When Olúfemi O. Táíwò was an undergraduate at Indiana University, he traveled with his parents to their homeland, Nigeria, for his grandfather’s funeral in the southwestern city of Abeokuta. To reach the family compound where they would be staying, the travelers chartered a convoy and an armed escort. “At that point, it was some of the most concentrated poverty I’d ever seen in my life,” Táíwò, who is 32, told me. He spent most of that night in a nauseated daze — malaria, he thinks — and was shocked to wake up in midair. Armed men were storming the compound, and Táíwò’s father had thrown him out of bed in a futile effort to escape. The family was held at gunpoint for hours while the burglars rummaged for goods and cash.
Nobody was injured, but the experience was formative. For Táíwò, now an assistant professor of philosophy at Georgetown University, the limits of catchall identity categories were made evident when his family cruised past beggars with the car windows up and their jewelry glinting. “I wouldn’t be saying something false if I identified myself as a Nigerian American,” he told me. “But I would at the very least be saying something misleading” by suggesting “I was somehow representative of all of those people.”
On May 3, Táíwò published his second book, Elite Capture,which deals with the confused ways the concept of identity is used in American political culture. The idea of elite capture has been around for decades and typically describes how the most advantaged people in a group take control of benefits that are meant for everybody — as, for example, how a leader in a developing country might use foreign-aid money to line his own pockets. Táíwò’s innovation is applying this idea to identity politics, the concept devised in 1977 by the Black radical feminists of the Combahee River Collective. He argues that their project has been hijacked. “We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity,” they wrote, because organizing around what was good for people at the bottom of social hierarchies would be good for all oppressed people. But rather than using personal identity as an entry point to building radical coalitions, as these innovators intended, elites are using it as a tool to advance their own narrow interests.
He gives recent examples: when Washington, D.C., mayor Muriel Bowser had the words BLACK LIVES MATTER painted on a street days after her police force was brutalizing protesters in 2020, and the “Humans of CIA” video series, in which the agency tried to attract new recruits by appealing, for instance, to their queer identities. Both were efforts to pacify dissent or to rebrand violent institutions using the symbols of identity politics.
Photo: Elliott Jerome Brown Jr.
Táíwò is a relaxed and unpretentious communicator given to long pauses while he figures out the clearest way to get his thought across. His temperament is well suited to making sense of our inflection point. The past several years have been tumultuous, with the departure of the Obamas from the White House and Donald Trump’s bigoted rise opening up novel ways to think about identity and how it shapes experience. One result has been social movements — Black Lives Matter, the George Floyd uprisings, Me Too — which, for all their merits, were easily reduced to branded content. The misuse of identity politics has led to Nancy Pelosi wearing kente cloth but has done little to address actual inequality. So Táíwò’s project is reclamation. “It’s a starting point,” he said of the concept’s original use. “It’s compatible with working on common problems with people from other identity groups.”
These distinctions were uniquely salient where he came from. Born in 1990, Táíwò moved with his family at around the age of 1 from the San Francisco Bay Area, where his parents had immigrated to attend graduate school in the early 1980s, to the northern suburbs of Cincinnati. His mother got a pharmacology job with Procter & Gamble, while his father, an engineer by training, stayed home to care for their first child, Táíwò’s autistic older brother. The physical landscape was a sharp contrast to their first American home — chain stores, strip malls, and other emblems of white suburban affluence replaced the mom-and-pop commerce and Black Power reverberations of Oakland — but the social one was more indelible, composed mostly of a tight-knit Nigerian diasporic community.
In Elite Capture, Táíwò refers only obliquely to his personal experiences with violence. (The story about Abeokuta does not make an appearance.) But his upbringing is deeply entwined with the fact that genocide, in the form of the 1966 anti-Igbo pogrom that led to the Nigeria-Biafra War between 1967 and 1970, was a living memory for many people he grew up around. Their identity-based experiences and suffering, what you might call their Nigerian-ness, did not automatically make them wise or good or heroic — to say nothing of establishing them as natural authorities on what a just world should look like. “There were people with anger and other emotional-regulation issues,” he told me. “There were incidents of abuse, especially of kids.”
As a result, faddish calls to “listen to the most affected” or “center the most marginalized,” which abound in the academic and leftist activist circles he occupies and bleed out into the corporate world and the halls of Congress, “never sat well with me,” Táíwò writes. When people said these things to him, “it wasn’t usually because they intended to set up Skype calls to refugee camps or to collaborate with houseless people.” Instead, inside the elite spaces on campus or within government, deference to people who seemed marginalized was mostly a well-intended but hollow gesture.
Photo: Elliott Jerome Brown Jr.
This pattern felt both personally and politically corrosive. “There’s a sense in which I could never take myself seriously,” Táíwò told me, “sitting in a fancy academic room and just saying, ‘Here’s my perspective as a Nigerian American person,’ while also remembering rolling through Abeokuta and seeing other Nigerian people outside of the closed window of a car in an armed convoy.” The emphasis on material factors is a hallmark of his work. Táíwò’s first book, Reconsidering Reparations, also released this year, argues that reparations, in addition to addressing colonialism and slavery, must respond to the effects of climate change.
It also gives voice to people on the left who neither see personal identity as the lone vector for inequality nor reject its relevance outright. “Acting on this conception of ‘centering the most marginalized’ would require a different approach entirely, in a world where 1.6 billion people live in inadequate housing (slum conditions) and 100 million are unhoused,” Táíwò writes. “Such a stance would require, at a minimum, that one leave the room.”
So what could a different approach look like? Táíwò proposes a “constructive politics” — a shift in focus to specific results. To him, this means redistributing resources and power downward to the people most negatively affected by the status quo. That may seem frustratingly general, and Táíwò is up front about not offering a how-to guide for equality. He wrote Elite Capture, he says, to help progressives, both in leadership and the rank-and-file, be more aware and strategic. But he points to how people in Flint, Michigan, working with allies across the country, bucked local authorities to address their water crisis — this was an example of moving past the perils of identity into collective action. “In that moment, what they needed was not for their oppression to be ‘celebrated,’ ‘centered,’ or narrated in the newest academic parlance,” Táíwò writes. “What Flint residents really needed, above all, was to get the lead out of their water.”
HALIFAX – Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston says it’s “disgraceful and demeaning” that a Halifax-area school would request that service members not wear military uniforms to its Remembrance Day ceremony.
Houston’s comments were part of a chorus of criticism levelled at the school — Sackville Heights Elementary — whose administration decided to back away from the plan after the outcry.
A November newsletter from the school in Middle Sackville, N.S., invited Armed Forces members to attend its ceremony but asked that all attendees arrive in civilian attire to “maintain a welcoming environment for all.”
Houston, who is currently running for re-election, accused the school’s leaders of “disgracing themselves while demeaning the people who protect our country” in a post on the social media platform X Thursday night.
“If the people behind this decision had a shred of the courage that our veterans have, this cowardly and insulting idea would have been rejected immediately,” Houston’s post read. There were also several calls for resignations within the school’s administration attached to Houston’s post.
In an email to families Thursday night, the school’s principal, Rachael Webster, apologized and welcomed military family members to attend “in the attire that makes them most comfortable.”
“I recognize this request has caused harm and I am deeply sorry,” Webster’s email read, adding later that the school has the “utmost respect for what the uniform represents.”
Webster said the initial request was out of concern for some students who come from countries experiencing conflict and who she said expressed discomfort with images of war, including military uniforms.
Her email said any students who have concerns about seeing Armed Forces members in uniform can be accommodated in a way that makes them feel safe, but she provided no further details in the message.
Webster did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
At a news conference Friday, Houston said he’s glad the initial request was reversed but said he is still concerned.
“I can’t actually fathom how a decision like that was made,” Houston told reporters Friday, adding that he grew up moving between military bases around the country while his father was in the Armed Forces.
“My story of growing up in a military family is not unique in our province. The tradition of service is something so many of us share,” he said.
“Saying ‘lest we forget’ is a solemn promise to the fallen. It’s our commitment to those that continue to serve and our commitment that we will pass on our respects to the next generation.”
Liberal Leader Zach Churchill also said he’s happy with the school’s decision to allow uniformed Armed Forces members to attend the ceremony, but he said he didn’t think it was fair to question the intentions of those behind the original decision.
“We need to have them (uniforms) on display at Remembrance Day,” he said. “Not only are we celebrating (veterans) … we’re also commemorating our dead who gave the greatest sacrifice for our country and for the freedoms we have.”
NDP Leader Claudia Chender said that while Remembrance Day is an important occasion to honour veterans and current service members’ sacrifices, she said she hopes Houston wasn’t taking advantage of the decision to “play politics with this solemn occasion for his own political gain.”
“I hope Tim Houston reached out to the principal of the school before making a public statement,” she said in a statement.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 8, 2024.
REGINA – Saskatchewan Opposition NDP Leader Carla Beck says she wants to prove to residents her party is the government in waiting as she heads into the incoming legislative session.
Beck held her first caucus meeting with 27 members, nearly double than what she had before the Oct. 28 election but short of the 31 required to form a majority in the 61-seat legislature.
She says her priorities will be health care and cost-of-living issues.
Beck says people need affordability help right now and will press Premier Scott Moe’s Saskatchewan Party government to cut the gas tax and the provincial sales tax on children’s clothing and some grocery items.
Beck’s NDP is Saskatchewan’s largest Opposition in nearly two decades after sweeping Regina and winning all but one seat in Saskatoon.
The Saskatchewan Party won 34 seats, retaining its hold on all of the rural ridings and smaller cities.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 8, 2024.
HALIFAX – Nova Scotia‘s growing population was the subject of debate on Day 12 of the provincial election campaign, with Liberal Leader Zach Churchill arguing immigration levels must be reduced until the province can provide enough housing and health-care services.
Churchill said Thursday a plan by the incumbent Progressive Conservatives to double the province’s population to two million people by the year 2060 is unrealistic and unsustainable.
“That’s a big leap and it’s making life harder for people who live here, (including ) young people looking for a place to live and seniors looking to downsize,” he told a news conference at his campaign headquarters in Halifax.
Anticipating that his call for less immigration might provoke protests from the immigrant community, Churchill was careful to note that he is among the third generation of a family that moved to Nova Scotia from Lebanon.
“I know the value of immigration, the importance of it to our province. We have been built on the backs of an immigrant population. But we just need to do it in a responsible way.”
The Liberal leader said Tim Houston’s Tories, who are seeking a second term in office, have made a mistake by exceeding immigration targets set by the province’s Department of Labour and Immigration. Churchill said a Liberal government would abide by the department’s targets.
In the most recent fiscal year, the government welcomed almost 12,000 immigrants through its nominee program, exceeding the department’s limit by more than 4,000, he said. The numbers aren’t huge, but the increase won’t help ease the province’s shortages in housing and doctors, and the increased strain on its infrastructure, including roads, schools and cellphone networks, Churchill said.
“(The Immigration Department) has done the hard work on this,” he said. “They know where the labour gaps are, and they know what growth is sustainable.”
In response, Houston said his commitment to double the population was a “stretch goal.” And he said the province had long struggled with a declining population before that trend was recently reversed.
“The only immigration that can come into this province at this time is if they are a skilled trade worker or a health-care worker,” Houston said. “The population has grown by two per cent a year, actually quite similar growth to what we experienced under the Liberal government before us.”
Still, Houston said he’s heard Nova Scotians’ concerns about population growth, and he then pivoted to criticize Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for trying to send 6,000 asylum seekers to Nova Scotia, an assertion the federal government has denied.
Churchill said Houston’s claim about asylum seekers was shameful.
“It’s smoke and mirrors,” the Liberal leader said. “He is overshooting his own department’s numbers for sustainable population growth and yet he is trying to blame this on asylum seekers … who aren’t even here.”
In September, federal Immigration Minister Marc Miller said there is no plan to send any asylum seekers to the province without compensation or the consent of the premier. He said the 6,000 number was an “aspirational” figure based on models that reflect each province’s population.
In Halifax, NDP Leader Claudia Chender said it’s clear Nova Scotia needs more doctors, nurses and skilled trades people.
“Immigration has been and always will be a part of the Nova Scotia story, but we need to build as we grow,” Chender said. “This is why we have been pushing the Houston government to build more affordable housing.”
Chender was in a Halifax cafe on Thursday when she promised her party would remove the province’s portion of the harmonized sales tax from all grocery, cellphone and internet bills if elected to govern on Nov. 26. The tax would also be removed from the sale and installation of heat pumps.
“Our focus is on helping people to afford their lives,” Chender told reporters. “We know there are certain things that you can’t live without: food, internet and a phone …. So we know this will have the single biggest impact.”
The party estimates the measure would save the average Nova Scotia family about $1,300 a year.
“That’s a lot more than a one or two per cent HST cut,” Chender said, referring to the Progressive Conservative pledge to reduce the tax by one percentage point and the Liberal promise to trim it by two percentage points.
Elsewhere on the campaign trail, Houston announced that a Progressive Conservative government would make parking free at all Nova Scotia hospitals and health-care centres. The promise was also made by the Liberals in their election platform released Monday.
“Free parking may not seem like a big deal to some, but … the parking, especially for people working at the facilities, can add up to hundreds of dollars,” the premier told a news conference at his campaign headquarters in Halifax.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 7, 2024.
