Elite Capture

How the Powerful Took over Identity Politics

121 pages

English language

Published Aug. 18, 2022 by Haymarket Books.

ISBN:
978-1-64259-688-5
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OCLC Number:
1267687188

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4 stars (1 review)

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 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 …

3 editions

One of these article-turned-into-book books

4 stars

This is a book based on an article, or rather it is an article inflated to the size of a book. I was able to tell after 30 pages, and got confirmed afterwards. This seems like a common practice in the US publishing world: an article-sized essay gets inflated through the addition of an introduction where terms are defined, and the insertion of examples. The argumentative structure stays the same, only now instead of occasionally nodding towards an example to support an argument, every argument gets one to several examples that are stretched to wikipedia length. This practice isn't necessarily a bad thing. In the case of this book, some of the examples given are things I didn't know anything about (the decolonial struggles of Guinea-Bissau and Cabo Verde), so this is a nice opportunity to learn something new. But all in all, this practice makes good essays longer and …