*Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò* # Progressive Summary # Definitions Elite: > 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.” Elite capture: > 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. # Chapter Notes ## 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. > 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. > 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.” > 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. “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.” > 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. > 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. > 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. > As economist Diya Dutta explains, elite capture, in essence, refers to “the presence of unequal access to power— some have greater access to power (by virtue of their lineage, or caste, or economic wealth or gender or some other reason) and consequently the ability to influence the transfer of funds/resources disproportionately.” Public goods and resources such as knowledge, attention, and values are unfairly distributed, just as much as material wealth and political power are. More precisely, the distribution patterns of all these are distorted in similar ways, for similar reasons. Elite capture is symptomatic of social systems with unequal balances of power. ## 2- Reading the Room ## 3 - Being in the Room ## 4 - Building a New House ## 5 - The Point is to Change It > 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. > 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. > 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. > 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.” > 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. # Quotes # References