Coquitlam Public Library

Elite capture, how the powerful took over identity politics (and everything else), Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò

eng

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Elite capture

electronic resource

Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò

how the powerful took over identity politics (and everything else)

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, Ol?f?́mi O. T??w? deftly argues, is not with "identity politics" itself. Through a substantive engagement with the global Black radical tradition, T??w? 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. T??w?'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. "Among the churn of books on 'wokeness' and 'political correctness,' philosopher Ol?f?́mi O. T??w?'s Elite Capture clearly stands out. With calm, clarity, erudition, and authority, T??w? 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 T??w? in this book." "With global breath, clarity and precision, Ol?f?́mi O. T??w? 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." "Ol?f?mi T??w? 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."

adult

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