Elite Capture by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò

Author:Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò [Táíwò, Olúfẹ́mi O.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2022-05-03T11:00:00+00:00

Better Blueprints

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.

As philosopher C. Thi Nguyen reminded us in the last chapter, the power of the system is that of the game designer. It builds our social, economic, cultural, and even attentional environment in ways that get us to follow its game plan.

In the speech I quoted at the beginning of this chapter, Amílcar Cabral explains another important aspect of this systemic control: “[I]mperialist domination . . . for its own security, requires cultural oppression and the attempt at direct or indirect liquidation of the essential elements of the culture of the dominated people.” Culture, for Cabral, is our collective ability to design and organize our own lives, and be the engines of our own history—an ability that conflicts directly with the aims of imperialists to be the ones doing the designing and controlling. This is why, “whatever may be the material aspects of this domination,” imperialist domination can survive “only by the permanent, organized repression of the cultural life of the people concerned.”29

This, above all, illustrates the key problem with deference: it focuses the very capacity that we have to reconstruct the whole house to the specific rooms that have already been built for us. It advertises itself as deferring to marginalized voices and perspectives, but in conceding so much creative space to the blueprint of society, it is perhaps better understood as deference to the built structure of society.

I am arguing here for another approach—one that concedes that we have to start with the interactions that we have most control over, but that keeps in view the point of changing how those interactions go: to rebuild the whole of society, not just our interactions. Rooting ourselves here thus gives us a constructive politics.

A constructive politics pursues specific goals or end results, rather than aiming to avoid “complicity” in injustices that we assume will mostly persist anyway. If it’s “epistemology” or knowledge practices we’re concerned about, then a constructive politics focuses on institutions and practices of information gathering that are strategically useful for challenging social injustices themselves, not just the symptoms manifest in the room we happen to be in today.

In general, a constructive politics is one that engages directly in the task of redistributing social resources and powe,r rather than pursuing intermediary goals cashed out in symbols.

This is a demanding approach. It asks that we swim upstream, that we be accountable and responsive to people who aren’t yet in the room, and that we build the kinds of rooms in which we can sit together, rather than merely seek to navigate more gracefully the rooms history has built for us.

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