Days into the national insurrection that boiled over after the police lynching of George Floyd, in May, 2020, Muriel Bowser, a Black woman and the mayor of Washington, D.C., ordered that the words “Black Lives Matter” be painted in mustard yellow along Sixteenth Street, near the White House. The symbolism radiated from multiple directions. Almost a week earlier, law-enforcement agents had used tear gas to clear Lafayette Park, which intersects the street, of protesters. The mural was a thumb in the eye of Trump, who certainly took it as such. He thundered, in response, that Bowser was “incompetent” and “constantly coming back to us for ‘handouts.’ ”

In the fall of 2021, Bowser announced that the segment of Sixteenth Street displaying the mural—renamed as Black Lives Matter Plaza—had been turned into a permanent monument. She explained, “The Black Lives Matter mural is a representation of an expression of our saying no, but also identifying and claiming a part of our city that had been taken over by federal forces.” Speaking of its wider significance, she said, “There are people who are craving to be heard and to be seen, and to have their humanity recognized, and we had the opportunity to send that message loud and clear on a very important street in our city.”

Last spring, nearly two years after her confrontation with Trump, Bowser proposed a new spending budget for Washington, D.C., that spoke as loudly as the paint used to decorate B.L.M. Plaza. In a press conference celebrating a surplus created in part by the federal government’s pandemic stimulus, Bowser announced, “We’ve been able to invest in something we’ve been wanting to invest in a long time—the sports complex. We’ve been able to invest in a new jail.” Bowser was promising to spend more than two hundred and fifty million dollars to eventually replace part of the existing jail. She was also proposing thirty million dollars to hire and retain new police officers, with the goal of bringing the force to a total of four thousand members; another nearly ten million dollars would add one hundred and seventy new speed cameras across the municipality.

Despite Bowser’s very public embrace of the slogan “Black Lives Matter,” even enshrining its existence in the nation’s capital, the D.C. Mayor was now advancing a political agenda that stood in stark contrast to the movement’s demand to defund the police. Instead, Bowser had denuded the most radical imaginings of the movement into the decidedly vague “craving to be heard,” while also wielding it as a shield to protect her from activists’ accusations that her policies would harm Black communities. Bowser was able to benefit from the assumption that, as a Black woman who had angered and been insulted by Trump after painting “Black Lives Matter” on a public street, she could be trusted to do what was in the best interest of the Black community.

The most profound changes in Black life in the past several decades have been along the lines of class and status, creating political and social chasms between élites and ordinary Black people. After the struggles of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, it was no longer politically tenable in the U.S. to make decisions about minorities without their participation. This was especially true in cities that had experienced riots and rebellions. But exclusion gave way to shallow representation of African Americans in politics and the private sector as evidence of color blindness and progress. The rooms where decisions were being made were no longer entirely white and male; they were now punctuated with token representations of race and gender.

Not only could the few stand in to represent the many but their existence could also serve as evidence that the system could work for those who had formerly been excluded. And these new representatives could also use the language of identity politics, because many of them continued to experience racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination. But their aspirations were different from those who first used these left-wing political frameworks. The new representatives were not interested in transforming the system so much as they were trying to navigate it.

These tensions are strained when Black élites or political operatives claim to speak on behalf of the Black public or Black social movements while also engaging in political actions that either are in opposition to the movement or reinforce the status quo. It is a process described by the writer and philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò as “elite capture.” The concept, derived from the politics of global development, describes scenarios in which local élites in developing countries would seize resources intended for the much larger public. Táíwò explains that the term is used “to describe the way socially advantaged people tend to gain control over benefits meant for everyone” (if only rhetorically).

Táíwò, a professor of philosophy at Georgetown, published his first book earlier this year. Titled “Reconsidering Reparations,” it argues that, if colonialism and slavery were responsible for the maldistribution of wealth and resources that has made Black and brown people particularly vulnerable to today’s climate crisis, then the repair should be just as expansive or capable of remaking the world. In 2020, Táíwò wrote several essays critiquing the variety of ways that the concept of “identity politics” has been transformed from a radical invention of the Black feminist left of the sixties and seventies into a placid appeal to racial and gender representation. The themes of these essays have now been spun into a tight, short volume published by Haymarket Books, titled “Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and Everything Else).”

Táíwò begins his examination of identity politics with the Combahee River Collective, a group of Black lesbian socialists that formed in the late nineteen-seventies. Among them were Demita Frazier and the twin sisters Barbara and Beverly Smith, who wrote the Combahee River Statement, in which they coined the term “identity politics.” The women were veterans of the antiwar and feminist movements but also connected to the civil-rights movement and Black-liberation struggles of the era. In their wide range of experiences, the issues of importance to them—namely organizing against forced sterilizations and intimate-partner violence against women—were rarely taken seriously by others, including Black men and white women.

In the Combahee River Statement, the authors explained that Black women had to map out their own political agenda: “We realize that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us.” They continued, “This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression. . . . We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough.”

In this way, standpoint epistemology, or the ability to acquire knowledge because of your lived experience or social standing, is closely linked to the Combahee’s vision of identity politics. It was a powerful rejection of the status quo in the social sciences, which for many years had relied upon powerful outsiders, typically white men, to extoll their own wisdom about the lives of the marginalized, excluded, and oppressed. The powerful social movements of the era swept aside the common sense of white-male authority, transforming the marginalized from examined objects into subjects capable of controlling their own destiny.

Táíwò describes a subsequent shift in which these frameworks have become unmoored from their outsider status to be used by rich and powerful people, including people of color, to maintain the status quo. He adds that “recent trends in identity politics seem to be supercharging, rather than restraining, élite capture.” He cites examples of Black élites using radical slogans or other kinds of social-movement invocations to further the status quo while appearing to be aligned with the movement and Black public opinion. There are also more complex examples of activists using undemocratic forms of organizing that prioritize the insights and acumen of paid staff and organizers over the working-class public. In some dramatic examples, ostensibly grassroots organizations have transformed themselves into foundations to dispense money and advice to grassroots organizers, as was the case with the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation. Táíwò speaks directly to the dynamic that can emerge in these situations: “In the absence of the right kinds of checks or constraints, the subgroup of people with power over and access to the resources used to describe, define, and create political realities . . . will capture the group’s values, forcing people to coordinate on a narrower social project that disproportionately represents elite interests.” This was Audre Lorde’s pointed insight when she remarked that the “master’s tools” cannot dismantle the master’s house; the oppressed cannot use the same methods as the oppressor and still hope for a just outcome.

Though élite capture is a general phenomenon, there is something particularly jarring about its effects on Black politics, especially in the United States. Given the history of racial subjugation of Black people and the prevalence of state-sponsored white supremacy well into the twentieth century, a collective experience attributed to, by Táíwò and others, “racial capitalism,” Americans tend to see racial categories as stable, if not static. This is also true among African Americans, even though within Black communities there is much more awareness of the tensions of social class that pull at the threads assumed in the universalizing trait of blackness. And, because racism remains powerful across categories of class, there is an assumption that a single Black community is united around an ongoing struggle for Black freedom.

Consider the experiences of LaToya Cantrell, the first Black woman to be the mayor of New Orleans. During the protests of 2020, Cantrell was a target of labor activists, who were angry about the lack of sick leave and other provisions for workers in the tourism industry, and who rallied outside her home, where she was working during the height of the pandemic. In an open letter, Cantrell invoked her identity to rebuke the protesters. She wrote:

This moment must redress those who have been marginalized by our
tourism economy, by failed policies, and by an economic collapse that
has hit the least of us the hardest. It cannot be about misdirected
anger. It cannot be about empty gestures. And it cannot be about
storming angrily into a residential neighborhood leaving my daughter
feeling terrorized, a 12 year-old black girl, whose mother rose from
the epicenter of the crack cocaine epidemic, whose family did not come
from a place of privilege. . . . My father was a victim
of the crack epidemic. My stepfather was another casualty of the same
scourge—which ran unchecked by those in power, while it decimated the
black community. My brother was system-involved and turned his life
around. My stepbrother was system-involved and taken from us by
violence at 18. This is not a story about privilege and power. I can
stand up and say Black Lives Matter because I’ve personally had to
fight to make that true every day of my life.

Cantrell’s personal story is a moving one but also one that was dispatched to deflect legitimate protest: she is the mayor; she holds a position of power and authority in local government. This tactic is powerful not because the people it’s directed at don’t understand that élites can be manipulative and evoke personal stories to conjure empathy, but because the persistence of racism makes the stories resonate personally. And, when public officials are subjected to racist attacks, as they often are—just think about the Obamas—then the feelings of familiarity and solidarity are intensified in ways that resemble what political scientist Michael Dawson has described as “linked fate” or the idea that the social, economic, and political fortunes of African Americans are tied together because of shared identity and history.

These appeals to identity politics are much more impactful than the promises of corporate executives to spend money to make Black lives matter. Nevertheless, as Táíwò writes, “treating such elites’ interests as necessarily or even presumptively aligned with the broader group’s interests involves a political naivete we cannot afford.” This confusion then “functions as a form of racial Reaganomics: a strategy reliant on fantasies about the exchange rate between the attention economy and the material economy.” Táíwò adds that we need to “fix the social structure itself—the rooms we interact in, and the house they make up. Deference, as a strategy, bears at best a tenuous relationship to this goal.”

These politics are not only present in big-city encounters between elected officials but also within political movements and coalitions. Táíwò describes this as the tendency to “pass the mic” to supposedly the “most impacted” in a given room or meeting. As he explains, “At face value, a commitment to these ideas should help us resist and contain elite capture. They should provide a basis for respecting knowledge that the institutions of the world otherwise want to discredit.” But, for Táíwò, the focus on deference or passing the mike can be counterproductive, in that it “locates attentional injustice in the selection of spokespeople and book lists taken to represent the marginalized.” He’s not suggesting we return to political meetings dominated by conversations between white men. As he clarifies, “We all deserve these attentional goods, which are often denied, even to the ‘elites’ of marginalized and stigmatized groups.” But he uses his own experiences as an example of the problem in the approach. More than a few times, Táíwò has had the mike passed to him because he is Black and a first-generation Nigerian American in the United States, though to center him as more authentically aware of social injustice ignores Táíwò’s class privilege, as an American kid who went to good schools, with Advanced Placement and honors classes, compared with the fate of tens of millions of Nigerians and many others who grew up in the U.S. He concedes that it may be better to hear from him than to hear from a white person of a similar class background, but he nevertheless maintains that “these are the last facts we should want to hold fixed. And if our aim is simply to do better than the epistemic norms that we’ve inherited from a history of explicit global apartheid, that is an awfully low bar to set.”

To that end, Táíwò is interested in constructive, as opposed to deference, politics. “A constructive political culture would focus on outcome over process,” he writes—“the pursuit of specific goals or end results rather than avoiding complicity in injustice or promoting purely moral or aesthetic principles.” Táíwò does not get into the details of how activist groups might go about building campaigns, but he does see the politics of deference within these groups as undermining their potential. As he writes, “To opt for deference, rather than interdependence, may soothe short-term psychological wounds. But it does so at a steep cost: it may undermine the goals that motivated the project—and it entrenches a politics that does not serve those fighting for freedom over privilege, for collective liberation over mere parochial advantage.” He says, of traumatic experience, “It is not what gives me a special right to speak, to evaluate, or to decide for a group. It is a concrete, experiential manifestation of the vulnerability that connects me to most of the people on this earth. It comes between me and other people not as a wall, but as a bridge.”

With this definition of trauma, Táíwò invokes the feminist classic “This Bridge Called My Back,” and the political debates over social change in which the concept of identity politics emerged. In an interview, Barbara Smith, of the Combahee River Collective, once talked about the importance of the idea of a bridge as a way to overcome difference, saying that the notion of, “ ‘If I don’t have a particular identity, I’m not allowed to work on a particular issue’—that sounds to me like an excuse. That sounds to me like O.K., so that’s what somebody decides if they’re not really willing to go there, and go through the struggle of crossing boundaries and working across differences.”

What Táíwò and the Combahee River Collective, of which Audre Lorde was also a member, were arguing is not to paper over our differences for the sake of building inclusive movements. Rather, they demonstrate that identity politics is an important entry point into a world deeply defined by racism and gender inequality and hatred, but it alone is not enough. We must find the ties that bind us together, to see how our oppressions are linked, to build bridges to each other’s struggles and find ways to unite. This is the opposite of élite capture; it is a remaking of the world. As Táíwò, echoing Marx, reminds us, the point, after all, is to change it. ♦