Moments of Permanence - A curious parallel

From: tevriel.livejournal.com Date: March 21st, 2009 02:18 am (UTC) (Link)

Well, automatic expertise is probably taking it farther than I would; they have a different qualitative experience with these issues due to their experiences, but everyone's experiences are different. This is why minorities should be listened to, but not taken as automatically right; where you have a multiplicity of minority voices in broad concordance, you must assume they're going to be right.

In part, I say this because otherwise you are stuck with "my black friend said this is okay so it's fine and not racist at all", where perhaps one black person has said that, for reasons we can't identify - like the black Republican defending the "Barack the Magic Negro" thing - but a vast majority of black people have said That's Wrong, and therefore authority goes to the majority.

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From: kazaera.livejournal.com Date: March 21st, 2009 11:48 pm (UTC) (Link)

The thing is that expertise doesn't necessarily confer being *right*. To pursue the analogy, you can have experts who have some really strange off-the-wall opinion or who stopped really paying attention to the subject after the 1950s or whose research is flawed or has been taking money from the drug industry or - well, there's a number of reasons you shouldn't be taking the word of an expert as God's given truth, and saying that "but my expert friend told me X was true when we went out to the pub!" when you are faced with a panel of experts saying X is actually flat-out wrong is still not a valid form of argument. And who knows, maybe your expert friend just didn't feel up to the argument on what was supposed to be a nice night out.

And, of course, I'm not saying that being a PoC = automatic expertise on all things relating to racism, antiracist discourse, etc. However, it does generally mean they're an expert on the experience of living with racism by default and, chances are, have had to do a lot more thinking and working through issues than most white people ever do, with less privilege-induced blinders on. It's just that in general, I'd think "probably this PoC knows more about this stuff than I do" is a better attitude to take than the alternative, provided you don't then go "and that means every word they say is the Platonic ideal of what racism is and how to combat it."

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