We need to have a conversation about Deference Politics

@Richard Hull I'm not sure you can remove a reaction, but you can change it to thumbs down or something by clicking on the emoji button and selecting a different emoji

Thank you.

I had intended to separate the conversation of "deference politics" from my post that had been content moderated. I had wanted to hear others' take about the merits (or not). But I see that "boat has sailed".

I see that one of our social.coop tenants also involves conflict resolution and restorative justice. When I wronged, nobody reached out to me, except for a brief explanation that I had wronged which didn't make sense to me. As a generalization, I worry that if we don't give any space for learning then a behavior risks being repeated, and I wonder about the cascading consequences this may have for people who react by isolating themselves into bubbles. I recognize that burden shouldn't be demanded of individuals who were offended, felt targeted, etc. So how else can we expect others to change? I'd think that the scope of a moderator should include being a facilitator or mediator or allyship to help reach some level of understanding.

I really needed somebody to help me understand -- I want to be able to fully understand something before I make an apology. I hold myself to a higher bar than just expressing regret.

As for this topic, I had figured this would be an opportunity for those new to or old to contribute to this topic, rather than the focus to be on the CM'd post. I see now that my framing was bad that it prevented that outcome.

Edit: Punctuation

Wow, so I joined this group awhile ago and haven't really engaged, because at first it was "yet another thing", but then I was brought back around from another mention of Loomio as a potentially useful tool for my usecase(s), and wanted a reminder of how it actually looks in practice…only to come to this highly contentious (and really quite interesting) post.

Having read all the comments so far, and with the original problematic post by @chrispomeroyhale seemingly deleted, I don't have a lot to add about the context, but…I do actually think the spirit of the original post was genuine. Which is to say that I think "deference politics" is worthy of discussion, even as I think @chrispomeroyhale may have come to that conclusion from a reactionary place. At the same time, I think they have been pretty open and non-defensive in their responses so far, which suggests to me that the proposal for a conversation was made in good faith, even as it originally stemmed, perhaps, from hurt feelings.

The topic is a difficult one, obviously, but even more so in our current political moment, where whatever ground was gained through the post-George Floyd focus on "identity politics" (i.e. recognition of identity-based power dynamics) has been all but ceded back to the reactionary right, and a whole slew of white liberals who were never that comfortable with it to begin with, and are quietly content to return to the pre-2020 status quo.

So it's with significant risk that we disregard a person's perspective as being contingent upon their identity and otherwise without merit (as seems to have been the case with @chrispomeroyhale's original post), for the very reason that that same identity was the reason, historically, for their perspective to be disregarded. Put another way: identity absolutely informs perspective, but it is only part of the picture, and so if we're going to challenge "deference politics", we have to be very careful to parse the different parts of any argument and give them all the attention and grace they deserve.

That said, I do think within the general soup of "identity politics" (which I'd prefer to call politics of representation to separate it from the Combahee River Collective's original framing), which brought about all manner of disingenous"virtue signaling", vacuous "cancel culture", etc, some things — probably many things — were lost, amongst them a certain criticality that muddled any possibility for a shared liberatory framework. It is absolutely true that some people — to maintain their image of "goodness" or "allyship" — automatically deferred to others based on identity, even if the merits of their position or argument weren't there. It's also true that this whole dynamic spawned a cottage industry of various "consultants" (the bulk of so-called "DEI" work) who, collectively, made almost no real progress, except perhaps on the smallest scales. And it's true that "deference" gave these good white people, cis people, men, able-bodied people, citizens, whoever was in a position of power in any given context, cover for not engaging critically with the issue at hand, resulting in a whole bunch of wheel-spinning, and ultimately the devastating backlash we're dealing with now.

SO…I very much support having this conversation.