Elite capture, p.11
Elite Capture, page 11
Confronted by these crises, Andaiye said, such countries turned where they had to for funds: the International Monetary Fund. And they did so despite the fact that little had changed since the financial institution’s disastrous structural adjustment policies of the 1970s.
In response, Andaiye called for imagination—not to more incisively describe the failures of the first or second wave of policies, but to overcome the lack of new solutions that forced the region back to familiar and available nonsolutions. She called for builders.
Andaiye was in good company. Abolitionist scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, in her classic book Golden Gulag, documents a deep irony of the rise of California’s prison system, especially given US capitalism’s long-standing anti-communism: its world historical levels of incarceration were built via tight coordination between corporations, bankers, and government officials—that is, “central planning.” But Gilmore also noticed something about the successful resistance of California communities, including one in Tulane County, where family ranchers and farmworkers united under the banners of the United Farm Workers fought off a planned prison construction. Even without the “technocratic expertise” that the bankers and state government wielded, the community’s activists put forward “alternate planning criteria that must precede any industrial location decision,” which Gilmore calls “grassroots planning.”6
Both Andaiye and Gilmore propose, then, that planning creates places. The question the constructive program asks is: Will the plans be theirs or ours?
What the Constructive Approach Asks of Us
The constructive approach to politics does not ask us to invent a political culture out of whole cloth. “Constructive” is just a name, after all. Many of the people who came before us, including those profiled in this book, practiced constructive politics without having any need of this particular word to describe what they were doing.
A constructive program does not ask us to ignore our own interpersonal, symbolic, or material needs, even though it does ask us to be disciplined in how we relate those to the needs of the struggle and of the scores of people and generations that are not immediately present. After reading the book Woman Power by Cellestine Ware, Demita Frazier of the Combahee River Collective recalls arriving at the view that it is both Black women’s “right and responsibility” to analyze their social position as part of their radical perspective.7 I think the rest of us should take a page from this book as well.
The constructive approach is, however, extremely demanding. It asks us to be planners and designers, to be accountable and responsive to people who aren’t yet in the room. In addition to being architects, it asks us to become builders and construction workers: to actually build the kinds of rooms we could sit in together, rather than idly speculate about which rooms would be nice. But it’s important to acknowledge, in closing this book, that the constructive approach has implicit moral and emotional demands, as well: we can neither plan nor build a better world without collectively cultivating diverse kinds of moral and emotional discipline.
The deferential approach to politics is worth praising because of its concern and attention to the importance of lived experience—especially traumatic experiences. But just as this virtue becomes a vice when “being in the room” effects are ignored, this virtue also becomes a vice when trauma’s importance and prevalence are framed as positive bases for social credentials and deference behaviors, rather than primarily as problems to deal with collectively.
Here, scholarly analysis and argument fail me. The remainder of what I have to say skews more toward conviction than contention. But life has taught me that conviction has much to teach, however differently posed or processed, and so I press on.
I take concerns about trauma especially seriously. I grew up in the United States, a nation structured by settler colonialism, racial slavery, and their aftermath, with enough collective and historical trauma to go around. I also grew up in a Nigerian diasporic community, populated by many who had genocide in their living memory.
At the national and community level, I have seen personality traits, quirks of habit and action, that I’ve suspected were born of these grim parts of history. Like most people, I have not been spared. I’ve watched and felt myself change in reaction to fearing for my dignity or life, to crushing pain and humiliation. I reflect on these traumatic moments often, and very seldom do I think, “That was educational.”
These experiences can be, if we are very fortunate, building blocks. What comes of them depends on how the blocks are put together. Those who study the politics of knowledge call this the “achievement thesis.” As philosopher Briana Toole clarifies, by itself, one’s social location only puts a person in a position to know; “epistemic privilege” or advantage, on the other hand, is achieved only through deliberate, concerted struggle from that position.8
Humiliation, deprivation, and suffering can build—especially in the context of the deliberate, structured effort of “consciousness raising” that Toole specifically highlights. But these same experiences can also destroy, and if I had to bet on which effect would win most often, it would be the latter.
Contra the old expression, pain, whether born of oppression or not, is a poor teacher. Suffering is partial, shortsighted, and self-absorbed. We shouldn’t have a politics that expects different. Oppression is not a prep school.
Demanding as the constructive approach may be, the deferential approach is far more so, and in a far more unfair way. As philosopher Agnes Callard rightly notes, trauma (and even the righteous, well-deserved anger that often accompanies it) can corrupt as readily as it can ennoble.9 Perhaps more so.
When it comes down to it, the thing I believe most deeply about deference politics is that it asks something of trauma that it cannot give. It asks the traumatized to shoulder burdens alone that we ought to share collectively, lifting them up onto a pedestal in order to hide below them.
When I think about my trauma, I don’t think about life lessons. I think about the quiet nobility of survival. The very fact that those chapters weren’t the final ones of my story is powerful enough all on its own. It is enough to ask of those experiences that I am still here to remember them.
I also believe that deference politics asks us to be less than we are—and not even for our own benefit. As scholar-activist Nick Estes explains in the context of Indigenous politics, “The cunning of trauma politics is that it turns actual people and struggles, whether racial or Indigenous citizenship and belonging, into matters of injury. It defines an entire people mostly on their trauma and not by their aspirations or sheer humanity.” This performance is not for the benefit of Indigenous people; rather, “it’s for white audiences or institutions of power.”10
When I think about my trauma, I also think about the great writer James Baldwin’s realization that the things that most tormented him “were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.”11
That I have experienced my share of traumatic experiences, have survived abuse of various kinds, have faced near death from accidental circumstance and from violence (different as the particulars of these may be from those around me) is not a card to play in gamified social interaction or a weapon to wield in battles over prestige. 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.
Going together—the politics of solidarity, which deference provides one, flawed model of doing—is a good start. But on its own, it’s not enough. We also have to decide collectively where we’re going, and then we have to do what it takes to get there. Though we start from different levels of privilege or advantage, this journey is not a matter of figuring out who should bow to whom, but simply one of figuring out how best to join forces. As Paulo Freire showed us in theory, and the African anti-colonial and Portuguese Carnation revolutions showed us in practice, we will need each other to get where we’re going. And getting there, after all, is the point.
Notes
Introduction
An earlier version of this essay appeared as “Identity Politics and Elite Capture,” Boston Review, May 7, 2020, https://bos-tonreview.net/articles/olufemi-o-taiwo-identity-politics-and-elite-capture/.
1.Amílcar Cabral, Unity and Struggle: Speeches and Writings of Amílcar Cabral, vol. 3 (New York: New York University Press, 1979), 86.
2.Max Bearak and Rael Ombuor, “Kenyan Police Shot Dead a Teenager on His Balcony during a Coronavirus Curfew Crackdown,” Washington Post, March 31, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/kenyan-police-shot-dead-a-teenager-on-his-balcony-during-a-coronavirus-curfew-crackdown/2020/03/31/6344c70e-7350-11ea-ad9b-254ec99993bc_story.html.
3.Jorge Valencia, “Black Lives Matter Protests Renew Parallel Debates in Brazil, Colombia,” The World, June 15, 2021, https://www.pri.org/stories/2020-06-15/black-lives-matter-protests-renew-parallel-debates-brazil-colombia.
4.“Demonstrators in Brazil Protest against Crimes Committed by Police,” VOA News, June 1, 2020, https://www.voanews.com/americas/demonstrators-brazil-protest-against-crimes-committed-police.
5.César Muñoz, “Brazil Suffers Its Own Scourge of Police Brutality,” Human Rights Watch, June 3, 2020, https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/06/03/brazil-suffers-its-own-scourge-police-brutality.
6.“Rio Violence: Police Killings Reach Record High in 2019,” BBC News, January 23, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-51220364.
7.Larry Buchanan, Quoctrung Bui, and Jugal K. Patel, “Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History,” New York Times, July 3, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-floyd-protests-crowd-size.html; Dudley L. Preston, “3 Ways That the U.S. Population Will Change over the Next Decade,” PBS NewsHour, accessed January 2, 2020, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/3-ways-that-the-u-s-population-will-change-over-the-next-decade.
8.Jen Kirby, “‘Black Lives Matter’ Has Become a Global Rallying Cry,” Vox, June 12, 2020, https://www.vox.com/2020/6/12/21285244/black-lives-matter-global-protests-george-floyd-uk-belgium.
9.“Nigeria’s Lekki Shooting: What Has Happened so Far at Lagos Judicial Panel,” BBC News, November 27, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-55099016.
10.I explore this question in greater depth in my book Reconsidering Reparations: Worldmaking in the Case of Climate Crisis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021); Kwame Nkrumah, “Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism,” 1967; F Pigeaud and NS Sylla, “Africa’s Last Colonial Currency: The CFA Franc Story,” 2021.
11.David Malpass, “June 18, 2020: Ending Racism,” Voices, June 18, 2020, https://blogs.worldbank.org/voices/june-18-2020-ending-racism; Chris Cannito, “UN Human Rights Council Holds Historic Hearings on Racism in US,” Nonprofit Quarterly, June 22, 2020, https://nonprofitquarterly.org/un-human-rights-council-holds-historic-hearings-on-racism-in-us/.
12.Roberto Lovato, “The Age of Intersectional Empire Is Upon Us,” May 10, 2021, The Nation, https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/cia-video-intersectional/.
13.Talia Lavin, “The 1960s Previewed the GOP Attack on ‘Critical Race Theory,’” MSNBC, June 22, 2021, https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/right-wing-freakout-about-critical-race-theory-began-1960s-n1271670; Kevin M. Kruse, “The Trump Administration’s Thinly-Veiled Rebuke of ‘The 1619 Project’ is a Sloppy, Racist Mess,” MSNBC, accessed January 20, 2021, https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/trump-administration-s-thinly-veiled-rebuke-1619-project-sloppy-racist-n1254807.
14.Amy Cassidy and Tara John, “UN Condemns ‘Reprehensible’ UK Race Report for Repackaging ‘Racist Tropes into Fact,’” CNN, April 19, 2021, https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/19/uk/un-uk-race-report-intl-gbr/index.html; Tara John, “Analysis: Culture Wars Give Boris Johnson and His Government a Quick and Easy High. They’re No Substitute for Governing,” CNN, accessed April 4, 2021, https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/04/uk/uk-race-report-culture-wars-intl-gbr/index.html.
15.Ashley Bohrer, “Intersectionality and Marxism: A Critical Historiography,” Historical Materialism 26, no. 2 (2018): 60.
16.Dominic Gustavo, “‘Humans of CIA’ Recruitment Campaign Sells Youth ‘Identity Politics Imperialism,’” World Socialist Web Site, May 20, 2021, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/05/20/ciar-m20.html.
17.Duchess Harris, “From the Kennedy Commission to the Combahee Collective,” in Sisters in the Struggle (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 280–305.
18.Harris, “Combahee Collective,” 280–305.
19.Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), 5–6 (my emphasis).
20.Terrell Jermaine Starr, “Barbara Smith, Who Helped Coin the Term ‘Identity Politics,’ Endorses Bernie Sanders,” The Root, accessed February 3, 2020, https://www.theroot.com/barbara-smith-who-helped-coin-the-term-identity-politi-1841419291; Barbara Smith, “I Helped Coin the Term ‘Identity Politics’. I’m Endorsing Bernie Sanders,” Guardian, February 10, 2020, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/10/identity-politics-bernie-sanders-endorsement.
21.Taylor, How We Get Free, 107–9.
22.Starr, “Barbara Smith Endorses Bernie Sanders.”
23.Asad Haider, “Identity Politics,” chapter 1 in Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump (Verso Books, 2018), 7–26.
24.Marie Moran, “(Un) Troubling Identity Politics: A Cultural Materialist Intervention,” European Journal of Social Theory 23, no. 2 (2020): 258–77; Linda Martin Alcoff, “The Political Critique,” chapter 2 in Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (Oxford University Press, 2005), 20–46.
25.Tess Bonn, “Saagar Enjeti Laments Use of Identity Politics in 2020 Democratic Race,” The Hill, November 26, 2019, https://thehill.com/hilltv/rising/472191-saagar-enjeti-laments-use-of-identity-politics-in-2020-democratic-race.
26.Michael C. Dawson, Blacks in and out of the Left (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 194.
27.Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019).
Chapter 1: What Is Elite Capture?
1.TonyTony Platt, “E. Franklin Frazier Reconsidered,” Social Justice 16, no. 4 (1989): 186–95; Malik Simba, “E. Franklin Frazier (1894–1962),” Black Past, January 19, 2007, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/frazier-e-franklin-1894–1962/; Arthur P. Davis, “E. Franklin Frazier (1894–1962): A Profile,”Journal of Negro Education 31, no. 4 (1962): 429–35.
2.Tony Platt and Susan Chandler, “Constant Struggle: E. Franklin Frazier and Black Social Work in the 1920s,” Social Work 33, no. 4 (1988): 293–97.
3.Frazier’s 1939 book The Negro Family in the United States was a widely acclaimed sociological account of Black American life. See Randal Maurice Jelks and Ayesha K. Hardison, “Black Love after E. Franklin Frazier: An Introduction,” Women, Gender, and Families of Color 7, no. 2 (2019): 108–12.
4.Lori Martin, “Africana Demography: Lessons from Founders E. Franklin Frazier, WEB Du Bois, and the Atlanta School of Sociology,” Issues in Race and Society 8 (2019): 5–28; Earl Wright and Thomas C. Calhoun, “Jim Crow Sociology: Toward an Understanding of the Origin and Principles of Black Sociology via the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory,” Sociological Focus 39, no. 1 (2006): 1–18.
5.Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Constance Farrington, trans. (New York: Grove, 1963), 149–51.
6.Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 148.
7.Fanon, “The Trials and Tribulations of National Consciousness,” chapter 3 in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Richard Philcox, trans. (New York: Grove, 2004), 97–144.
8.Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (New York: International Publishers, 1966).
9.Bernard Magubane and Nzongola-Ntalaja, Proletarianization and Class Struggle in Africa (San Francisco: Synthesis Publications, n.d.), 57.
10.Fanon, Wretched of the Earth (2004 ed.), 97–144.
11.E. Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie (New York: Free Press, 1997), 104.
12.Frazier, “Negro Business: A Social Myth,” chapter 7 in Black Bourgeoisie, 153–73.
13.Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie, 235.
14.Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie, 236.
15.Jared A. Ball, The Myth and Propaganda of Black Buying Power (New York: Springer, 2020).
16.Ball, “Introduction” in Black Buying Power, 1–10.
17.Jo Freeman, “The Tyranny of Stucturelessness,” Jo Freeman official website, https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm.
18.For examples, see Monica Martinez-Bravo, Priya Mukher-jee, and Andreas Stegmann, “The Non-democratic Roots of Elite Capture: Evidence from Soeharto Mayors in Indonesia,” Econometrica 85, no. 6 (2017): 1991–2010; Pranab K. Bardhan and Dilip Mookherjee, “Capture and Governance at Local and National Levels,” American Economic Review 90, no. 2 (2000): 135–39; Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, “Persistence of Power, Elites, and Institutions,” American Economic Review 98, no. 1 (2008): 267–93.
19.Diya Dutta, “Elite Capture and Corruption: Concepts and Definitions,” National Council of Applied Economic Research, 2009, 4.
20.Dutta, “Elite Capture and Corruption,” 5.
21.Wendy Brown, “Neo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,” Theory and Event 7, no. 1 (2003); Tyler Stovall, White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021).
22.Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From#BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), 100.
23.Cited in David Farber, Crack: Rock Cocaine, Street Capitalism, and the Decade of Greed (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 144.
