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.”
EDMONTON – Alberta Premier Danielle Smith says her government’s $8.6-billion plan to fast-track building new schools will include a pilot project to incentivize private ones.
Smith said the ultimate goal is to create thousands of new spaces for an exploding number of new students at a reduced cost to taxpayers.
“We want to put all of the different school options on the same level playing field,” Smith told a news conference in Calgary Wednesday.
Smith did not offer details about how much private school construction costs might be incentivized, but said she wants to see what independent schools might pitch.
“We’re putting it out there as a pilot to see if there is any interest in partnering on the same basis that we’ll be building the other schools with the different (public) school boards,” she said.
Smith made the announcement a day after she announced the multibillion-dollar school build to address soaring numbers of new students.
By quadrupling the current school construction budget to $8.6 billion, the province aims to offer up 30 new schools each year, adding 50,000 new student spaces within three years.
The government also wants to build or expand five charter school buildings per year, starting in next year’s budget, adding 12,500 spaces within four years.
Currently, non-profit independent schools can get some grants worth about 70 per cent of what students in public schools receive per student from the province.
However, those grants don’t cover major construction costs.
John Jagersma, executive director of the Association of Independent Schools and Colleges of Alberta, said he’s interested in having conversations with the government about incentives.
He said the province has never directly funded major capital costs for their facilities before, and said he doesn’t think the association has ever asked for full capital funding.
He said community or religious groups traditionally cover those costs, but they can help take the pressure off the public or separate systems.
“We think we can do our part,” Jagersma said.
Dennis MacNeil, head of the Public School Boards Association of Alberta, said they welcome the new funding, but said money for private school builds would set a precedent that could ultimately hurt the public system.
“We believe that the first school in any community should be a public school, because only public schools accept all kids that come through their doors and provide programming for them,” he said.
Jason Schilling, president of the Alberta Teachers’ Association, said if public dollars are going to be spent on building private schools, then students in the public system should be able to equitably access those schools.
“No other province spends as much money on private schools as Alberta does, and it’s at the detriment of public schools, where over 90 per cent of students go to school,” he said.
Schilling also said the province needs about 5,000 teachers now, but the government announcement didn’t offer a plan to train and hire thousands more over the next few years.
Alberta NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi on Tuesday praised the $8.6 billion as a “generational investment” in education, but said private schools have different mandates and the result could be schools not being built where they are needed most.
“Using that money to build public schools is more efficient, it’s smarter, it’s faster, and it will serve students better,” Nenshi said.
Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides’ office declined to answer specific questions about the pilot project Wednesday, saying it’s still under development.
“Options and considerations for making capital more affordable for independent schools are being explored,” a spokesperson said. “Further information on this program will be forthcoming in the near future.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 18, 2024.
OTTAWA – Health Minister Mark Holland urged a committee of senators Wednesday not to tweak the pharmacare bill he carefully negotiated with the NDP earlier this year.
The bill would underpin a potential national, single-payer pharmacare program and allow the health minister to negotiate with provinces and territories to cover some diabetes and contraceptive medications.
It was the result of weeks of political negotiations with the New Democrats, who early this year threatened to pull out of their supply-and-confidence deal with the Liberals unless they could agree on the wording.
“Academics and experts have suggested amendments to this bill to most of us here, I think,” Independent Senator Rosemary Moodie told Holland at a meeting of the Senate’s social affairs committee.
Holland appeared before the committee as it considers the bill. He said he respects the role of the Senate, but that the pharmacare legislation is, in his view, “a little bit different.”
“It was balanced on a pinhead,” he told the committee.
“This is by far — and I’ve been involved in a lot of complex things — the most difficult bit of business I’ve ever been in. Every syllable, every word in this bill was debated and argued over.”
Holland also asked the senators to move quickly to pass the legislation, to avoid lending credence to Conservative critiques that the program is a fantasy.
When asked about the Liberals’ proposed pharmacare program for diabetes and birth control, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has often responded that the program isn’t real. Once the legislation is passed, the minister must negotiate with every provincial government to actually administer the program, which could take many months.
“If we spend a long time wordsmithing and trying to make the legislation perfect, then the criticism that it’s not real starts to feel real for people, because they don’t actually get drugs, they don’t get an improvement in their life,” Holland told the committee.
He told the committee that one of the reasons he signed a preliminary deal with his counterpart in British Columbia was to help answer some of the Senate’s questions about how the program would work in practice.
The memorandum of understanding between Ottawa and B.C. lays out how to province will use funds from the pharmacare bill to expand on its existing public coverage of contraceptives to include hormone replacement therapy to treat menopausal symptoms.
The agreement isn’t binding, and Holland would still need to formalize talks with the province when and if the Senate passes the bill based on any changes the senators decide to make.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 18, 2024.
HALIFAX – Nova Scotia’s NDP are accusing the government of prioritizing landlords over residents who need an affordable place to live, as the opposition party tables a bill aimed at addressing the housing crisis.
NDP Leader Claudia Chender took aim at the Progressive Conservatives Wednesday ahead of introducing two new housing bills, saying the government “seems to be more focused on helping wealthy developers than everyday families.”
The Minister of Service Nova Scotia has said the government’s own housing legislation will “balance” the needs of tenants and landlords by extending the five per cent cap on rent until the end of 2027. But critics have called the cap extension useless because it allows landlords to raise rents past five per cent on fixed-term leases as long as property owners sign with a new renter.
Chender said the rules around fixed-term leases give landlords the “financial incentive to evict,” resulting in more people pushed into homelessness. She also criticized the part of the government bill that will permit landlords to issue eviction notices after three days of unpaid rent instead of 15.
The Tories’ housing bill, she said, represents a “shocking admission from this government that they are more concerned with conversations around landlord profits … than they are about Nova Scotians who are trying to find a home they can afford.”
The premier’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Also included in the government’s new housing legislation are clearer conditions for landlords to end a tenancy, such as criminal behaviour, disturbing fellow tenants, repeated late rental payments and extraordinary damage to a unit. It will also prohibit tenants from subletting units for more than they are paying.
The first NDP bill tabled Wednesday would create a “homelessness task force” to gather data to try to prevent homelessness, and the second would set limits on evictions during the winter and for seniors who meet income eligibility requirements for social housing and have lived in the same home for more than 10 years.
The NDP has previously tabled legislation that would create a $500 tax credit for renters and tie rent control to housing units instead of the individual.
Earlier this week landlords defended the use of the contentious fixed-term leases, saying they need to have the option to raise rent higher than five per cent to maintain their properties and recoup costs. Landlord Yarviv Gadish, who manages three properties in the Halifax area, called the use of fixed-term leases “absolutely essential” in order to keep his apartments presentable and to get a return on his investment.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 18, 2024.
