THE MODERN ORIGIN OF IDENTITY-BASED DEFERENCE POLITICS: STANDPOINT EPISTEMOLOGY

Deference politics has had a major impact on how we act in social justice spaces.

In general, deference is the yielding, submitting, or deferring to someone because that person is seen as authoritative or superior in some way.

In the context of social justice movements today, Nigerian American philosopher Olúfẹmi Táíwò, in his 2022 book Elite Capture, defines deference politics as the way we modify our interpersonal interactions because we think that doing so will fix systems of oppression.

This is exemplified in the (mis)application of calls like “listen to/center x people.”

THE ORIGIN OF DEFERENCE POLITICS

This politics emerged out of standpoint epistemology, or standpoint theory, a term coined by Euro-American philosopher Sandra Harding to emphasize women’s knowledge in her 1986 book, The Science Question in Feminism.

Standpoint epistemology* proposes that knowledge is always socially situated and rooted in individuals’ personal perspectives.

* Note: epistemology is the branch of philosophy that examines the origins and nature of knowledge.

Because of that, Harding argued that marginalized people have a unique standpoint that enables them to better define research questions.

In 1987, in her book The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology,

British Canadian sociologist Dorothy Smith pointed out that sociology has been written from the standpoint of men in the ruling class, and that ideological apparatuses, such as education and the media, marginalize women's perspectives while representing men's standpoints as universal. She argued that women’s everyday lived experiences can inform and generate new questions for sociology research.

In 1990, African American professor Patricia Hill Collins argued in Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, that African American women have a distinctive point of view due to the interlocking system of race, gender, and class oppression.

Since then, feminists have built on Collins’s work to consider the standpoints of other marginalized groups.

THE LIMITATION OF IDENTITY-BASED DEFERENCE POLITICS

Táíwò stresses that, technically, standpoint epistemology should help us because elite institutions have long discredited or ignored knowledge production by people with marginalized identities.

His critique is in how this theory gets put into practice today, which often focuses on giving deference with norms like “stay in one’s lane” and “step up step back” — solely based on an individual’s association with a marginalized category without consideration for other factors.

This identity reductionist approach has led to things like liberal privilege politics and the “privilege walk,” which require us to disclose personal and private information to calculate our advantages or disadvantages.

Táíwò gets that we’re trying to fix the uneven distribution of power by fixing the uneven distribution of attention in our spaces, where systemic oppression can manifest in interpersonal interactions.

For example, men may assume women aren’t as knowledgeable and capable and talk over them, which writer Rebecca Solnit detailed in her 2008 book, Men Explain Things to Me, leading to ”mansplaining“ being added to our lexicon.

Táíwò acknowledges that deference politics is a response to the very real experiences of being put down, ignored, sidelined, and silenced — even to people in high places like a corporate boardroom with a marginalized identity — and people ought to demand dignity and recognition.

Nevertheless, he argues that deference politics ultimately participates in the weaponization of attention in the service of marginalization, that this strategy directs what little attentional power we can control at “symbolic sites of power,” rather than at the root causes of our collective struggle.

For example, a Euro-American merely needs to acknowlege their “white privilege” while uncritically “passing the mic” and bypasses the work of understanding the forces that have produced whiteness as a power structure tied to racial capitalism.

This reduces anti-racist work to self flogging and deferring, and makes it harder for all of us to fight racial capitalism as a macrostructure.

Inequalities definitely influence knowledge production, but some have argued that standpoint epistemology should not be about the knowledge or lived experience of an individual, but that of a collective.

In fact, the feminists who developed standpoint theory were inspired by the Marxist argument that workers share the experience of subjugation by the capitalists. When they become aware of their collective struggle, they can form a social class to fight for their liberation.

To conclude, we should demand respect in all our spaces. Our marginalized identities and lived experiences do give us certain insights and perspectives, but they do not automatically give us authoritative knowledge on complex issues or exempt us from ever being challenged.

And, we must keep working towards transforming material social relations.