The ability to decide who you defer to in strategic ways kind of cheapens what deference is. What's particularly interesting about that is the way that it kind of weaponizes the u.S.'s own history of segregation and its imprint on passage to elete bases. For most people in this country, particularly of affluent white backgrounds, their friend groups and social groups aren't that diverse. And so for a number of these people, the only contact to political perspectives on the relvan issues that they might have might just be the person trotted in front of them as a black woman with a perspective on this issue.
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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