Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Politics and Polemics
Episode: Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, "Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and Everything Else)" (Haymarket, 2022)
Description: “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...