Deconstructing Power Hierarchies 
Abby Jean posted a fascinating and interesting discussion of how we approach and talk about poverty.
I hope we can understand how this kind of dynamic, in which the underprivileged have to explain and defend themselves to the privileged, merely reproduces the hierarchy of oppression we want to end. If we are unwilling to trust underprivileged people’s own insights on being underprivileged, who will we trust? How can we deconstruct power hierarchies when we’ve set ourselves up as the ultimate judges of their truths?
While I think that the thoughts expressed are interesting—I don’t entirely agree. A common problem with our efforts to deconstruct power hierarchies, in addition to the difficulties of the implicit us/them division, is that it involves Us doing a lot of talking about Them. This is not a conversation. This is not a sincere attempt to engage. The academic Marxist, living comfortably, writing about the plight of the proletariat, is engaged in a fundamentally absurd undertaking. We do a lot more talking about the poor than talking to the poor. Unsurprisingly, poverty as theorized is not the same as poverty as practiced. Our “solidarity with the poor” is too rarely coupled with actual interraction with the poor.
That said, if you go into the least-privileged communities and ask them for solutions to systemic poverty problems, you’re not likely to get a particularly useful response. One of the downsides of poverty is that it makes it awfully hard to spend time and resources crafting policy broad proposals. The pressing questions usually involve more basic and immediate needs than societal reform.
There are no neat answers here. I don’t have a way to cleanly navigate the sticky questions of power and identity. Except … I don’t know that it matters much one way or another if we ask those in poverty to explain their decisions. The real question is whether we’re willing to listen to the answer.
