DEFERENCE POLITICS AND ITS PITFALLS
In part three of this Elite Capture study group shareout, we’ll share what Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò proposes as a fruitful approach to building power, which he calls constructive politics.
First, though, we’ll lay the context with his critique of a popular identity-based practice that is all too familiar to many of us, which he calls deference politics.
This deference politics can be observed at all political orientations and levels today, due to the misuse, neutralization, and co-optation of the original revolutionary identity politics.
The elite capture of identity politics
At the highest institutional level, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò identifies two main trends:
Performing symbolic identity politics to pacify without enacting material reforms, like painting “Black Lives Matter” on streets, but not changing the structures and policies that have resulted in significantly higher barriers to economic security for populations such as poor disabled Black women in the U.S., a group with 39% living in poverty as of 2022.
Rebranding rather than replacing inherently repressive institutions with elements of identity-based politics, such as the appointment of the first Black defense secretary in U.S. history, but not disbanding AFRICOM and the network of U.S. military bases currently occupying Africa.
The game is rigged everywhere
In left and progressive spaces, from grassroots to nonprofits, the use of identity politics is often more well-meaning, but has its limitation.
This is because, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò argues, our political structures affect the structure of all of our interactions. In the book Elite Capture, he notes that “the game has already been played by the time society hands us the controller.”
The game is rigged because by the time we come to “play,” the ruling class had already decided where the resources are and who is granted access to them.
Worse yet, they even set the rules for how the environment we’re in responds to our actions, an environment which is often most hostile to marginalized people.
One way that we respond to the rigged game is by trying to change the rules where we have some power — such as in our actions — which is where we see an opportunity to enact change.
But, these opportunities can get seized by deference politics.
Defining deference politics
Táíwò defines deference politics as a practice that “considers it a step toward justice to modify interpersonal interactions in compliance with the perceived wishes of the marginalized.”
He points out that the prime example of deference politics is the call to “listen to the most affected” or “center the most marginalized,” which is currently ubiquitous in many academic and activist circles.
These calls don’t sit well with Táíwò because the problem is, we are still in those circles, which are already structurally rigged.
The pitfalls of deference politics
Táíwò observes that “centering the most marginalized” usually means giving conversational authority to whoever is already in a particular room and appears to fit a social category associated with some form of oppression, regardless of what they’ve experienced, their level of knowledge on the topic, and their politics.
For example, not all Vietnamese refugees share the same experience and politics, have the same historical and geopolitical analysis of their displacement, or know the solutions to end refugee crises. But, if one fits the category of “Viet refugee” in an academic/activist/political circle in the U.S., they could be platformed to speak for all Vietnamese refugees, or even for all refugees.
Táíwò argues:
“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)... 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… Such a stance would require, at a minimum, that one leave the room.”
Táíwò isn’t completely against deference politics, noting that it isn’t entirely off base, it’s just that it’s potentially limiting and misleading, because:
“In such a game, it is much trickier than we realize to avoid moves that intensify elite capture and other oppressive aspects of our social structure—even when we use strategies that correctly identify the distribution of power in the room we’re in.”
He is sympathetic to attempts to fix the uneven distribution of power by fixing the uneven distribution of attention. But, it doesn't get to the root causes of “why everything is so f*cked up.”
In the next post, we will explore his proposal of constructive politics.