Being marginalized doesn’t make you smarter

Standpoint theory begins from a genuinely important insight: people’s knowledge comes above all from their life experience, and so different people will have different insights and recognize different things. Our life experience does shape what we see and don’t see, and can blind us to things that others see in their position. This difference can in turn become a problem in the context of power relations, when only the experience of the powerful is represented, and other perspectives are ignored and therefore become missing. Standpoint theory’s best moment was probably Patricia Hill Collins’s 1986 sociology article “Learning from the outsider within“, which pointed out that sociological generalizations at that time were generally made by white men, and thus missed things that were clearer to black women: sociological generalizations about families that do not account for Black women’s experience will fail to see how the public/private split shaping household composition varies across…