Identity politics gets a bad rap these days. Critics on the right portray it as grievance politics. Centrist critics worry that it serves to divide instead of to unify. Critics on the left claim that it misidentifies the real underlying cause of structural injustice: class-based oppression. Erstwhile comrades are pointing fingers across familiar battle lines. Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s Elite Capture offers a defense of identity politics from the left. His thesis is that the problem lies not with identity politics, per se, but with the structural forces that shape it. The titular concept of “elite capture” describes “how political projects,”…