Credentialism is Idea Control

Systems of oppression rely heavily on idea control to prevent us from exercising our innate freedom to understand our own experiences.

A very common mechanism for this, especially in environments afflicted by white supremacy culture, is credentialism. In a nutshell, this is the attitude that information, ideas, and advice are only worthwhile if they come from someone with suitable credentials.

Of course, actually gaining those credentials (degrees, certifications, roles of authority in certain hierarchies, and so on) is generally very heavily gatekept. This prevents people with different information, ideas, and advice from becoming considered "worth listening to" - and thereby ensures that, on the whole, people do not drift too far from what the over-culture of oppression deems "acceptable" in terms of ideas.

There is immense value in knowing who we can trust; but there is only danger in using official, sanctioned credentials as a replacement for our own judgment and methods of evaluating trust. We shouldn't go around just trusting anyone who says they oppose evil systems (and that goes for everything posted on this site as well). But we should find alternative ways to trust reliable sources of ideas that do not conform to hegemonic, oppressive norms.

Breaking the Hold of Credentialism

Credentialism has largely stagnated huge swaths of the so-called "Western" intellectual and philosophical worlds. The immense projects of classist, racist, and sexist gatekeeping and exclusion in academia, and fields like science and technology, serve to keep this stranglehold alive and strong.

To get away from this sorry state of affairs, we need two things.

First, we must actively heal and rediscover our own, personal, innate ability to find trust. Without self-guided trust, we are always vulnerable to outside manipulation; and the patterns of reformism all but guarantee that we would just wind up replacing one set of credentials for another, without actually addressing the root issue of credentialism. This is not to say we all have to know everything. Quite the contrary - trust is a community project.

Secondly, as we learn to trust ourselves and each other, we simultaneously need to create new networks for sharing information. We need new conduits for passing along what we learn in life. This is usually the role of culture in human societies - to generate new ideas and understandings, to enable us to collectively have new experiences, and to preserve what each generation learns, and hand it along to those who come after us in the future. Colonialism and white supremacy have severely damaged this inter-generational cultural infrastructure, but it is not lost completely, and more importantly, we can regrow new cultures of our own to fill this need.

A Useful Question for the Small Stuff

Of course, changing something systemic and extremely widespread is a large project. It takes time. In the interim, there is a very potent question we can always raise, when someone wants to invoke credentials, expertise, authority, or some other similar mechanism of structural idea control:

Are we choosing to accept what someone tells us because they have the "right" credentials, or because we trust their personal, lived experience, and their ability to relate that experience to us?