Elite Capture

How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else)

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781642597141
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

"Identity politics" is everywhere, polarizing discourse from the campaign trail to the classroom and amplifying antagonisms in the media, both online and off. But the compulsively referenced phrase bears little resemblance to the concept as first introduced by the radical Black feminist Combahee River Collective. While the Collective articulated a political viewpoint grounded in their own position as Black lesbians with the explicit aim of building solidarity across lines of difference, identity politics is now frequently weaponized as a means of closing ranks around ever-narrower conceptions of group interests. But the trouble, Olúf??mi O. Táíwò deftly argues, is not with identity politics itself. Through a substantive engagement with the global Black radical tradition and a critical understanding of racial capitalism, Táíwò identifies the process by which a radical concept can be stripped of its political substance and liberatory potential by becoming the victim of elite capture—deployed by political, social, and economic elites in the service of their own interests. Táíwò's crucial intervention both elucidates this complex process and helps us move beyond a binary of "class" vs. "race." By rejecting elitist identity politics in favor of a constructive politics of radical solidarity, he advances the possibility of organizing across our differences in the urgent struggle for a better world.

1

What Is Elite Capture?

In 1957, E. Franklin Frazier published a controversial work of sociology: Black Bourgeoisie. This work was, among other things, a pioneering analysis of elite capture that will help clarify the basic phenomenon.

Edward Franklin Frazier was born to James and Mary Clark Frazier in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1894. Though his father had managed to teach himself to read and write without having ever attended school, those hard-won markers of respectability won him no exemptions from the degradations of working life as a Black man in a racist society. Nevertheless, James made it a point to impress upon his children the importance of education. Throughout his time in Baltimore public schools, Edward seemed to take it to heart, graduating near the top of his high school class. The reward for his hard work was a scholarship to Howard University.¹

After graduating from Howard with honors, Frazier turned to teaching while continuing his studies. He was an instructor at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and eventually became director of social work at the Atlanta School of Social Work. There, American sociology and Black sociology were both being invented by a network of Black scholars that included W. E. B. Du Bois. While their scholarship likely influenced his later thinking, Frazier’s time there was limited, as he was fired in 1927—after which he and his wife, Marie, moved to Chicago, where Frazier completed a doctorate in sociology while teaching at Fisk University. In 1943, he was hired at Howard University in Washington, DC, where he stayed until his death.²

Frazier was uncommonly successful, especially for a Black academic of his era. That was certainly not because he played it safe. His views on the Black family launched historic debates with fellow sociologist Melville Herskovits, and they continue to shape scholarship and policy decades later.³ His 1927 firing from Atlanta was set in motion when of one of his articles, “The Pathology of Race Prejudice,” broke a taboo: it analyzed white Southerners with the same anthropological eye so often trained on “other” peoples. It probably didn’t help smooth things over that Frazier argued white Southern racism toward Black people was a kind of insanity. His article was picked up by the Atlantic Constitution, a local paper, and soon the Fraziers were on the receiving end of death threats.⁴ Good old “cancel culture” at work.

But the controversy for which Frazier is known best would not be kicked off until thirty years later, with the publication of his 1957 sociological study of the US Black middle class, Black Bourgeoisie. In the book, Frazier accuses the Black middle class of being an insecure, powerless group constantly constructing a world of “make-believe” to deal with an “inferiority complex” caused by the brutal history of racial domination in the United States. It was instantly controversial. Frazier recalls in a preface to the 1962 edition that in the aftermath of the first edition, he was both applauded for his courage and threatened with violence.

At around the same time as Frazier was analyzing the Black bourgeoisie of the United States, Frantz Fanon was publishing seminal works of political philosophy in which he discussed mid-century African middle classes. Their approaches bore striking similarities. Fanon was writing during the wave of national independence movements in Asia and Africa that followed the conclusion of the Second World War—a time of possibility and political questions. The African middle classes of which he spoke were poised to become the national ruling elite of post-colonial societies. He described this bourgeoisie as an “underdeveloped middle class” that was “not engaged in production, nor in invention, nor building, nor labor” and thus doomed to actions of the “intermediary type”: that is, to “keep in the running and to be part of the racket.”⁵

These failures of this new post-colonial ruling class explain, in part, why Fanon suspected that it would capture, dilute, and ultimately subvert the energy of anti-imperialist struggle.⁶ “National consciousness,” he predicted, “instead of being the all-embracing crystallization of the innermost hopes of the whole people, instead of being the immediate and most obvious result of the mobilization of the people, will be in any case only an empty shell, a crude and fragile travesty of what it might have been.”⁷

This prediction seemed to come true. The national independence movements supplanted formal colonial rule only to run headfirst into neocolonialism: a condition in which those young nations’ new ruling elite were either sharply constrained by or actively colluding with the corporations and governments of the former colonial powers—and the international system they dominated.⁸ African studies scholar Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, writing in the early 1980s, just after this wave of independence movements, summed it up this way:

The masses had hoped that their living conditions would be improved after independence, and this was in fact what these leaders promised them. But the promise was not honored after independence, for many reasons, one of which was the fact that the anticolonial struggle had masked the conflicts of interested between the petty bourgeoisie and ordinary people. These conflicts became manifest after independence when, instead of fulfilling their promises, the new rulers responded to popular demands either with more promises or with repression.⁹

Why were the Black “lumpenbourgeoisie” (as Frazier described them) of the United States and the newly ascendant African ruling classes so ineffective at improving the systems for Black people as a group? Frazier and Fanon alike focused on their intellectual and political failures.

Fanon referred to a belief among the African middle classes that they could “advantageously replace the middle class of the mother country,” which he saw as “willful narcissism” and “intellectual laziness.”¹⁰ Frazier was similarly unbridled in his criticisms, and some of the most scathing were directed at the Black press, “the chief medium of communication which creates and perpetuates the world of make-believe for the black bourgeoisie.” While acknowledging the contributions of Black publications like the Chicago Defender and early abolitionist organs like Frederick Douglass’s Paper, 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.

A central argument of Black Bourgeoisie concerns a generations-old political strategy for racial uplift: the project of building a separate Black economy within the United States. Booker T. Washington’s National Negro Business League, which first convened in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1900, is a classic example of this strategy, which debuted to great enthusiasm and fanfare among Black business leaders. Frazier, however, argued that Washington’s approach was misguided, based on faulty analysis of the economic situation of African Americans at the time. The combined net worth of all 115 attendees at the inaugural National Negro Business League did not amount to even $1 million. By the time Frazier wrote his book, more than six decades later, all eleven Black-owned banks in the nation combined did not represent the amount of capital held in the average local bank in smaller white cities. Frazier thus concludes that an African American economy was a pipe dream all along.¹²

Not only would building a national Black economy be mathematically almost impossible, Frazier asserted; the attempt would also be politically naive. Such an economy would have to be bootstrapped out of the present political reality, which would make it vulnerable to outside influence—despite being a response to that very vulnerability. Even if people are successfully persuaded to “buy Black,” Frazier argued, if they’re doing so with dollars earned from their job at the Ford plant, then we haven’t yet created a Black economy.

Why does the myth of a Black economy as a comprehensive response to anti-Black racism survive, even if prominent Black businesspeople have long been in a position to know that it wasn’t a serious possibility? Frazier contends that it owes its persistence to the particular class interests of the small but influential Black bourgeoisie who were behind the idea. Some of these were business owners hoping to enjoy a monopoly of the African American economic market. Others were salaried professionals—far and away the largest percentage of the Black middle class in the mid-twentieth century—hoping to work their way into white-owned marketing firms on the strength of their presumed knowledge of the untapped potential of Black purchasing power in the Cold War economy.

Whether on the part of the Black press or the Black entrepreneurs, Frazier claims that “the black bourgeoisie have shown no interest in the ‘liberation’ of Negroes”—that is, unless “it affected their own status or acceptance by the white community.”¹³ Given half a chance, “the black bourgeoisie has exploited the Negro masses as ruthlessly as have whites.”¹⁴ Frazier surely overstates things here. Nonetheless, his book, like Fanon’s work, offers a crisp depiction of elite capture that remains valuable.

Today, we are about as far in time from Frazier’s Black Bourgeoisie and Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks as Frazier and Fanon were from Booker T. Washington’s National Negro Business League. But little has changed. In his comprehensive analysis of the current state of this political trajectory, communication studies scholar Jared A. Ball reveals a set of political arrangements much like the one Frazier depicted more than a half century earlier. There have been some twists and turns: as Ball explains, the latest iteration of the mythical Black economy-to-freedom pipeline centers narrowly on African Americans’ economic power as consumers rather than as bankers or as producers. According to the myth, Black Americans have over $1 trillion worth of power as consumers that they could use to bootstrap themselves into power and freedom, but instead squander on fashion and other frivolous purchases. This concept of “buying power,” he argues, was developed by the US government and business elites and is maintained in implicit partnership with Black businesspeople and media elites—roughly the same cast of characters Frazier referred to as the Black “lumpenbourgeoisie.”¹⁵ 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

Ball’s analysis reiterates Frazier’s: in each story, what lies behind the “movement for a Black economy” is a myth and a material reality. The possibility of an insulated Black economy is the myth, while the immediate interests of a few well-positioned Black folk provide the true impetus. And in both versions of the story, it is the problem—the institutions and patterns of the status quo—that is offered up as the solution.

Who Runs the World? Elites

Confronted with this problem that masquerades as solution, Frazier and Ball both get right something crucial that critics of “identity politics”—as well as “wokeness,” “cancel culture,” and many other hot-button terms—frequently get wrong. Critics and detractors of these political commitments claim that they reflect the social preoccupations of “rich white people” or the “professional-managerial class.” And they’re not completely wrong. But that fact is just something that identity politics, wokeness, and the like have in common with everything else in our lives: the increasing domination of elite interests and control over aspects of our social system. That’s because almost everything in our social world has a tendency to fall prey to elite capture. In other words, it’s not just that wokeness is too white. It’s that everything is.

True, whiteness and eliteness are two very different things. For our purposes, though, this is a fair dig because they have gone hand in hand in many parts of the world for the past few hundred years, with consequences that have shaped everything around us.

The core concern of this book is eliteness as such—and there’s no hard and fast rule about what kind of person can be an elite. Sometimes you’re an elite because of how people have decided (or been forced) to relate to some aspect of your social identity. Sometimes you’re an elite because of some more contingent advantage: your level of education, wealth, or social prestige. Sometimes you’re an elite just because you happen to be the only one of your group who’s in a particular room. According to political scientist Jo Freeman, “an elite refers to a small group of people who have power over a larger group of which they are part, usually without direct responsibility to that larger group, and often without their knowledge or consent.”¹⁷ You’ll notice that Freeman doesn’t treat the status of “elite” as a stable identity—it’s a relationship, in a particular context, between a smaller group of people and a larger group of people.

Elite capture happens when the advantaged few steer resources and institutions that could serve the many toward their own narrower interests and aims. The term is used in economics, political science, and related disciplines to describe the way socially advantaged people tend to gain control over benefits meant for everyone.¹⁸ In this context, it has been used much like the more familiar label of “corruption” and identified by similar symptoms of undue influence, such as bribes.¹⁹ But the concept has also been applied to describe how political projects more generally can be hijacked—in principle or in effect—by the well positioned and better resourced.

As economist D...