This helps to illuminate developments in black elite politics since Frazier wrote in the 1950s. In Frazier’s time, there were class differences among African Americans, but exceedingly few black Americans had notable political power or the level of wealth that could buy serious influence. But that has changed, as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor points out:
The most significant transformation in all of black life over the last fifty years has been the emergence of a black elite, bolstered by the black political class, that has been responsible for administering cuts and managing meager budgets on the backs of black constituents.
This transformation was dramatically on display in Baltimore during the protests of the murder of Freddie Gray. Taylor continues: “when a black mayor, governing a largely black city, aids in the mobilization of a military unit led by a black woman to suppress a black rebellion, we are in a new period of the black freedom struggle.”
Elite capture is not unique to black politics; it is a general feature of politics, anywhere and everywhere. I could just as easily have focused on the world of elite universities. In Philosophy of African American Studies (2015), for example, Stephen Ferguson II makes a similar argument about the elite capture of black studies, which owes its existence to the radical student movements of the 1960s and ’70s but has since been “turned into a bureaucratic cog in the academic wheel controlled by administrators, with virtually no democratic input from students or the black working-class community.” I could also have kept the general perspective but reversed the role of race and class. In socialist organizations, for example, we might find that white people likewise tend to capture the group’s politics.
Identity politics originated with black women who were tired of having their political priorities sidelined or devalued in political organizations.
Or we could look away from race to a different set of identity characteristics altogether. In the Buzzfeed article “You Wanted Same-Sex Marriage? Now You Have Pete Buttigieg,” Shannon Keating laments the trajectory of mainstream queer politics away from the more radical elements dramatically on display in the Stonewall riot of 1969 and ACT UP. Or take how The Wing, a coworking space touting itself as a “women’s utopia,” exploits the women who work for it.