not to view them as part of what sociologist E. Franklin Frazier called the “black bourgeoisie,” which, in the parts of Táíwò’s argument devoted to Frazier’s work, is deployed as a synonym of “elite.” Rather than “elite capture,” then, we might think of the mainstreaming of identity politics as a process of intra-elite influence, in which ideas that originated among marginal counter-elites eventually found broader elite acceptance — not a totally unfamiliar phenomenon in the history of ideas.
The book’s subtitle, How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics, seems to promise a certain amount of historical explanation of how we arrived at a moment when banks, military contractors, and intelligence agencies are competing in wokeness olympics to recruit top college graduates. However, Táíwò leaves us none the wiser on the specific history of the recent “great awokening,” focusing instead on the pervasiveness of “elite capture” in various times and places. Indeed, the examples he examines in most detail come not from the past two or even 20 years but from Frazier’s classic study Black Bourgeoisie and the protracted independence struggles of several African nations against Portuguese colonizers.
The Cape Verdean and Guinean revolutionaries Táíwò cites approvingly throughout his book, such as Amílcar Cabral, were Marxists. Táíwò himself appears not to be of the same persuasion, particularly insofar as his central analytical concept, “elite,” does not belong to the Marxist lexicon. While Marxist terms such as “capitalist,” “bourgeoisie,” and “proletariat” have their own shortcomings, they offer more precision than “elite,” which may colloquially refer to a social status attained not only by economic capital but by education, place of residence, family background, and various other factors. Táíwò, a child of prosperous immigrants (as he tells us in the book) with a tenure-track position at a top university, is himself an elite by many definitions.
But it’s not the capture of identity politics by people like himself that seems to concern him. Nor is it likely he will be all too worried by the book’s glowing reception in the more exclusive realms of the media and academia. The book’s high-profile blurbs and the positive write-ups it has received suggest its argument meets an ideological need for today’s Left. To put it simply, many who not long ago found books by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi revelatory may also find something to object to in the deployment of “anti-racist” PR by corporations from Uber to BlackRock. Perhaps the key selling point of Elite Capture, in the end, is the way it splits the anti-racist baby. It offers a rationale for its readers’ incipient skepticism of corporate identity politics dross while leaving their reverence for the identity-politicking public intellectuals in the media and academia intact.
Geoff Shullenberger is a writer and academic. He blogs at outsidertheory.com. Follow him on Twitter: @daily_barbarian.
