Image Credits: Mrs. Linda Taylor, Photo by Bettmann via Getty Images.
(2022) - From ‘Welfare Queen’ to ‘Black Girl Magic’ - Joy James
Diversity often serves as a buffer for inequity rather than a challenge to it. That’s the question philosopher Joy James takes up in this conversation, tracing a century-long pattern of colonial powers co-opting select members of racialized and gendered minorities to defuse radical movements and preserve control. Narratives of “excellence” and visibility, she argues, mask the ongoing dispossession and exploitation of marginalized communities, while those who ascend are constrained, unable to speak for the excluded without risking removal and replacement by someone more compliant. The interview forces us to confront a harder truth: is it progress to gain entry into spaces built on exclusion, or merely a strategy to neutralize resistance? And if “excellence” within those spaces is just another name for assimilation and co-optation, what is the alternative, when exclusion often means poverty and dispossession?
The way we [Black women] are trained is to compensate. Like even the leadership is a compensation packet in some ways. The way I always looked at it, whenever we got a promotion and stuff, it was another form of domestic labor. [...]. You’re never actually in control even though you’re given these positions that look like you have power.