Rambling

Book Thoughts: Elite Capture by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò

After I read a book, I generally email my thoughts or notes to a friend. I'm now also copying these first emails to this blog since it's easier to revisit. The following may have a lot of quotes and random commentary. Commentary is marked in darker blue.

This was my book club book for August. It's like a more in-depth version of Táíwò's essay "Being-in-the-Room Privilege: Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference," which I'm pretty sure we've both read before.

I actually looked at the book reviews before opening this up and found it to be lower than I expected; a lot of people were hoping for less theory and more "what to do." But I've noticed a trend with these books in general in that they're more to give grounding principles and less about telling you what to do, ABCD, because the situation in which you are personally operating is unique. The only book I've read recently that actually gave things to do was An Abolitionist's Handbook, but that's a lot more of the self-help variety than an organizing How-To. There is also a book that I took a few notes on for us before, Secrets of a Successful Organizer, but in general, in the way that books like Pollution is Colonialism and We Do This 'Til We Free Us have covered, there is no real universal solution. Everything will have to be negotiated in the specific set of circumstances it exists in. Which is also why I think Fumbling Towards Repair notes that you should only read it if you're actually doing transformative justice work already.

Now, if you actually watch Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò's introduction video for Africana Studies for Cornell like 8 years ago because you want to know how to pronounce his name (which was, surprisingly, how I was reading it in my head already), you'll also hear him say that (at least 8 years ago) he's a teacher, not an activist. The activism will come from his students. For him, he's more interested in asking questions than giving answers, which both suits the whole collaborative education idea rather than the "banking" model and lets us know that people were probably expecting the wrong thing from this book.

So all of this is to say that I think this book is more about framework and people who actually are genuinely looking for something with concrete steps to work with should probably A) join an actual organization/union if they haven't already, B) talk with actual organizers there that will probably give real on-the-ground knowledge, and C) look for specific reading materials, which you should probably know about from B or other organizing meetings at some point. I think this book is more about getting us all to think about the limitations of "Deference Politics" and to encourage us to think "outside the room" and to bring up the question of who is outside our rooms in the rooms we're in already.

Now, of course, as someone with social anxiety, I'm probably going to do nothing.

Below is summary of the ideas in this book.


The Origin of Identity Politics

The term "identity politics" originates from the 1977 manifesto of the Combahee River Collective, an organization of queer, Black feminist socialists. These activists had been sidelined repeatedly in national organizations for both Black and feminist causes. Multiple people who did important work were part of this collective, such as Audre Lorde, who gets cited everywhere and of whom I've only read "Uses of the Erotic," which was a completely useless essay for me as an asexual person. (I read this because of its citation in Pleasure Activism, which is also on my personal shitlist.)

So "identity politics" was meant to center the lived, intersectional experiences of Black women and was in favor of diverse coalitional organizing.

As Princeton professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor puts it, “One could not expect Black women to be wholly active in political movements that neither represented nor advanced their interests”; therefore, the identity politics they developed served as “entry points for Black women to engage in politics,” rather than a whole cloth withdrawal from problematic organizations and movements.

Beverly Smith, another of the group’s founders, recalls the immediate political effect of the group’s statement among groups in the Boston left: “[W]e also drew many women of color or who were not Black to us. We had connections with Latinas. We had connections with Asian women. . . . And they drew us too. Because it wasn’t just like one way. When we’d find out about things that were happening, we would get ourselves there as well.” The collective’s principled stance on identity politics functioned as a principle of unity, rather than division.

Nowadays, identity politics is mostly used as a dividing team thing, especially on social media. Táíwò argues that this is because of "Elite Capture" and not about what identity politics is at its core.


Elite Capture

According to political scientist Jo Freeman, “an elite refers to a small group of people who have power over a larger group of which they are part, usually without direct responsibility to that larger group, and often without their knowledge or consent.”

Elite capture happens when the advantaged few steer resources and institutions that could serve the many toward their own narrower interests and aims. The term is used in economics, political science, and related disciplines to describe the way socially advantaged people tend to gain control over benefits meant for everyone. In this context, it has been used much like the more familiar label of “corruption” and identified by similar symptoms of undue influence, such as bribes. But the concept has also been applied to describe how political projects more generally can be hijacked—in principle or in effect—by the well positioned and better resourced.

Elite capture is not a conspiracy. It’s bigger than cynical appropriations, opportunism, or the moral successes or failures of any individual or group. It is a kind of system behavior—a phenomenon articulated at the population level, an observable (predictable) pattern of actions involving individuals, groups, and subgroups, each of whom may be pursuing any number of different goals from their own narrow point of view. Elite capture is not limited to the scope of their intentions. The constant dynamic of individual and group interactions makes up a social system, and elite capture emerges out of that dynamic.

Public goods and resources such as knowledge, attention, and values are unfairly distributed, just as much as material wealth and political power are. More precisely, the distribution patterns of all these are distorted in similar ways, for similar reasons. Elite capture is symptomatic of social systems with unequal balances of power.

It's interesting that knowledge, attention, and values are counted as resources here. Haven't really thought of it that way before, but it is true that stuff like attention on social media is extremely skewed.

Common features of elite capture:


Self-interest (laziness, callous indifference, and opportunism) is enough for elite capture:

Other basic examples of elite capture:



Common Ground

Táíwò spends some time on making analogies that are easy for people to understand how elite capture is a system problem that can perpetuate itself through people who don't necessarily believe in its system. One of those is talking about how in the fable, "The Emperor's New Clothes," the townspeople didn't have to necessarily believe that the emperor really was wearing clothes, they just had to know they would be risking something (their livelihood, their political safety, etc.) by pointing it out, or that they would gain something from playing along. It is enough for the system that they act as if they believe it, regardless of what they actually think in their heads. The problem, ultimately, isn't the emperor, the townspeople; it's the system which they live under that grants such unequal power — the empire.

A concept brought up here is "common ground," which is a collaborative creation of a shared understanding of information. When we communicate, we treat these common beliefs as if they were true. Assumptions like this serve to make communication faster. What information gets treated as common ground is also often subject to elite capture. Political structures also affect the structures of all of our interactions.

Carter Godwin Woodson, the author of The Mis-Education of the Negro, pointed out how the curriculum available to Black people was built around information selected by the racist education system:

In medical schools Negroes were likewise convinced of their inferiority in being reminded of their role as germ carriers. The prevalence of syphilis and tuberculosis among Negroes was especially emphasized without showing that these maladies are more deadly among the Negroes for the reason that they are Caucasian diseases; and since these plagues are new to Negroes, these sufferers have not had time to develop against them the immunity which time has permitted in the Caucasian. Other diseases to which Negroes easily fall prey were mentioned to point out the race as an undesirable element when this condition was due to the Negroes’ economic and social status. Little emphasis was placed upon the immunity of the Negro from diseases like yellow fever and influenza which are so disastrous to whites. Yet, the whites were not considered inferior because of this differential resistance to these plagues.

The information was technically accurate (certain illnesses are more prevalent among certain populations), but also stripped of its context and thus supported racist beliefs because the common ground primarily had ideas about whites being biologically superior (when ultimately it's about geography and living conditions).

At the time Woodson was writing, it was common ground to say that African Americans had no distinctive history. He argued and produced different materials. "The point was not just to change hearts and minds, but to change the common ground—to change what information was usable by people in their daily interactions."


Value Capture

A second metaphor here is game theory, referencing philosopher C. Thi Nyugen. Ultimately the greatest amount of agency in the experience of a game is not held by the player but by the designer, who sets up the rewards and punishments and decides what you can and cannot do. The designer creates the environment and gives people reason to play along, akin to how power structures do so for people in the real world.

Value capture is a process by which we begin with rich and subtle values, encounter simplified versions of them in the social wild, and revise our values in the direction of simplicity—thus rendering them inadequate. This kind of process is always a possible result of social interaction, but the distortions to our values are sharpest in social systems and environments where this simplicity is built into the structures of reward and punishment.

In real life, the value capture process is sometimes deliberately managed by elites to manipulate and control others with game design-like tactics. Gig economy platforms like Uber and Lyft use “badges” and rating systems to manage the decision-making environment of their driver employees. Even outside of work, social media features such as likes, shares, and retweets play the role of points in games. Over time, these simple metrics threaten to distort or take the place of values (say, the wish to meaningfully contribute to discussion or to take pride in the quality of one’s work) that might otherwise have inflected our behavior on these platforms.

(...)

It is clear that the forces of capital have found uses for game thinking. But, as Nguyen is careful to point out, a shadowy cabal of plotters’ deliberate use of game design strategies to control people is the exception, not the rule, of value capture. Deliberate or calculated intervention is not a prerequisite for value capture; rather, it requires only an environment or incentive structure that encourages excess value clarity.

For example, we can imagine ourselves participating in good faith conversations on a new social media platform about a particular social issue. This platform is structured, of course, by designers employed by the company owners, who build and manage algorithms that direct the traffic of posts and encourage consumer engagement. As we talk on this platform, its features begin to affect our behavior: simpler takes attract comments and shares, affecting what people say on the platform. The tech-company owners get the lion’s share of revenue generated by the site’s traffic, driven by our conversations, and a small number of site participants get the lion’s share of attention directed by the activity on the platform. An elite emerges.

It would be a mistake, however, to understand everything that happens on the platform as a process orchestrated by the elites. They are its results, like the platform’s unequal distribution of profit and attention itself. Elites do often make the environment worse and block solutions, but to blame the problem of elite capture entirely on their moral successes and failures is to confuse effect for cause. The true problem lies in the system itself, the built environment and rules of interaction that produced the elites in the first place.


The Issues With Deference Politics

He frames this better than I could so I'm going to just copy and paste copiously.

A prime example of deference politics is the call to “listen to the most affected” or “center the most marginalized,” now ubiquitous in many academic and activist circles. These calls have never sat well with me. In my experience as an academic and organizer, when people have said they needed to “listen to the most affected,” it wasn’t usually because they intended to set up Skype calls to refugee camps or to collaborate with houseless people. Acting on this conception of “centering the most marginalized” would require a different approach entirely, in a world where 1.6 billion people live in inadequate housing (slum conditions) and 100 million are unhoused, a full third of the human population does not have reliable drinking water, and the intersections of food, energy, and water insecurity with the climate crisis have already displaced 8.5 million people in South Asia alone, while threatening to displace tens of millions more. Such a stance would require, at a minimum, that one leave the room.

Instead, “centering the most marginalized” in my experience has usually meant handing conversational authority and attentional goods to whoever is already in the room and appears to fit a social category associated with some form of oppression—regardless of what they have or have not actually experienced, or what they do or do not actually know about the matter at hand. Even in rooms where stakes have been high—where potential researchers were discussing how to understand a social phenomenon, where activists were deciding what to target—the rules of deference have often meant that the conversation stayed in the room, while the people most affected by it stayed outside.

This particular politics of deference emerged out of a theoretical orientation called standpoint epistemology, which became popular in feminist circles in the 1970s and has continued to contribute to the thinking of many activists and academics since. Standpoint epistemology comprises three seemingly innocuous ideas:

1) knowledge is socially situated,

2) marginalized people have some advantages in gaining some forms of knowledge, and

3) research programs (and other areas of human activity) ought to reflect these facts.

These ideas should go down easy. As Liam Kofi Bright argues, any serious empiricist philosophy would entail all three of these points. Moreover, they are politically important: they point to the value of lived experience and the knowledge that comes from it. At face value, a commitment to these ideas should help us resist and contain elite capture. They should provide a basis for respecting knowledge that the institutions of the world otherwise want to discredit.

But the devil is in the details. The common approaches to putting these abstract ideas into practice emphasize deference to others in conversational contexts, in an effort to fix the distribution of attention: they ask that we pass the mic, believe marginalized people, and give offerings.

The motivation is admirable, and these actions themselves are often good ideas, as far as they go. But aside from involving attitudes and interpersonal dynamics, oppression—racism, ableism, xenophobia, patriarchy, and so forth—also have serious material consequences. These structures of injustice decide who has reliable access to basic interpersonal security, housing, health care, water, and energy. All of these consequences of bigotry, from the attitudinal to the material, have to be dealt with if we are to address oppression.

The politics of deference focuses on the consequences that are likeliest to show up in the rooms where elites do most of their interacting: classrooms, boardrooms, political parties. As a result, we seem to end up with far more, and more specific, practical advice about how to, say, allocate tasks at a committee meeting than how to keep people alive.

Deference as a default political orientation can work counter to marginalized groups’ interests. We are surrounded by a discourse that locates attentional injustice in the selection of spokespeople and book lists taken to represent the marginalized, rather than focusing on the actions of the corporations and algorithms that much more powerfully distribute attention. This discourse ultimately participates in the weaponization of attention in the service of marginalization. It directs what little attentional power we can control at symbolic sites of power rather than at the root political issues that explain why everything is so fucked up.

To say what’s wrong with the popular, deferential applications of standpoint epistemology, we need to understand what makes it popular. First, a cynical answer: deference to figures from oppressed communities is a performance that sanitizes, apologizes for, or simply distracts from the fact that the deferrer has enough “in the room” privilege for their “lifting up” of a perspective to be of consequence—to reflect well on them.

In her influential essay “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” Freeman notes that “structurelessness” in the women’s liberation movement did not resolve the problem of unequal and unfair distributions of power; instead, it provided a mask behind which informal networks of well-positioned elites could hide their outsize influence on the culture and activities of the group.

Unlike structurelessness, deference politics doesn’t mask its distributive consequences. Visible performance of a deferential act of “passing the mic” or “stepping back” in order to give attention or space to another person does tend to redistribute short-term attention, as promised. But deference politics can still mask essential power relations, especially when we consider the performance in the context of the people who aren’t in the room at all. For instance, one white person giving the mic to the specific person of color in the room can obscure both the overall power dynamics of the room and the whole room’s relationship to the broader category of “people of color” that a particular comrade is taken to represent.

It would be reasonable to assume that most of those who practice standpoint epistemology deferentially do so for the right reasons, and that they trust the people they share the room with to help them find the proper practical expression of their joint moral commitments. Indeed, we don’t need to attribute bad faith to all or even most of those who practice deferential politics to explain the phenomenon.

Bad roommates aren’t the problem, for the same reason that being a good roommate isn’t the solution: the problem is that we are still trapped in the room. If we want better politics, we have to challenge how those rooms are put together, the security system that controls access to them, and the rules that dictate what happens in them.

(...) So, if we have to listen to one person, perhaps it’s better that it be a Black person, even an affluent and privileged Black person, than the affluent and privileged white person who would otherwise have dominated the discussion. Put another way, deference can often seem like the best we can do in the face of what we take to be the fixed facts about the room and its purpose, and who’s in it.

But these are the last facts we should want to hold fixed. And if our aim is simply to do better than the epistemic norms that we’ve inherited from a history of explicit global apartheid, that is an awfully low bar to set.

The facts that explain who ends up in what room shape our world much more powerfully than the squabbles for comparative prestige between people who have already made it inside. And when the conversation is about social justice, the social mechanisms that determine who gets into the room are often exactly what needs to change—for example, the fact that incarcerated people cannot participate in academic discussions about freedom is intimately related to the fact that they are physically locked in cages.

Still, deference does have attractive qualities. After all, the people in powerful rooms, to whom others defer, may be “elites” relative to the larger group they represent, but disadvantaged relative to the other people in the rooms with them.

Our sense of ourselves—and the patterns of deference we tend to fit to our standpoint epistemological commitments— often foregrounds the ways in which we are marginalized, rather than the ways we are not. A privileged person in an absolute sense (a person belonging to, say, the half of the world that has secure access to “basic needs”) may nevertheless experience themselves consistently on the low end of the power dynamics of their immediate social world. The rooms we are in, which is to say the social dynamics we actually experience, play a central part in developing and refining our political subjectivity and our sense of ourselves.

Deference responds to real, morally weighty experiences of being put down, ignored, sidelined, silenced. The fact that others have graver problems does not legitimate bigotry toward the relatively advantaged.

People are—and ought to be—vying for respect, dignity, and some measure of recognition alongside policy reforms and material redistribution. We all deserve these attentional goods, which are often denied, even to the “elites” of marginalized and stigmatized groups. Moreover, distributions of respect and care can be won and lost collectively; there is some connection between the inside of the room and the outside. The deference interpretation of standpoint epistemology thus has an important non-epistemic appeal to such elites: it intervenes directly in morally consequential practices of giving attention and respect.

This focus on one’s own relative marginalization is especially easy to cultivate when exposure to people below us in the relevant hierarchies is controlled or prevented, which is, after all, a great deal of what rooms do. This foregrounding of the personal happens for a reason that is entirely compatible with the ethos of “standpoint epistemology” and valuing lived experience. Our personal emphasis on the ways we are marginalized often matches the world as we have experienced it. And such a focus may be in some ways convenient for the practitioners of deference epistemology. Nonetheless, I still think that the cynical view does them too little credit. Many who practice deference epistemology are simply doing the best they can.

However, this same phenomenon also illustrates how the strength of standpoint epistemology, its recognition of the importance of perspective, becomes its weakness when flattened into deference politics. From a structural perspective, the rooms we don’t enter, the experiences we don’t have (and the reasons we are able to avoid them) might have more to teach us about the world and our place in it than anything said inside. If so, the deferential approach to standpoint epistemology actually prevents “centering” or even hearing from the most marginalized, since it focuses us on the interactions inside the rooms we occupy, rather than calling us to account for the interactions we needn’t and typically don’t have.

For those who are deferred to, the performance of deference can supercharge group-undermining norms.

In her book Conflict Is Not Abuse, activist writer and scholar Sarah Schulman makes a provocative observation about the psychological effects of both trauma and felt superiority: while these often come about for different reasons and have very different moral statuses, they result in similar behavioral patterns. Chief among these are misrepresenting the stakes of conflict (often by overstating harm) and representing others’ independence as a hostile threat (for example, calling out failures to “center” the right topics or people). These behaviors, whatever their causal history, have corrosive effects, especially when a community’s norms magnify or multiply rather than constrain or metabolize them.

For those who defer, the habit can supercharge moral cowardice, as the norms of deference provide social cover for the abdication of responsibility. It displaces onto individual heroes, a hero class, or a mythicized past the work that is ours to do in the present. Their perspective may be clearer on this or that specific matter, but their overall point of view isn’t any less particular or constrained by history than ours. More importantly, deference places the accountability that is all of ours to bear onto select people—and, more often than not, a sanitized and thoroughly fictional caricature of them.

Deference to collectives or their culture has many of the same risks as deference to marginalized individual. PAIGC militant Amílcar Cabral affirmed the need to respond to centuries of anti-Black racism and the widespread assumptions about the inferiority of African history and culture. He, of course, denied that anything like a single African culture existed. But even if it did, reference to it would not answer questions about how we ought to behave and organize ourselves politically, since “all culture is composed of essential and secondary elements, of strengths and weaknesses, of virtues and failings, of positive and negative aspects, of factors of progress and factors of stagnation or regression.” He went as far as to insist that “blind acceptance of the values of the culture, without considering what presently or potentially regressive elements it contains” would be “no less harmful to Africa” than racist underestimation of African culture had been.

The same tactics of deference that insulate us from criticism and disagreement insulate us from connection and transformation. They prevent us from engaging empathetically and authentically with the struggles of other people—a prerequisite of coalitional politics.

Moreover, as identities become more and more fine grained and disagreements sharper, we come to realize that “coalitional politics” (understood as struggle across difference) is, simply, politics. Thus, the deferential orientation, like that fragmentation of political collectivity it enables, is ultimately anti-political.

To opt for deference, rather than interdependence, may soothe short-term psychological wounds. But it does so at a steep cost: it may undermine the goals that motivated the project—and it entrenches a politics that does not serve those fighting for freedom over privilege, for collective liberation over mere parochial advantage.

Deference politics is right about the what: it does in fact matter that we pay attention to lived experiences, and it is politically important that we pay attention to difference. But it is wrong about the how, because the more we focus on changing our norms of interactions to ones that locally and cosmetically elevate the voices and perspectives in the room, the harder it becomes to change the world outside of the room.

I take concerns about trauma especially seriously. I grew up in the United States, a nation structured by settler colonialism, racial slavery, and their aftermath, with enough collective and historical trauma to go around. I also grew up in a Nigerian diasporic community, populated by many who had genocide in their living memory.

At the national and community level, I have seen personality traits, quirks of habit and action, that I’ve suspected were born of these grim parts of history. Like most people, I have not been spared. I’ve watched and felt myself change in reaction to fearing for my dignity or life, to crushing pain and humiliation. I reflect on these traumatic moments often, and very seldom do I think, “That was educational.”

These experiences can be, if we are very fortunate, building blocks. What comes of them depends on how the blocks are put together. Those who study the politics of knowledge call this the “achievement thesis.” As philosopher Briana Toole clarifies, by itself, one’s social location only puts a person in a position to know; “epistemic privilege” or advantage, on the other hand, is achieved only through deliberate, concerted struggle from that position.

Humiliation, deprivation, and suffering can build—especially in the context of the deliberate, structured effort of “consciousness raising” that Toole specifically highlights. But these same experiences can also destroy, and if I had to bet on which effect would win most often, it would be the latter.

Contra the old expression, pain, whether born of oppression or not, is a poor teacher. Suffering is partial, shortsighted, and self-absorbed. We shouldn’t have a politics that expects different. Oppression is not a prep school.

Demanding as the constructive approach may be, the deferential approach is far more so, and in a far more unfair way. As philosopher Agnes Callard rightly notes, trauma (and even the righteous, well-deserved anger that often accompanies it) can corrupt as readily as it can ennoble. Perhaps more so.

When it comes down to it, the thing I believe most deeply about deference politics is that it asks something of trauma that it cannot give. It asks the traumatized to shoulder burdens alone that we ought to share collectively, lifting them up onto a pedestal in order to hide below them.

When I think about my trauma, I don’t think about life lessons. I think about the quiet nobility of survival. The very fact that those chapters weren’t the final ones of my story is powerful enough all on its own. It is enough to ask of those experiences that I am still here to remember them.

I also believe that deference politics asks us to be less than we are—and not even for our own benefit. As scholar-activist Nick Estes explains in the context of Indigenous politics, “The cunning of trauma politics is that it turns actual people and struggles, whether racial or Indigenous citizenship and belonging, into matters of injury. It defines an entire people mostly on their trauma and not by their aspirations or sheer humanity.” This performance is not for the benefit of Indigenous people; rather, “it’s for white audiences or institutions of power.”

When I think about my trauma, I also think about the great writer James Baldwin’s realization that the things that most tormented him “were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.”

That I have experienced my share of traumatic experiences, have survived abuse of various kinds, have faced near death from accidental circumstance and from violence (different as the particulars of these may be from those around me) is not a card to play in gamified social interaction or a weapon to wield in battles over prestige. It is not what gives me a special right to speak, to evaluate, or to decide for a group. It is a concrete, experiential manifestation of the vulnerability that connects me to most of the people on this earth. It comes between me and other people not as a wall, but as a bridge.

Going together—the politics of solidarity, which deference provides one, flawed model of doing—is a good start. But on its own, it’s not enough. We also have to decide collectively where we’re going, and then we have to do what it takes to get there. Though we start from different levels of privilege or advantage, this journey is not a matter of figuring out who should bow to whom, but simply one of figuring out how best to join forces. As Paulo Freire showed us in theory, and the African anti-colonial and Portuguese Carnation revolutions showed us in practice, we will need each other to get where we’re going. And getting there, after all, is the point.

Woof. There's so much here. I agree with all the reasons he states for why people do Deference Politics. I really need to read Conflict Is Not Abuse, also. Its kind of wild that trauma and exploiting others can lead to similar behaviors when one is often the direct cause of the other, but it makes sense. My sister's most difficult workplace relationships in her union right now consist of 1 guy who is not doing his work despite being charismatic, and 2 women who are taking a ton of emotional time and energy from her by responding in trauma ways and then accusing other people of not deferring to them adequately when they come from marginalized backgrounds. (One of the most recent incidents of this was one of them blowing up at other people in a meeting for not recommending her to be the president of some committee, which she perceived as an attack on her racial identity. Meanwhile, my sister, who she's on pretty good terms with because of all the emotional labor my sister is doing for her, actually believes that she isn't the right person for the job precisely because she seems overburdened and has emotional outbursts like this that are completely out of context to whatever they're currently talking about. Rather, in that meeting she literally got mad at people who were asking for context about what she was so upset about, because they weren't even aware of a lot of the details of the situation.)

And I think pointing out the fact that we stand to learn the most from the rooms we're not in is extremely true and also extremely hard for me, personally. Like, this is something that I can understand as true and, yet, my social anxiety already means I'm not even entering rooms I want to enter. The idea of even trying to figure out who is not in the room, which essentially boils down to, "Think hard about who is not here, and then talk to as many people as you can outside to get a good sense of what they want," is grueling to me to even imagine. I would jokingly say that my bitch ass isn't in any rooms, but it's not true. I have my volunteer room, in which basically everyone is white besides me and one other Asian, in which I'm the youngest person, and there's also stuff like my Book Club. But I don't feel empowered enough to try to change my volunteer room, nor do I particularly want to try because I want to focus on other things in my life. I keep saying this, but I'm like a perpetual failure at all this organizing stuff despite reading and thinking about it because fundamentally I do not want to talk to people. And truthfully, talking to people takes a ton out of me, way more than the average person. I don't know if that's like "Cut yourself slack, you're basically disabled in this realm," or if it's like, "You Should Be Trying Harder because literally noooooo one wants to talk to other people, that's the number one complaint about union work is that people don't want to do one-on-ones and maintaining social relations, they want to do all the big flashy stuff or do nothing at all." So far all I really have is guilt, which isn't really productive because it doesn't actually make me want to do anything besides contemplate whether I'd be better off dead, which is a moot point because it is point blank unfeasible for me.

Other than that, there's a place that gives me pause, and it's about the whole deference to whole groups being just as bad, and how all cultures contain good and bad elements. This makes sense and I am inclined to agree with it, but then I also remember "Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor," and Pollution Is Colonialism, which both bring up that Indigenous people are not obligated to think about the futures of settlers and part of decolonizing is ceding this control (the whole idea of "Land Back"). Which also makes a lot of sense, but I guess if we agree with that, then we're also doing deference here. I guess another way you could think about it is that Indigenous people will work on their stuff and we can only work on our stuff, which is Anti-colonial rather than Decolonial at best. Part of me just does want to cede control so I don't have to think about it and worry about if I'm doing something wrong. But I guess, in reality, if you're talking about the lives of millions of people, you are going to actually need to have hard conversations. And some people will be pissed off and not everyone will be happy and things will never perfectly be solved and liberation is a really hard, long-term project that will have tons of losses in the process. aughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh


Constructive Politics

Táíwò believes in "constructive" politics over deference politics as the way to combat elite capture.

A constructive approach would focus on outcome over process: the pursuit of specific goals or results, rather than mere avoidance of “complicity” in injustice or promotion of purely moral or aesthetic principles. A constructive approach fits squarely into what political theorist Michael Dawson calls “pragmatic utopianism . . . that starts where we are, but imagines where we want to be,” combining a set of goals unbound by whatever passes for common sense today with a “hardheaded political realism” capable of finding the strategies and tactics needed to shift common sense and the world underneath it.

When it comes to knowledge and information, a constructive politics would be concerned primarily with building institutions and campaign-relevant practices of information gathering, rather than centering specific groups of people or spokespeople who stand in for them. It would focus on accountability, rather than conformity. It would calibrate itself directly to the task of redistributing social rather than to intermediary goals cashed out in pedestals or symbolism. It would focus on building and rebuilding rooms, not regulating traffic within and between them. It would be what political scientist Adom Getachew terms a “worldmaking” project, aimed at building and rebuilding actual structures of social connection and movement, rather than mere critique of the ones we already have.

Human social systems are self-organizing. Indeed, something much like this thought is already embedded in the use of the term “organizing” to label work that challenges oppressive aspects of our society. Often when we organize, we try to build a smaller system of our own within the overall system we live in that is influential enough to change the whole system’s behavior. This is a potential role for a mass movement, a workers’ party, a set of direct actions. It’s the sort of thing we can do in a room.

In our organizing, there are two basic ways we can respond to this unfortunate fact about political struggle. The first is to shift our aims and priorities to focus on that which we can easily reach, either by ignoring the external constraints or simply by taking on faith that getting the “internal” politics right is our best shot of changing the world at large. While there is a wisdom to focusing on what we have the best chance of controlling or managing, this approach is also deeply defeatist. That’s why, in any sober analysis of our situation, most of the tools we have to affect to change the world are part of a second, “external” strategy: one that lies outside of any given room or set of interpersonal relationships.

If we follow the constructive approach that I am advocating in these pages, we recognize that the way we treat each other in organizing spaces matters primarily in terms of how it relates us to the rest of the world. After all, most of the world— and thus most of the structures we are trying to change—are outside of the particular rooms in which we build alliances and refine our politics.

This is the section that many readers were hoping for some How To's, but the next parts have case studies that are larger than just "I have a room, what do I do with this room?" which I think was actually the question dissatisfied readers wanted answered.

Táíwò believes in focusing on building things, "whether institutions, norms, or other tools." This quote is in a section titled "Building a New House", which is most certainly a nod to Audre Lorde's famous "master's tools" quote. This tracks with other things I've read and discussed (or at least shared) with you: Pollution Is Colonialism, A Third University Is Possible, some abolitionist texts, etc.

The main thing I'm wondering about though is how much effort we should be spending on attending to in-group dynamics vs out-group dynamics. The abolitionist texts I've read (Cullors and Kaba) focus a lot on the idea of accountability within groups and building communities that work towards undoing violence, focusing on the local. That seems to track closer with "The Personal Is Political" idea of second wave feminism, while Táíwò's main point is that we need to be engaging actively outside of our rooms even while doing the work in them. Táíwò saying also that outcomes matter more than process also goes against my impression of Abolitionist practices.

I'm sure that these ideas aren't necessarily opposed to each other since Táíwò himself has mentioned abolitionists, I just wonder at what point do you decide that helping manage someone else's emotions just isn't worth it anymore and is actively distracting from the work and leading to burnout (just thinking of my sister's perpetual predicament of dealing with people who want deference politics; not like her organization uses abolitionist practices though, which actually has ideas for how to bring make community part of the process of transformative justice).


Like standpoint epistemology, this simple ethos seems obvious and innocuous enough at this level of abstraction. But it has competitors. For instance, people and organizations could orient their politics oppositionally. Many forms of political identification consist in whole or in large part as lists of things that one opposes: one is “anti-capitalist,” “anti-carceral,” or “antiracist.” Racism, capitalism, and mass incarceration are worth opposing. But the long view of human history confirms that even successful opposition to these would not guarantee a just future. Not one of these phenomena, at least in their modern forms, is even a millennium old. Especially in recent history, more often than not, one form of oppression has been replaced with another, different form that is similar to or even more unjust than the one that preceded it.

But maybe we want more than to play Whac-A-Mole with injustice. If we want to do more than alter the color of our children’s chains, we will have to successfully oppose more than isolated instances of oppression.

"A constructive approach to politics involves building power in and through institutions and networks."

We should set our sights on different scales, from local fights like community control over land, housing, and energy to global ones over debt cancellation in the global South. These fights, especially when they are planetary in scope, make it possible to totally revamp our global social system—to rebuild the house we all live in together.


Case Study: the PAIGC

The PAIGC (the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde) was an organization that resisted the Portuguese-imposed fascist regime Estado Novo in Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau.

The party spent three years negotiating with the Portuguese government, employing a strategy that focused on demonstrations and workers’ strikes. The PAIGC’s nonviolence was met with brutality, culminating in the massacre of fifty peacefully striking dockworkers at the port of Pidjigu-iti. After the massacre, the group began an armed guerrilla campaign of resistance to the Portuguese. This is the fight Lilica left school to join, and it culminated in the independence of both nations in 1973 and 1974.

PAIGC's military struggle also included reforming the colonial education system as a major part of its work.


Revolutionary Struggle Activities:


Post-Revolution

Nevertheless, something meaningful was won, beyond new flags. Even Guinea-Bissau, regarded by many as a “failed state” (when not as a “narco-state”), has won some ground. Education is one such arena: using its newfound national independence, Guinea-Bissau’s literacy rate surged from its pre-independence level of 2 percent, climbing as high as 60 percent among fifteen-to twenty-four-year-olds.

In the decades since independence, Cape Verde increased its national income tenfold, ascending from a status as one of the poorest countries in the world to a “middle-income country” and one of Africa’s most stable economies. The PAIGC’s emphasis on community power and decision making seems to have survived, avoiding the temptations toward autocracy to which other revolutions succumbed, and some foreign commentators have gone as far as to call it an “African exception” and “Africa’s most democratic nation.”

The PAIGC took on an important struggle against long odds, and their victories changed things for everyone. They could not erase or undo the barriers history had erected, but they could and did surpass many of them.


Case Study: The Water in Flint, Michigan

The month after the ill-fated switch in Flint’s water source, residents reported that their tap water was discolored and gave off an alarming odor. In that moment, what they needed was not for their oppression to be “celebrated,” “centered,” or narrated in the newest academic parlance. They didn’t need outsiders to empathize over what it felt like to be poisoned. To be sure, deference politics could give people these things—and these things aren’t unimportant. But they are secondary. What Flint residents really needed, above all, was to get the lead out of their water.

So they got to work. The first step was to develop epistemic authority. To achieve this, they built a new room, one that put Flint residents and activists in active collaboration with scientists who had the laboratories to run the relevant tests and prove MDEQ’s report was fraudulent.

Flint residents’ outcry about the poisonings helped recruit scientists to their cause. The new roommates ran a citizen science campaign, further raising the alarm about the water quality and distributing sampling kits to neighbors so that they could submit their water for testing. The alliance of residents and scientists won, and the poisoning of the children of Flint emerged as a national scandal.

This victory over the public narrative was only a first step, however. The second step—cleaning the water—required more than state acknowledgment; it entailed the apportionment of labor and resources to fix the water and address continuing health concerns.

What Flint residents received, initially, was a mix of platitudes and mockery from the ruling elite (including the US president, whose shared racial identity with many of the Flint residents apparently did not constrain). Now, however, it looks as though the activism of Flint residents and their expanding list of coalition partners has won additional and more meaningful victories. As of this writing, the ongoing campaign is pushing the project to replace dangerous water service lines to its final stage and has already forced the State of Michigan to pay a $600 million settlement to affected families.

This outcome is in no way a wholesale victory. Not only will attorney fees cut a substantial portion from the payouts, but the settlement cannot undo the damage that was caused to the residents.

Indeed, no epistemic orientation can by itself undo the various power asymmetries between the people and the imperial state system. But constructive politics, like that of Flint’s residents can help make the game a little more competitive; deference epistemology, on the other hand, isn’t even playing.

This is not a one-off story, but a generalizable strategy: even public decision-making that involves technical concepts and research can be done in a meaningfully democratic and participatory fashion.


Notable People

This book weaves together the stories of a few major players in resistance. Below is a quick list:


#books #nonfiction