There's definitely people who are, in a clear eyed way, om exploiting social norms. And you know, i won't have anything interesting to say about those people. But these institutional formations that you're pointing out are actually a good reason to keep moving away from the grifter model of explaining what's happening in social justice spaces. What do you get rewarded for in the academy, especially in the parts of the academy where these sorts of norms circulate? You get a war. You get rewarded for thinking of the new name for a thing. That's how you get people to cite your paper. Sometimes the evaluation is aesthetic, sometimes it's social. Does the incrowd in your discipline view
Featuring Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò on his essay "Being-in-the-Room Privilege: Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference," an interview first posted in December 2020. This pairs well with last week's Jared Clemons interview on In This House We Believe antiracism. Since 2020, Táíwò has published a book expanding on these ideas: Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else).
Read Táíwò's essay: thephilosopher1923.org/post/being-in-the-room-privilege-elite-capture-and-epistemic-deference
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