#Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò

[cuntylittlesalmon]

For example, we can imagine ourselves participating in good faith conversations on a new social media platform about a particular social issue. This platform is structure, of course, by designers employed by the company owners, who build and manage algorithms that direct the traffic of posts and courage consumer engagement. As we talk on this platform, its feature begin to affect our behavior: simpler takes attract comments and shares, affecting what people say on the platform. The tech-company owners get the lion's share of the revenue generated by the site's traffic, driven by our conversations, and a small number of site participants get the lion's share of attention directed the activity on the platform. An elite emerges. It would be a mistake, however, to understand everything that happens on the platform as a process orchestrated by the elites. They are its results, like the platform's unequal distribution of the profit and attention itself. 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.

— Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and Everything Else)

[endlessandrea]

Bringing this back 😁🔥🔥

[kenyatta]

Frazier concludes that, whether in the black press or in business, “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.” At every opportunity, “the black bourgeoisie has exploited the Negro masses as ruthlessly as have whites.” Frazier surely overstates things here, but his book is a window into a common phenomenon. To better understand the broader dynamic, we can look to philosopher C. Thi Nguyen’s work on games. As he explains in his new book Games: Agency as Art (2020), confusing the real world with the carefully incentivized structure of game worlds can lead to a phenomenon he calls “value capture,” a process by which we begin with rich and subtle values, encounter simplified versions of them in social life, and then revise our values in the direction of simplicity. Nguyen is careful to point out that value capture doesn’t require anyone’s deliberate or calculated intervention, only an environment or incentive structure that encourages excess value clarity. Nguyen stops short of noting that another risk of gamifying values is the unequal distribution of power across participants. But outside of the world of games, power differentials do shape outcomes. Value capture is managed by elites, on purpose or not. In other words, elites don’t simply participate in our community; their decisions help to structure it, much in the way that game designers structure the world of games. After all, elites face a simpler version of oppression than non-elites do: whereas working-class black folk are pressed by racial slights and degradation alongside economic problems that might require “socialized medicine” to solve, elites’s economic position makes them comfortable enough to focus on their own status and cultural power—often at the expense of non-elites.

Identity Politics and Elite Capture - Boston Review

[deadassdiaspore]

[disillusioned41]

More Perfect Union Jul 7, 2022

Why Are Republicans Obsessed With “Woke” Corporations? | The Class Room With Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò

In the last few years, Republicans have been increasingly concerned about a “woke” corporate agenda,  but they're missing the real problem. It’s not that corporations and establishment politicians care too much about racial or gender justice. The problem is they pretend to care about racism or misogyny to defend their wealth and power. And that's what we should be worried about: The amount of power that corporate elites have over working people."  

[alwaysbewoke]

1. “Angela Davis: An Autobiography” by Angela Davis 2. “Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else)” by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò 3. “Digging our own Graves: Coal Miners and the Struggle over Black Lung Disease” by Barbara Ellen Smith 4. “1919” by Eve L. Ewing 5. “Assata Taught Me: State Violence, Racial Capitalism, and the Movement for Black Lives” by Donna Murch 6. “Finding my Voice” by Emerald Garner 7. “From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation” by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor 8. “Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care” by Kelly E Hayes and Mariame Kaba 9. “An Enemy Such as This: Larry Casuse and the Fight for Native Liberation in One Family on Two Continents Over Three Centuries” by David Correia 10. “101 Changemakers: Rebels and Radicals who Changed US History” by by Michele Bollinger and Dao X Tran  11. “Class War, USA: Dispatches from Workers’ Struggles in American History” by Brandon Weber 12. “#SayHerNameBlack Women’s Stories ofPolice Violence and Public Silence” by Kimberlé Crenshaw and African American Policy Forum 13. “An Asian American A to Z: A Children’s Guide to Our History” by Cathy Linh Che and Kyle Lucia Wu 14. “Repair: Redeeming the Promise of Abolition” by Katherine Franke 15. “Haunted by Slavery: A Memoir of a Southern White Woman in the Freedom Struggle” by Gwendolyn Midlo Hall

x

[probablyasocialecologist]

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.

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture

[st-just]

Identity politics, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò argues in his book Elite Capture, has been captured for the interests of the powerful—mostly rich, mostly white, mostly male. He gives irritatingly few specifics (one of the most severe weaknesses of the book in my opinion), but I’ve certainly noticed the pattern myself. LGBT rights is coopted to sell rainbow cookies and diversity trainings. Advocacy to help mentally ill people results in condescending reminders from your boss that you should prioritize self-care, even as you work long hours for not enough money. We wanted a revolution and we got wellness influencers and the Bank of America pride float. A lot of discourse around social justice doesn’t address anything of practical, material benefit to oppressed people. It is nothing more than an elaborate system of etiquette for educated middle-class people, signalling that the users have the free time and social connections to know that you’re supposed to say “trans” and not “transsexual.” This does not help trans people access medical care, but it does help cis people manage their psychodramas around gender.

Ozy Brennan, Against Deference Politics: Or, The Importance Of Building Shit

[ghelgheli]

An entire industry of racial commentary, from think pieces to blogs to academic studies and whole fields of researchers, centers upon convincing imagined skeptical whites or Global Northerners that the social sky is in fact blue. We aim to disrupt, contextualize, or falsify stereotypes and correct how we are perceived, and we try to manipulate how attention to different social problems or populations is parceled out.

Most worrying, we spend so much time and energy responding to others’ mistakes that we lose the ability to distinguish their questions from ours. While we produce constant criticism of aspects of the material or attention economy that we don’t like, we systematically underproduce or rush through scholarship on questions that are infinitely more important and worthy of our time and analysis. For example, what forms of social life are compatible with our flourishing? What must our economies look like to respond to our social problems? What are the root causes— in a material and institutional sense, from a rigorous perspective— of our current problems, and which of them are alterable? How can we build algorithms, institutions, rules, laws, social movements, or revolutions that do the altering?

The focus on proving that structural racism exists, on answering skeptical Global Northerners and whites, has subtly changed the goal posts— on reparations and a host of other justice issues— from where they stood during the anticolonial movements of the twentieth century. Let’s put them back.

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Reconsidering Reparations

[protoslacker]

What matters about racism, capitalism, racial capitalism, and any other options are the ideas underneath and what we do with them. Racial capitalism offers us a clue: If it is true that racism and capitalism are in a mutually supporting relationship, then we should expect that any potentially effective anti-racist and anti-capitalist struggles will also be mutually supporting. Our ultimate goal isn’t to understand the origins of a term or even its lineage, but to understand the workings of a world we are trying to change.

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò at Hammer&Hoe. A FRAMEWORK TO HELP US UNDERSTAND THE WORLD

Out of a common history emerged racism, capitalism, and the whole world. This offers us a clue on how to change it.

[bfpnola]

Hi, my lovelies! I'm still in the process of adding these to our Social Justice Resources but I just could not wait to share them!

Currently, the 2022 Socialism Conference is being hosted in Chicago, Illinois, as well as virtually, with lectures from a variety of diverse activists and authors, including but not limited to Robin D.G. Kelley, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Liat Ben-Moshe. I genuinely believe that these recordings could become such an amazing resource for my auditory learners, especially since a lot of our resources offered, including our own, are mainly text-based. (There is even a Q&A section provided at the end of each and just the representation in the room as well as the nuance in each and every person's words is truly astounding.)

The following lectures are offered, so please share them, listen while doing chores or driving, etc:

Crises, Wars, & Revolts on the Edge of a New Global Slump with David McNally & Shireen Akram-Boshar

Disability, Madness, Liberation: Deinstitutionalization & Prison Abolition with Liat Ben-Moshe

 Transgender Marxism with Jules Joanne Gleeson, c, & Sophie Lewis

How Do We Get a New Constitution? with Aziz Rana & Amna Akbar

Pandemic Politics & the Viral Underclass with Steven Thrasher

Black Feminism & Black Liberation in 2022 with Barbara Ransby

Change Everything: Racial Capitalism & the Case for Abolition with Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Abolitionist Internationalism: Borders, Migration, & Racial Capitalism with Harsha Walia & Robin D.G. Kelley

Gaza is Palestine: Voices from Under the Blockade with Jehad Abusalim & Shafeka Hashash

Playing Through Fire: Sports In A Time Of Reaction with Dave Zirin

Rebuilding a New Reproductive Justice Movement: Taking on the Right with Anne Rumberger, Cheryl Rivera, Sarah Leonard, & Natalia Tylim

Health Communism: Toward a New Political Economy of Health with Beatrice Adler-Bolton & Artie Vierkant

The Dig LIVE: What Now? Perspectives on the Conjuncture, Daniel Denvir hosting Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Robin D.G. Kelley, & Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò

Class Struggle Unionism with Joe Burns

Freedom Dreams and the Socialist Project with Robin D.G. Kelley

Don't want to miss future activist-related events, protests, and workshops like this in the future? We offer free text message updates!

Signal boost because Tumblr kills posts with links. Love y'all!

-- @reaux07 (she/they)

[markoferko]

TELJES KONFÚZIÓ! most tudtam meg, hogy egy ember, aki kétszer szerepel az Introduction of African Anthropology kurzusom olvasmánylistáján, az valójában két ember!!! Mondjuk jobban belegondolva így elég sok mindennek több értelme van :D

1. Dr. Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University.

2. Dr. Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò is a Professor at the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University.

[gridbug]

April/May reading roundup

Since I have been stalling on writing the April roundup for so long I have decided to merge the April and may roundups together so I can push them all out at once. I also didn't bother finding and downloading the covers for the books this time and adding them in, I'm on my laziness arc. I took an even longer break before picking this up again, I'm on a vacation, and finally getting some (but not enough) quiet.

The Dream of Reason by Jenny George

This is the debut collection from Jenny George is from 2018, and she has published poems in a whole bunch of places (Poetry, Granta, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, New York Times Magazine) and it's easy to see why. The Dream of Reason is full of beautiful, short lyric poetry, and engages in a very compelling way with the relationship between humans and the animal world and the violence that people do to eachother.

Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto by Legacy Russell

Of these books I have to admit that I found this the most underwhelming, perhaps due to my high expectations. Glitch Feminism offers a Black, queer, feminist analysis of being online that rejects the sort of tech dystopia and silicon valley fueled optimism, arguing that even under systems of homophobic and transphobic

There's a lot of ideas and concepts here, and I wish the book was longer or had comitted to a more focused. As a manifesto, I understand it wants to be more invested in smashing idols than developing theories, but with a few exceptions (the opening chapter, some moments of lyrical passion) the book doesn't speak with the force or energy to justify being so thin on content. There is a great alternative analysis to and critique of tech skepticism in here, but it also has to share space with a work of art criticism, and a Black queer cyberfeminist theory of embodiment, and personal memoir, and it just is too much. Still, since it is such a short book (about 150 small pages) you can breeze through it in a day, even though by the end you'll be left wanting.

Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and everything else) by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò

This book is in part an expansion of an essay that Táíwò published in the Boston Review, a critique of how identity politics have been weaponized by elites. Rather than kicking the race/class ball back and forth like so many commentators do, Táíwò offers an analysis of how claims of authority and legitimacy based on identity within the room (in academia and activist spaces) serves to perpetuate the interests of a privileged few and undermine activism that reaches out to people outside the room (those outside of academia and the non profit world that would benefit the most from actually engaging with these issues). Critiques of "identity politics" from the left are nothing new (most of them are quite boring imo), what makes this book special is how his analysis of the dynamics of elite capture breaks through the noise to offer something original and explanatorily useful. Táíwò is a philosopher by background, and his analysis draws on concepts from political philosophy and the philosophy of language to great effect, his critique of so-called deference politics, something which you see all the time online, where people will defer to the lived experience of others. In theory this is a noble and important strategy, it serves to "decenter" the voices who already are the loudest and give neglected ones a voice. But who's voice, under what circumstances, to what end? Táíwò interrogates these sorts of questions, showing that beneath these and other common lines of analysis in contemporary liberal identity politics is a whole nest of contradictions and false starts. In listening to the most marginalzied "in the room" we are not engaging directly with the people who are most marginalized, but are instead expecting people perceived as the most "marginalized" to offer "The Black TM" perspective or whatever else. Here's a great example:

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.

I found myself nodding along vigorously the whole time to this book, it just cuts through so much dead air and nonsense.

I'm hoping this book gets a sequel or second edition of some sort, because there is so much here and it's already stirred a lot of good conversation on how to get out of these defeatist, never ending games. Of course implicit in the book's analysis is the idea that activism and left wing politics is actually about helping the most affected and disenfranchised, rather than, for example stroking the egos of pseudo radical academics or

Leon Trotsky: A Revolutionary's Life by Joshua Ruebstein

This book is part of a series of short (around 200 page) biographies called Jewish Lives, some of the figure are more obvious, like Theodore Hertzel, but other biographies take Jewish people from history who are often not thought of as part of Jewish history, like Karl Marx or Rosa Luxeburg, and places them within their Jewish context. Leon Trotsky is a divisive figure, often for bad reasons. For liberals he was a radical extremist, for Marxists he is either a subject of obscene veneration or scorn.

I wanted to pregame reading Isaac Deutscher's The Prophet and read something that would give me a sense of what Trotsky did. Deutscher's biography, at well over one thousand pages (I think the verso paperback is 1600 pages for the single volume) was too big to just dive in, but what I read from Rubenstein left me wanting more. I agree with some of his conclusions about Trotsky, and disagree with others. In particular his bemoaning of Trotsky's willingness to use violence in the revolutionary cause, or bemoaning. While it is interesting to a certain extent to speculate on what might have been if the Bolsheviks had been more willing to indulge Martov's "loyal opposition" and a greater spectrum of political opinion, ironically it was precisely the Bolshevik's ruthlessness that allowed them to see that the February revolution provisional government was held together with chewing gum, and could be smashed apart. For the liberals who see the October revolution as the bad revolution where things went south, there's no reason to believe that the provisional government would have survived, and wouldn't have been replaced by a just as brutal counterrevolutionary government, if not a more extreme one. Trotsky's decision not to fight more seriously for a leading position in the party after Lenin's death until it was too late (either through ignorance, hubris, or stupidity) is one of the more vexing episodes in Soviet history.

The book also includes a few anecdotes and bits of color, but for want of space mainly focuses on Trotsky's political career and his relationship with Judaism and Jewishness. Trotsky understood more quickly than most how disastrous fascism would be for European Jews, even beginning with Mussolini. Obviously with someone as prolific as Trotsky, a 200 page biography can only scratch the surface of many of these accomplishments, so it is as good as it could be expected to be given the limits of space and I would recommend it.

The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism by Martin Wolf

I like to take a gander at what the liberal and centrist commentariat is talking about, by reading publications like the Atlantic and the opinion pages of major newspapers. Martin Wolf is the main economics commentator for the Financial Times, an English business and finance broadsheet which is, with some caveats, the best newspaper in the world. While most papers have genuinely awful opinion pages (see the execrable New York Times) the FT's columnists are a cut above the rest, offering incisive analysis of current economic trends and new political developments, albeit from a centrist, center right, or at its most adventurous, center left, position. Martin Wolf's latest book draws on his own wealth of expertise in recent economic history and monetary and fiscal policy to sketch out an account of how we got to the current crisis, and how we might get out of it.

As a work on economics, there is a lot of great work here to admire. Wolf is willing, unlike so many of his fellow travelers, to correctly point out poor economic performance is fundamental in understanding the sources of discontent across the world and the global rage towards elites. A lot of the policies he promotes and suggests, universal healthcare in the US, expanding the social safety net, are great policies. His analysis of where

But the suggestions on how to get out of the rut through reform. What is really striking is reading this guy who has, since the 90s, been on the right side of history, the winning side of globalization and neoliberalism and global capitalism, and just how scared he is of where capitalism is headed. Reading this you get a real sense of how fucked we are, and even this maximalist liberalism, which allows for serious interventions in the economy, seems unfit for the challenges facing us today.

On Browsing by Jason Guriel

This short book by Canadian poet-critic Jason Guriel is an extension of an essay he wrote for the Walrus, titled "Life in the Stacks: A Love Letter to Browsing" which forms the first chapter of this book. If you've ever gotten lost for an afternoon in a bookstore, or a DVD rental store, or a mall for that matter, this is a great read.

A Stranger in Your Own City by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad

This is a memoir by journalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, who was born in Baghdad in 1975, and grew up amidst the Iran-Iraq war, the pious 90s, and the immediate aftermath of the U.S. invasion itself. The prose throughout sparkles, and offers an excellent tour through the last twenty or so years as Iraq has been beset by corruption, the rise of ISIS, internal tragedy and disappointment. All of this is written from Abdul-Ahad's perspective, as an Iraqi, born in Baghdad, and doesn't pretend to be any comprehensive history of whole conflict, he recommends several other books that cover this ground from a more academic lens in the beginning, but what it offers instead is arguably even more valuable for genuine understanding: a personal human story. His critique of the racism and condescension of so much first world media, its inability to recognize how America's intervention was destroying a community and group of people who actually lived there. The book stands on its own, however, so even if you are not as familiar with the recent history of Iraq, this will still make for a compelling read.

[female-malice]

A powerful indictment of the ways elites have co-opted radical critiques of racial capitalism to serve their own ends.

“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, Olúfẹ́mi 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.

[probablyasocialecologist]

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. I suspect that this is why prison scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore stressed that "abolition is about presence, not absence" and fellow abolitionist Micah Herskind called it "the dual-pronged project of tearing down and building up, the dismantling of life-sucking systems alongside the construction of life-giving ones." Gilmore and Herskind also strike a similar cord with the anti-colonial ethos of PAIGC militant Amílcar Cabral, which, in the words of Kenyan activist Firoze Manji, can be summarized as "self-determination, not secession."

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture

[ghelgheli]

The Stuff I Read in August 2023

Stuff I Extra Liked Is Bold

Books

Raven Stratagem, Yoon Ha Lee (2017)

Reconsidering Reparations, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (2022)

The Mirror of My Heart: A Thousand Years of Persian Poetry by Women, trans. Dick Davis (2019)

The Origins of Unfairness, Cailin O'Connor (2019)

Short Fiction

the prisoner, ignatz

The Unwanted Guest, Tamsyn Muir

She Loves to Cook, and She Loves to Eat, Sakaomi Yuzaki

Still Sick, Akashi

Born Again Bunny, ignatz

A Museum of Dubious Splendors, Studio Oleomingus

In the Pause Between the Ringing, Studio Oleomingus

The Indifferent Wonder of an Edible Place, Studio Oleomingus

Game Theory

The Bargaining Problem, John Nash (1950)

Two Person Cooperative Games, John Nash (1953)

Perfect Equilibrium in a Bargaining Model, Ariel Rubinstein (1982)

Marriage and household decision making: A bargaining analysis, Marilyn Manser and Murray Brown (1980)

Evolutionary Game Theory

The theory of games and the evolution of animal conflicts, John Maynard Smith (1974)

The Logic of Animal Conflict, John Maynard Smith and George R. Price (1973)

Why imitate, and if so, how? A boundedly rational approach to multi-armed bandits, Karl Schlag (1996)

On the Stability of Racial Capitalism, Liam Kofi Bright, Nathan Gabriel, Cailin O'Connor, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò

Fairness and Signaling in Bargaining Games, Mihaela Popa-Wyatt, Roland Mühlenbernd Jeremy L. Wyatt

Inequality and Inequity in the Emergence of Conventions, Calvin Cochran and Cailin O'Connor (2019)

Power by Association, Travis LaCrois and Cailin O'Connor (2020)

Why Natural Social Contracts are not Fair, Cailin O'Connor (2022)

How to Put the Cart Behind the Horse in the Cultural Evolution of Gender, Daniel Saunders (2022)

Division of Labor, Economic Specialization, and the Evolution of Social Stratification, Joseph Heinrich and Robert Boyd (2008)

On the emergence of minority disadvantage: testing the cultural Red King hypothesis, Aydin Mohseni, Cailin O'Connor, and Hannah Rubin (2021)

Philosophy (broadly construed)

"But What Are You, Really?" The Metaphysics of Race, Charles W. Mills (1998)

Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System, Maria Lugones

Extracted Speech, Rachel Ann McKinney (2016)

Nozick's Entitlement Theory of Justice, Kenneth J. Arrow (1978)

Nietzsche, the Chinese Worker's Friend, Ishay Landa (1999)

Measuring Conventionality, Cailin O'Connor (2020)

Other

Who Was Barbie? various @ nplusonemag

Lockhart's Lament, Paul Lockhart

Female Hunters of the Early Americas, Randall Haas et al.

We Have No Moat, and Neither Does OpenAI, anonymous

The Bitter Lesson, Rich Sutton

The Evolution of Individual and Cultural Variation in Social Learning, Alex Mesoudi et al.

Medieval Arab Lesbians and Lesbian-Like Women, Sahar Amer (2009)

"My son was castrated as a result of a medical error. Is it OK to raise him as a eunuch?" Thomas W. Johnson and Richard J. Wassersug (2021)