Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò ([o.lú.fɛ́.mi tá.í.wò]; born 1989/1990) is an American philosopher and professor of philosophy at Georgetown University in the USA. He is the author of Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else) (2022) and Reconsidering Reparations (2022).

Interview with Democracy Now (2023)

 * Elite capture is what happens when the advantaged few in a group steer the resources and political direction of organizations or movements or parts of our social structure, like the justice system, towards their narrower interests and aims.


 * The wars of independence that were fought throughout the African continent and the world beyond the African continent were linked.


 * Basically, what I mean by the constructive view of reparations is the idea that we do need the people who have gotten rich off the spoils of yesterday’s injustice, yesterday’s apartheid, yesterday’s laying of the groundwork for today’s capitalism, and there needs to be redistribution from the large corporations that have gotten all of that wealth to the rest of the people throughout the world. But the point of that redistribution isn’t just so we can shuffle around cells on an Excel spreadsheet. I think we should also be building a different kind of world that doesn’t structurally run on racism and other kinds of oppression and capitalism. And the construction of constructive view is the point of building that world. That world would have a much different energy system. It would produce things in a different way. It would manage resources in a different and more democratic way. And I think those are the kinds of changes we have to think about building, rather than only thinking about redistributing money or only thinking about tearing down the structures that we have now.

Quotes about Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò

 * Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò is a thinker on fire. He not only calls out empire for shrouding its bloodied hands in the cloth of magical thinking but calls on all of us to do the same. Elite capture, after all, is about turning oppression and its cure into a (neo)liberal commodity exchange where identities become capitalism’s latest currency rather than the grounds for revolutionary transformation.
 * Robin Kelley, attributed in interview