Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics

"Olúfémi Táíwò is a thinker on fire. He not only calls out empire for shrouding its bloodied hands in the cloth of magical thinking but calls on all of us to do the same. Elite capture, after all, is about turning oppression and its cure into a (neo)liberal commodity exchange where identities become capitalism's latest currency rather than the grounds for revolutionary transformation. The lesson is clear: only when we think for ourselves and act with each other, together in deep, dynamic, and difficult solidarity, can we begin to remake the world."

-Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

"Among the churn of books on 'wokeness' and 'political correctness, ' philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò's Elite Capture clearly stands out. With calm, clarity, erudition, and authority, Táíwò walks the reader through the morass, deftly explicating the distinction between substantive and worthy critique and weaponized backlash. Understanding the culture wars is essential to US politics right now, and no one has done it better than Táíwò in this book." -Jason Stanley, author of How Fascism Works

"With global breath, clarity and precision, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò dissects the causes and consequences of elite capture and charts an alternative constructive politics for our time. The result is an erudite yet accessible book that draws widely on the rich traditions of black and anticolonial political thought." -Adom Getachew, author of Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University and a fellow at the Climate and Community Institute. He is the author of the critically acclaimed book Elite Capture, a contributor to Greta Thunberg's The Climate Book, and a past recipient of a Marguerite Casey Freedom Scholar fellowship. Táíwò's public philosophy, including articles exploring intersections of climate justice and colonialism, has been featured in The Guardian, The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Nation, Boston Review, Dissent, Al Jazeera, Foreign Policy, Hammer & Hope (where he is a member of the Editorial Team). His writings have been translated into Brazilian Portuguese, French, German, Italian, and Korean, among other languages.