In recent years (or, it seems, months) there has been an increased desire to defer to the voices of under-represented communities. These are well-intentioned, however, " Doing better than the epistemic norms we've inherited from a history of explicit global apartheid is an awfully low bar to set. The facts that explain who ends up in which room shape our world much more powerfully than the squabbles for comparative prestige between people who have already made it into the rooms." The people who serve as handy representatives of the under-represented community may be very different from typical members of their community, which explains why they're in the room to begin with. "For example,"says Olúfémi O. Táíwò, "the fact that incarcerated people cannot participate in academic discussions about freedom that physically take place on campus is intimately related to the fact that they are locked in cages." Or as Nick Estes says 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". Aas Táíwò comments, "This performance is not for the benefit of Indigenous people, but "for white audiences or institutions of power".
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