Elite Capture Quotes

“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...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.”
― Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics

“Especially in recent history, more often than not, one form of oppression has been replaced with another, different form that is similar or even more unjust than the one that preceded it. But maybe we want more than to play Whack-A-Mole with injustice. If we want to do more than alter the color of our children's chains, we will have to successfully oppose more than isolated instances of oppression.”
― Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics

“Elites do often make the environment worse and block solutions, but to blame the problem of elite capture entirely on their moral successes and failures is to confuse effect for cause. The true problem lies in the system itself, the built environment and rules of interaction that produced the elites in the first place.”
― olufemi o. taiwo, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics

“Value capture is a process by which we begin with rich and subtle values, encounter simplified versions of them in the social wile, and revise our values in the direction of simplicity--thus rendering them inadequate. This kind of process is always a possible result of social interaction, but the distortions to our values are sharpest in social systems and environments where this simplicity is built into the structures of reward and punishment. Capitalism is such a system: it rewards the relentless and single-minded pursuit of profit and growth--extremely narrow value systems that exclude much of what makes life worth living.”
― Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics

“As Carter G. Woodson realized, many of our decisions are shaped by decisions that someone with more power made before us. The whole social structure affects how institutional systems, like schools, function. In turn, those institutional systems exert power over the interactions that take place within them--conversations, lectures, relationships.”
― Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics

“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 philosophy Agnes Callard rightly notes, trauma (and even the righteous, well-deserved anger that often accompanies it) can corrupt as readily as it can ennoble. 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.”
― Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics

“The politics of deference focuses on the consequences that are likeliest to show up in the rooms where elites do most of their interacting: classrooms, boardrooms, political parties. As a result, we seem to end up with far more, and more specific, practical advice about how to, say, allocate tasks at a committee meeting than how to keep people alive. Deference as a default political orientation can work counter to marginalized groups' interests. We are surrounded by a discourse that locates attentional injustice in the selection of spokespeople and book lists taken to represent the marginalized, rather than focusing on the actions of the corporations and algorithms that much more powerfully distribute attention. This discourse ultimately participates in the weaponization of attention in the service of marginalization. It directs what little attentional power we can control at symbolic sites of power rather than at the root political issues that explain why everything is so fucked up.”
― Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics

“Communication is often described in overly intellectual terms that take its role as information exchange a bit too seriously. On such views, to have one’s offer of public information unfairly rejected is to be harmed in some special, epistemic way as a knower. The systems of injustice that show up in our communicative interactions are then frequently treated as a special ideological kind of injustice, rooted in a belief system that stands apart from or even behind other systems of injustice. But another possibility is that communication is simply a kind of action, and thus that the way we act in conversation is largely governed by the exact same forces, norms, and incentives that explain everything else we do. Elites capture our conversations, then for largely the same reasons and in the same ways, they capture everything else.”
― Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics

“But that is a feature of how identity politics is being used, rather than what identity politics is at its core. It is this “elite capture”—not identity politics itself—that stands between us and a transformative, nonsectarian, coalitional politics.”
― Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics

“Whether a student omits their own history from their paper because they believe the professor who said that Black people have no important history, or because they simply observe that the successful students always pick topics from white history, or because they can’t find any books on Black history, they too are playing for the short-term win for themselves, following rules set down by someone else.”
― Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics

“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 the white audiences or institutions of power.”
― Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics

“A 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.”
― Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics

“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.”
― Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics

“For those who defer, the habit can supercharge moral cowardice, as the norms of deference provide social cover for the abdication of responsibility. It displaces onto individual heroes, a hero class, or a mythicized past the work that is ours to do in the present. Their perspective may be clearer on this or that specific matter, but their overall point of view isn't any less particular or constrained by history than ours. More importantly, deference places the accountability that is all of ours to bear onto select people--and, more often than not, a sanitized and thoroughly fictional caricature of them.”
― Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics

“In real life, the value capture process is sometimes deliberately managed by elites to manipulate and control others with game design-like tactics. Gig economy platforms like Uber and Lyft use "badges" and rating systems to manage the decision-making environment of their driver employees. Even outside of work, social media features such as likes, shares, and retweets play the role of points in games. Over time, these simple metrics threaten to distort or take the place of values (say, the wish to meaningfully contribute to discussion or to take pride in the quality of one's work) that might otherwise have inflected our behavior on these platforms.”
― Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics

“If they had been provided food aid from abroad, Cape Verdeans could possibly have survived even both of these problems, but by the 1940s the ruling Portugese Empire had entered into what historian Alexander Keese calls "a dynamic of maximum exploitation of colonial populations." Their approach, which coupled indifference to colonial suffering with a lack of investment in basic infrastructure of administrative capacity, all but ensured that there would be plenty of suffering to go around.”
― Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics

“If people make communicative decisions for the same kinds of reasons that they take other actions, then the whole situation becomes much less mysterious. The question of what all those townspeople cheering the naked emperor were thinking might simply and plausibly be: "If I don't play along with the emperor, something bad might happen to me.”
― Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics

“constructive political culture would focus on outcome over process—the pursuit of specific goals or end results rather than avoiding complicity in injustice or promoting purely moral or aesthetic principles.”
― Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics

“Student debt alone in the United States is worth $1.7 trillion—which, the Debt Collective points out, turns into $1.7 trillion worth of leverage on the global financial system if it is tightly organized.”
― Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics

“a wide range of activist groups, including the Debt Collective and the Movement for Black Lives, along with thinkers like Fantu Cheru and Jeffrey Williams, have long noticed the disciplinary function of student, medical, and credit card debt.56”
― Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics

“to be housed or not depends greatly on the rules and rule-like actions of a small group of elites: individual landlords, corporate landlords, the police, and the data agencies that traffic information between these groups.31 Elites have captured the means of maintaining shelter, so they set the rules by which the rest of us succeed or fail to win shelter.”
― Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics

“Value capture is a process by which we begin with rich and subtle values, encounter simplified versions of them in the social wild, and revise our values in the direction of simplicity—thus rendering them inadequate.”
― Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics

“The World Bank and IMF continue to encourage post-colonial nations to maintain high levels of predatorily securitized debt today. By maintaining financial control, they operate as de facto governing bodies, tying needed aid to politically distorting conditions.33”
― Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics

“Elite capture happens when the advantaged few steer resources and institutions that could serve the many toward their own narrower interests and aims.”
― Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics

“Ball adds that the “buying power” variant of this myth also serves to shift focus and blame onto the supposed “financial illiteracy” of the Black poor, as opposed to the social and economic conditions that exploit, oppress, and marginalize people.16”
― Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics

“The concept of elite capture originated in the study of developing countries to describe the way socially advantaged people tend to gain control over financial benefits, especially foreign aid, meant for others.”
― Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics

“Frazier nevertheless insisted that the Black press’s “demand for equality for the Negro in American life is concerned primarily with opportunities which will benefit the black bourgeoisie economically and enhance the social status of the Negro.” The elite in control of prominent Black media, he argued, would advance these subgroup interests seemingly without regard to the welfare of the larger group. Frazier gave as an example the celebration by Black newspapers of the election of a Black doctor to the presidency of a local affiliate of the American Medical Association, even though the doctor had opposed a national health program and the AMA itself opposed “socialized medicine.”11 Good old respectability politics at work.”
― Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics

“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 the scores of people and generations that are not immediately present....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 builder 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.”
― Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics

“To opt for deference, rather than interdependence, may soothe short-term psychological wounds. But it does so at a steep cost: it may undermine the goals that motivated the project--and it entrenches a politics that does not serve those fighting for freedom over privilege, for collective liberation over mere parochial advantage.”
― Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics

“In her book 'Conflict is Not Abuse' activist writer and scholar Sarah Schulman makes a provocative observation about the psychological effects of both trauma and felt superiority: while these often come about for different reasons and have very different moral statuses, they result in similar behavioral patterns. Chief amount these are misrepresenting the stakes of conflict (often by overstating harm) and representing others' independence as a hostile threat (for example, calling out failures to 'center' the right topics or people). These behaviors, whatever their causal history, have corrosive effects, especially when a community's norms magnify or multiply rather than constrain or metabolize them.”
― Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics