An article I'm wrestling with today about privilege and the politics of "being in the room"

Link to Article by Olúfémi O. Táíwò

Hello, here's an article I'm wrestling with today. I had a really good conversation with some people about it this morning and just wanted to share it here. It gave me thoughts about how the idea of deference, or deferring to others, can be done at an intellectual level that still doesn't affect the real lives of real people. Nowadays, many of us may have heard or done this a lot when it comes to the idea of centering certain groups or voices in our lives. Why are we centering them or deferring to them? Is it because we assume they have a certain experience that, when voiced, can lead to better outcomes? Or is it based in the actual experiences of the people we're deferring to? And as a person who has grown up in intellectual spaces, the article is making me think about whether such spaces or "rooms" are actually needed for material change to happen if all that comes from such spaces is the equipping of individuals with more vocabulary that they can use to describe problems rather than with the tools and relationships that could be used instead to solve those same problems (for me, the closest example is my education, the sociology classes that made us students aware of systemic realities in our world from the safety of the college campus). 

The author also discusses how "being in the room" is a reality that operates at multiple levels. Many mechanisms and experiential intersections bring a person to be "in the room" for certain conversations but they are also "in the room" because their experiences might differ in significant ways from the communities that they're being used to represent (i.e. being tokenized). For me, this has a lot to do with my work because people don't just become involved in faith-related work when they're born. I had a conversation with a co-worker yesterday about diversity and inclusion within the organization that I work for, InterVarsity. There are many factors that actually lead a person to apply to be a minister on a college campus and InterVarsity only sees the people who have been led by the confluence of those factors to fill out the application or at least consider it. What the organization doesn't see is the ways in which some people may be deterred from ever even considering faith-related work on campus. In basketball, the equivalent analogy is seen when blocks show up on the stat sheet but shots that a player deters others from taking aren't recorded. Those are some of my thoughts and you're invited to wrestle with the article alongside me.