Global Governance, Gender Equality, Human Rights, Power & Security When Did the Ruling Class Get Woke?

PWH Visiting Scholar Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò is interviewed about his new book Elite Capture, which investigates the co-option of identity politics and the importance of coalitional organizing, in The Nation. 

The protest movement sparked by the murder of George Floyd is now regarded as the largest mass mobilization in the history of the United States, and, significantly, as the philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò points out, was distinctly global in scope. From the old colonial capitals of Europe to cities across the Global South, people took to the streets to protest not only wanton police violence in the United States but also local appendages of the global machinery of white supremacy and state violence. As Táíwò puts it, people around the world were “fighting on their own front[s] in the same struggle.”

Of course, corporate America, always willing to appropriate the next big thing, got in on the action too. While those who took to the streets forged solidarities across difference and found new ways to care for their comrades, carrying extra masks and hand sanitizer along with bottled water and milk to soothe tear-gassed eyes, Silicon Valley tech giants, multinational banks, and purveyors of every conceivable consumer good co-opted the language of protest and justice to grotesque and absurd effect. Whether it was Amazon, Goldman Sachs, or Fox News, corporate America’s statements of apparent sympathy or feigned outrage belied its reliance on the very white supremacist structures that offer a ready supply of precarious Black and brown labor and that the 2020 uprising sought to dismantle.

Read more in The Nation >>https://www.thenation.com/article/world/qa-olufemi-taiwo-elite-capture/