Alienated from both the place of ethnic origin—Africa—and the place of our birth—America—our plight is unique, unquestionably based on a perspective of collectively lived experiences, as well as on individual struggles. Although I speak in a  voice that echoes shared experiences, I am speaking for no one but myself. And although my pathology has been (and will undoubtedly continue to be) characterized by the dominant voices as paranoia-ridden, privileged, and vengeful, my alienation is based in none of those things. The American dilemma is, at one level, a barrier between peoples—a breakdown of language and communication. At yet another level, that condition is deep-seated intolerance, self-hate, and denial among the conquerors. 

No longer can we easily point to overt practices of racism, sexism, or gender bias. These types of discrimination have become successfully entrenched in a variety of institutional contexts, however, including even the law, and the rule of law is being used to squelch dissent—something I'm sure the founding fathers did not anticipate or desire. 

The sites of theory making have, by necessity, been driven by the institutional insidiousness built up by those in power. Gone are the resounding voices of Fanon, DuBois, and Evers. The new power generation speaks in unconventional tongues: architects speaking culture from multiple venues, literary highbrows getting their hands dirty in the grit of popular culture, anthropologists and artists forming coalitions, etc. This hybridization of discourse is crucial to the development of useful theory making that does not assume a power position a priori. 
Architecture is the embodiment, the concretization of the structures of freedom, domination, capitalism, democracy, and other institutions that have an effect on people. The less we consider architecture as an embodiment of these structures, the more these structures begin to control our discourse. The more we think of architecture as having a weakened political stance or position (or none at all), the more architecture becomes merely a representation of the invisibly controlling elements in our society that already tend to prevent our work from being able to critique the system from the inside. This, it can be said, is an eclipse of agency—or similarly, a lack of engagement from the subject, where processes at work outside of the realm of the architect are already determining the effectiveness of the work. 

In talking about cultural marginalization, some critics have conflated structure and agency, and illuminated the relation between form and content. The subject, on both sides of the peripheral fence, is an active participant in the perpetual dynamic of hide-and-seek. On the marginalized side, the subject is an agent but is banished, punished by impaired development. The discourse of the normative, ruling class both defines the perimeters while operating as an active participant within those perimeters. According to Michel Foucault, societies control discourse by positing external  rules (forbidden speech, regimes of truth, priviledged access to education, secret societies, etc.). The systems, he argues, "tie down an internal system for discourse aimed at classifying, ordering, and distributing discursive materials so as to prevent the emergence of the contingent, so that no one will enter the discursive space unless certain prerequisites are satisfied and one is qualified to do so."²  This leads to a distributing and specializing of the speakers, and ultimately to categorization. 
What does this mean for architecture? It means, as Sanford Kwinter states, that 

we must make our forms out of the stuff of this world, with shapes that are borrowed, modified, blended, combined, inverted, and which manifest the complexity, instability and manifold qualities of the dimensions and the materials it occupies, organizes, or deploys. We must ask ourselves, "who are we when we design?," or"who are we when we theorize?"'and "what social position do we occupy?"³ 

Frantz Fanon states that "decolonialization is a violent phenomenon,"⁴ and "the possibility of this change is equally experienced in the form of a terrifying future in the consciousness of another species of men and women: the colonizers."⁵  In this way, Fanon is connecting consciousness with agency. When Fanon says, "The last shall be first and the first shall be last,"⁶ he is in fact calling for a "turning of the tables." However, composed alongside his rhetoric of multiplicity, this is understood as a polemical stance within his own system of discourse. He says, "I, the man of color, want only this: That the tool never possess the man. That the enslavement of man by man cease forever."⁷ By juxtaposing the rhetoric of absolutism with a rhetoric of multiple voices, Fanon effectively allows the contingencies of social change to take action even on his own site of activity.