In activist and academic circles, privileged people are expected to automatically defer to marginalized people on issues of oppression. Philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò argues that this norm kills solidarity and replaces effective politics with endless navel-gazing.
This article is maybe the best I’ve seen illuminating my problems with the norms in academic and activist spaces which tell us to “listen to queer voices” or not to speak on issues that we don’t have personal experience in. These norms (which Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò calls "deference epistemology) take the true statements that knowledge is socially situated and created from real experiences and use that to encourage passivity and stepping back from issues instead of diving in. Instead of creating solidarity, they create walls between us and conversational rules which stop us from getting anywhere.
I suggest reading the whole article, but here are a few important sections (emphasis in bold is mine):
On activists in Flint:
As a personal plea: please don’t just listen to my very trans voice. Engage with it! Push back, assert your own thoughts, and think about what I say like I’m another human being, not a representative for transness. We don’t get effective thinkers or strong-willed activists by bending over to someone who is more oppressed. I want comrades, not listeners.
this specific point gets at the heart of the problem imo: fundamentally, you are outsourcing your position/analysis/evaluation to someone else, and you are doing so in a implies that person’s position is unimpeachable–but that’s obviously illogical and unreasonable to expect of anyone. nobody is correct on every issue, and furthermore someone’s lived experiences may be extremely important and priceless, but they don’t guarantee a person will come to a right or reasonable conclusion about an issue either. so when we normalize this kind of shorthand thinking, we ensure that our future analysis will somehow be errant, because a point that should be challenged will eventually go unchallenged, or similar.