Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics

This really threw me for a loop. It is a pretty provocative book that challenges a lot of aspects of the social justice orthodoxy of today. It gives language and voice to a lot of the questions, confusions, and difficulties that many feel intuitively about “deference politics”: does focusing on identity markers or trauma histories actually get us closer to reshaping the material reality that created those traumas? Or is it just an easy way for people (or more specifically, elites) to feel like they are “good people” while not actually changing the status quo?

I really appreciate the sense in which Taiwo's goal is to actually radically change the world, and he feels this is done at the institutional and societal level and less at the individual dialogue or small group “spaces”-level. As one review of the book put it, “While deference politics identifies the main problem as a lack of black female CEOs, constructive politics critiques the very existence of a CEO class.” I really resonate with his sense that communal organizing based around the liberative goal at hand ends up producing more results than policing who is in the room and how they exist there.

I always enjoy books that challenge all the usual “sides” of an issue. He's saying a lot of the same things that, for example, a Tucker Carlson might say. From my right-leaning friends, family, and media sources, I have often heard these sorts of sentiments. “Focusing so much on different identity markers gets in the way of seeing us as just human—it just divides, it doesn't unite us into a group that can do things.” “To whatever extent there are still problems among these groups, simply ‘representation' isn't going to fix it.” “Why would we want ourselves or our credentials to be defined by the worst thing that have ever happened to us or people like us?” “Why don't we choose the best person or group to get the job done and less on all the identity markers?” “Can I only talk about an issue I'm concerned about if I am a marginalized member of that minority? I can't have an opinion or say in this?” “The problem is more about class and economics, not race and identity.” Etc. Etc. Etc. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about.

However, I love that Taiwo can say things along these lines but then says them even as he promotes the black radical tradition, liberation politics, environmentalism, redistribution of material goods, and a Marxist seizing of the means of production by the organized common people.

It also matters that he is the one saying these things. Even if my gut agrees with much of what he is saying, I still don't think it is my place to say it. I still think that my own intuitions are largely shaped by my limited cultural perspectives, so I do have to listen to others' voices (also known as deferring to them) before my own in these matters. So, if there is any truth to these sentiments that roll around inside of me (and other white people) sometimes, that needs to be voiced from within that marginalized community and tradition and not from outside people like me.

I also really like how his account of the “elite” is more dynamic than the usual critique. While some people talk of this “elite” as almost an organized conspiracy trying to keep people down to maintain power, Taiwo talks more about eliteness as such. It almost sounds like the way many people speak of white supremacy and structural racism: you don't have to be a racist to be perpetuating or acting out of racism and doing racist things. Similarly, in Taiwo's account, the identity of the “elite” is slippery and shifting and can change context to context. It's not always the rich white male at the top of an organization. It can be whoever is wielding power in a given space—including the marginalized individual that's been given deference, the group microphone, and the authority to declare who is in and out of the “room”. “Eliteness”—and who benefits from identity and whatever space they're in—shifts and morphs, perhaps even moment-by-moment, based on a lot of different factors. And there are no easy answers.

So Taiwo's book is an excellent critique of the cultural situation as it is and gets us closer to having good guardrails on our justice efforts. Having his thinking in mind might give us at least a little more pause before abandoning a certain legislative effort because it doesn't go far enough, or before declaring someone “lost” to the cause or “canceled”. I know my own privilege makes it too easy for me to say this, but I am all for anything that gets us more coalition building and less bitter division.

However, I've got a good number of questions, confusions, and critiques of this book that keeps me from going all in with Taiwo.

First, I think his account has a lot of internal contradictions. He'll beautifully articulate how even in small groups this sort of eliteness and elite capture happens, but then doesn't seem to recognize how this still exists within the examples he gives. Nearly every example and story of someone's life who embodied these principles is the story of someone who at various times, in various settings, were themselves elites through whom good things were accomplished as a function and direct consequence of them being an elite.

Carter Woodson was able to be published and be in the leadership of numerous entities. The revolutionaries of the various countries he mentions all became the Presidents and leaders of those countries, and they had to force and coerce a lot of their changes onto citizens that may or may not have consented to that rule and those changes. In the Flint water crisis, they still had to form groups with leaders and PR representatives and lawyers—and even then, progress only happened by pressuring the existing power structures to use their power towards better ends, not by tearing down the power structures and creating an entirely different material world. Even the labor unions, which Taiwo speaks of as almost the purest form of coalition building and constructive politics, have many layers of bureaucracy, leadership, committees, and power. You simply cannot escape the existence of elites and the necessity to try and use it to better ends.

And I think this critique flows from maybe the essential, foundational difficulty I have with his entire view: his Anarcho-Marxist commitment to a materialist account and analysis to everything. That philosophical commitment guides the entire book. To him, the unequal material ordering of society is the problem and reordering those material conditions to a greater amount of equality is the solution—no matter how that comes about. In the book, there seems to be no difference in how he tells these “success stories”—whether a group educates kids into liberation or uses guerilla warfare to slaughter thousands of the “oppressors”. What seems to matter is “getting shit done” by whatever means seems most effective in bringing the redistribution of material resources.

I think this is why he almost rolls his eyes at all the “identity politics” and “deference” afforded to marginalized folks—it's not about changing the material reality, but reordering society through changing immaterial structures, cultures, dynamics, and relationships.

And this is where I cannot follow Taiwo. My account of reality is wrapped up in both material and immaterial aspects of the world. In fact, I don't think I can give a coherent account of why I would want to change material realities for others if it weren't for immaterial aspects. And not just religious ones. Even abstract secular ideas of human rights and human dignity don't get a lot of attention in Taiwo's book, which is seeking a purely pragmatic and materialist politics.

He says in passing two times in the book, I believe, that a coalitional politics is inherently a moral politics because it would be about accomplishing moral ends, but he doesn't go further than that. I think he anticipates people being like, “wait, you want me to have a coalition with that person who has done those things to people like me?”, and he seems to just sort of wave off the concern saying, “don't worry—if we're trying to accomplish good things, it'll attract good people.”

But that's not how it works. Human societies are greater than the sum of their materialist conditions. On Taiwo's terms, we've had coalitional politics for most of this country's history and it has not ended up more just or materially equal. That's precisely what has given rise to “deference politics” in the first place. “Justice” is itself an immaterial, undefined value and good which you cannot pursue, give an account of, or fight for on purely materialist, pragmatic grounds. It is wrapped up in ethics and morality—ideas notably absent from Taiwo's writing.

Taiwo's account (and Marxism in general, I believe) has an incredibly deficient view of human psychology. Not only is it almost exclusively limited to material interests of people, but it narrows those interests too much. History has shown us that when you don't give actual attention, focus, and intentionality to the makeup of “the room”, it's almost always going to end up being powerful people that look like one another making decisions on behalf of others without that power who do not look like them. It seems like Taiwo would say this is fine as long as their goal is ultimately material justice and liberation. But humans (and groups) don't have just one interest or goal at a time. That group may have come together to accomplish a good, liberative goal, but their individual beliefs on the why and how will differ greatly based on their interests, experience, and identities.

Within my faith tradition, it matters how and why good things are accomplished. It is simply not worth it to (as one writer once put in) “build God's kingdom using the devil's tools”. No matter the goal, the flow of power, dignity, and voice are foundational to the “goodness” of the good in question. I would love to see Taiwo engage Black liberation theology. There, he would find the idea of the “blackness of God”, where God is found in whatever group is marginalized, powerless, and in need of liberation. Power, then, flows from the bottom-up. On one hand it is, in a sense, uber-deference politics: we not only recognize authority based on identity, but we recognize God based on it. But at the same time, it emphasizes the suffering nature of history that brought us here. Divine deference to “the lowly” is not a gleeful, plundering, victorious process, but one where God has entered suffering to bring good from it, not to make the suffering itself good or a badge of honor. It is a deference borne of compassion, not privilege.

If I were to try and synthesize the good I take from Taiwo's book with other convictions of mine, I would maybe go int his direction. Not a “coalitional politics”, but a “compassional politics”, where no one's hands are clean and everyone requires compassion—even the oppressors (this is also Paulo Freire's belief—an activist whom Taiwo endorses wholeheartedly without engaging the entire moral and ethical structure of this thinking). The “deference” in this case is not artificially lending expertise, power, or privilege to people based on trauma or identity, but is an exercise of love, lament, and recognition. But the slipperiness of this eliteness and privilege from which we need liberation means that this all needs to happen with a profound and difficult ethic of mutuality among us. The compassion has to be tenaciously from all sides, for all sides.

Thinking about this, I'm reminded of the idea of right-of-way in the law. My understanding is that, technically, no road laws say who “has” the right-of-way. No one ever has it; the laws only say who is supposed to yield it. That would be my view here with regard to privilege and power.

Especially in micro (and maybe even mezzo) contexts and interactions, privilege and eliteness are too shifting to say with confidence at any particular moment who has it, who doesn't, and who needs to act differently based on it. Instead, in my view, we need a radical mutual commitment to yielding privilege one to another. I as a white straight cis male yield space and privilege to those marginalized so I can see divinity itself and integrate their experience into mine; but I also do this in hope that they can yield the privilege that affords them so they may also take in my experience and voice.

This mutual self-giving ethos is idealized and difficult, but shooting for it is a much better way, I think, than simply saying our stories and identities and histories just get in the way of making our lives better. Because honestly, my suspicion is that humans crave knowing and being known more than they long for better material circumstances. And frankly, I'm also guessing that sort of ethos would lend itself to even more fruitful coalitions that can change material reality more than Taiwo imagines.

So in the end, like I said, I really appreciate how Taiwo's thinking complexifies these newish social justice norms that we've maybe implemented too simplistically. The world is simply not separated so neatly into good and bad people, or elites and regular people. Marginalization is not itself a privilege or qualification, and some ways of focusing on or emphasizing that can be performative and actually further entrench powerful interests. We definitely should have less policing of ever-more granular aspects of society, speech, intent, and position, and we should seek new kinds of coalitions with tangible goals in mind.

But to neglect these factors altogether is to go too far and to reduce reality even more simplistically than identity politics might. Human interests are far more complicated than arrangements of mere resources and materials. We ought not get inordinately focused or stuck on one side of that reality to the detriment of the other, but we should keep both in mind. We fight for and attend to material realities not as ends in and of themselves, but as ways to support immaterial human dignity and flourishing; and likewise, we attend to “identities” and privilege and oppression in order to see the effects of material reality as it is now and to imagine what it could be and how to get there—together.