Conversation

I'm starting to think it's intellectual malpractice to write/talk about privilege, class, oppression, etc. without revealing at least 2 generations of family and educational history. There is a suspicious pattern of 2nd/3rd generation privilege joining the privilege commentariat.
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Disagree, that implies you’re relying on basically an appeal to authority. While personal experience is obviously relevant, the whole idea of a book is that we don’t need to rely on biography for authority, we can rely on the logic and data presented to us in long format.
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2/ the personal experience should be reflected in the text of the book, and presumably shape it. As a straw man, the color of the author’s skin is irrelevant to the validity of a table of police brutality statistics.
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3/ the glaring exception to this is when you’re drawing conclusions specifically from one person’s anecdotes. If someone recounts stories of Lyndon Johnson from the perspective of his chief of staff when no one else was in the room...the bio matters for authority.
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Experiential data when you're talking about experiences is not "authority" in the sense of educational expertise. More like fieldwork in investigative journalism. Proclaiming socialist values while hiding your trust fund is not "rigor". It is being disingenuous or stupid.
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I won’t quibble over semantics - you’re trusting the person as an individual in this example, can’t independently verify the data, or you wouldn’t care about the provider of the data.
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Maybe an example would help? I’m starting to suspect you’re talking about the glaring exception to my claim, of personal anecdotes.