ELITE CAPTURE - Olúfhemi O. Táíwò

This is a buzzy little book I’ve been meaning to check out for a while now, especially since the 2020 protests where I got to see up close exactly the dynamic that Táíwò is describing in his book. This book, as the title suggests, documents the ways in which the elite are able to capture and then steer the discourse around justice and racial equality in such a way that their power is never truly questioned or diminished. So instead of, “why does the US operate a global empire of terror and domination?” it transforms into, “there should be more Black folxs on the board of Raytheon.” Capturing and co-opting the conversation around questions like “racial capitalism” to steer it away from capitalism writ large into a list of demands that they can negotiate with without breaking up or fundamentally changing the whole system. In some ways, this book is a victim of its own success. I kept reading about it and hearing references to it, alongside synopsis, and generally agreed with the idea and wanted to see what the full idea looked like, all fleshed out. Unfortunately, the book is quite short and punchy, which is good in the sense that more people will read it and consider the idea, but bad for those of us who already understand and accept the idea and want more of an in-depth and critically rigorous treatment. For example, there is actually a really interesting historical analogue to this, back in the 60’s the Amerikan establishment backed groups like R. Karenga’s US, who were Black nationalists and culturally oriented, against groups like the Panthers, who had a deeper critique and were Maoist. This book is too short to get into that or the numerous other examples in American history of this sort of dynamic being weaponized. Additionally, I was a bit disappointed that he never names Communism or Marxism and seems to go out of his way to avoid these topics. He quotes Cabral, Freire and talks at length about the PAIGC (a revolutionary group in Cape Verde/Guinea-Bissau) all of whom are pretty explicitly Communist/Marxist and are quite explicitly using this lens to avoid the exact elite capture he was talking about. You don’t have to say that Communism/Marxism is the only way to avoid elite capture, and you can certainly criticize a class-fundamental worldview but to avoid the question completely, seems weak. Overall, good and important idea and line of thinking, but I wanted much more. This is more of a long magazine article or primer than it is a serious take on a real problem.