Says Who? Epistemic Injustice

Betz, Margaret

doi:10.1007/978-3-031-47144-5_3

Margaret Betz⁵

Part of the book series: Radical Theologies and Philosophies ((RADT))

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Abstract

One of the main theses of the book addresses how perceptions of resistance violence are often distorted by the dominant groups through what is known as epistemic injustice. Various philosophers of epistemic injustice (like Miranda Fricker and José Medina) show how power structures are reinforced by how we consider who is a credible knower and source of information. Common epistemic vices encourage dominant groups to rely on self-serving hypocritical inconsistencies, selective attention, denial, and compartmentalization to dismiss the claims, experiences, and knowledge of politically vulnerable people. One of the results is that resistance violence is usually not contextualized within the dehumanizing conditions from which it arose and instead depicted as unprovoked aggression. I address how common calls for empathy miss the fact that epistemic injustice discourages empathetic responses by the dominant group in order to protect power structures. I propose a direction forward in hel** people address their self-serving epistemic habits that involves the ideas of Mark Bray and advice from proponents of Laughtivism.

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Notes

1.
Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and The Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 155 (emphasis in the original).
2.
Robert F. Williams, Negroes with Guns (BN Publishing), 81.
3.
Joanne Grant, ed., Black Protest (New York: Fawcett, 1968), 269, 270 (emphasis added)
4.
Martin Luther King, Jr. Why We Can’t Wait (New York: Signet, 1963), 27.
5.
Robert F. Williams, Negroes with Guns (BN Publishing), 41.
6.
Kristie Dotson, “Conceptualizing Epistemic Oppression,” in Social Epistemology 28 (2), 2014, 126.
7.
Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and The Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 44.
8.
José Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 32.
9.
Ibid., 33.
10.
Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 12.
11.
See Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and The Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 107.
12.
Robert F. Williams, Negroes with Guns (BN Publishing, 2006), 44.
13.
Vittorio Bufacchi, ed. Violence: A Philosophical Anthology (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) 166 (emphasis added).
14.
Ibid., 170.
15.
Ibid.
16.
Robert F. Williams, Negroes with Guns (BN Publishing, 2006), 119.
17.
Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and The Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 44 (emphasis in the original).
18.
Quoted by Gloria Anzaldúa in Borderlands: La Frontera (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999), 61.
19.
Robert F. Williams, Negroes with Guns (BN Publishing, 2006), 82.
20.
José Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 33.
21.
Thank you to Parish Conkling for adding the concept of “epistemic laziness” to describe people who say, “I’m not political,” thereby ignoring how they likely benefit from multiple systems.
22.
Claudia Rankine, “Bleached Racists and Lynching Trees, the Show That’s Targeting White Supremacy,” The Guardian, August 10, 2018 (accessed June 2023).
23.
Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and The Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 17.
24.
Candace Delmas, A Duty to Resist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 211.
25.
Ibid., 241.
26.
Quoted by Johanna Luttrell, White People and Black Lives Matter (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 9.
27.
Arline T. Geronimus, Weathering (New York: Little, Brown Spark, 2023), 126.
28.
Alisa Reznick “‘Show Me Your Papers’: A Decade After SB1070,” August 7, 2020 (accessed June 2023).
29.
Martin Luther King, Jr. Why We Can’t Wait (New York: Signet, 1963), 77, 78 (emphasis added).
30.
Ibid., 85.
31.
Ibid., 86.
32.
Ibid., 89.
33.
Ibid.
34.
Ibid., 112.
35.
Joanne Grant, ed., Black Protest (New York: Fawcett, 1968), 462 (emphasis added).
36.
Ibid., 461 (emphasis added).
37.
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum Press, 1970), 55.
38.
Arline T. Geronimus, Weathering (New York: Little, Brown Spark, 2023), 11.
39.
Ibid., 12.
40.
Ibid., 224.
41.
Gloria Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark: Luz En Lo Oscuro (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 144.
42.
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Viking Press, 1963), 30.
43.
Ibid., 48.
44.
Ibid., 49.
45.
Ibid. (emphasis in the original).
46.
Ibid., 54.
47.
Ibid.
48.
Ibid.
49.
Ibid., 228.
50.
Ibid., 4.
51.
Ibid.
52.
Benjamin Quarles, Allies for Freedom and Blacks on John Brown, Section II (New York: De Capo Press, 1974), 12, 13.
53.
Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and The Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), vii.
54.
Ibid., 1.
55.
Ibid.
56.
Ibid., 5.
57.
Ibid., 6.
58.
Robert F. Williams, Negroes with Guns (BN Publishing, 2006), 44.
59.
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum Press, 1970), 56.
60.
Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and The Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 7.
61.
Ibid., I63.
62.
Ibid., 58.
63.
Ibid., 161.
64.
Ibid., 162.
65.
Stuart Loory covered the freedom rides for the New York Herald Tribune in May of 1961 and recounted what he witnessed. He spoke of interacting with Dave Dennis of CORE in the jail reserved for Blacks. Loory writes, “They opened the door to the Negro cell and reached in and grabbed Dennis. One officer pulled him up and slammed him against the iron bars and put him in solitary. Jerome Smith of CORE was beaten. When we came out of jail we reported these incidents to the local FBI, and they went to investigate with local police officers and came out with ‘no violation of civil rights.’” To which Norman Thomas asked, “That is civil rights as understood in Louisiana?” and the response given was “Apparently so.” In Black Protest, 326.
66.
Johanna Luttrell, White People and Black Lives Matter (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), vi.
67.
Ibid.
68.
Ibid., 27.
69.
Robert F. Williams, Negroes with Guns (BN Publishing, 2006), 113 (emphasis added).
70.
Ibid., 21.
71.
Ibid., 22.
72.
Charles Mills, “White Ignorance,” in Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, ed. Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), 35.
73.
Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 18.
74.
Ibid., 19.
75.
Myisha Cherry, The Case for Rage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 44.
76.
Martin Luther King, Jr. Why We Can’t Wait (New York: Signet, 1963), 87.
77.
José Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 17–18.
78.
Ibid., 31.
79.
Ibid., 39.
80.
Ibid., 57.
81.
Ibid., 172.
82.
Within the online section of “What a Body Can Do,” in Self-Defense: A Philosophy of Violence (New York: Verso), 2022.
83.
Ibid., 12.
84.
Self-Defense: A Philosophy of Violence (New York: Verso, 2022), 56.
85.
A version of the following was published as “Any Woman: Rape, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistance Violence” in Social Philosophy Today Vol. 38, 2022, 33–45.
86.
Susan Brison, Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 17.
87.
Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Midwest,” in Signs 14(4), 1989, 117.
88.
Work Projects Administration (WPA).
89.
Needless to say, Newsom would hardly find it acceptable that his own fourteen-year-old suffer the same fate. Genteel Southern society did little to hide the exploitation of enslaved women. Deborah Gray White describes the “Fancy Trade” in which light-skinned Black women were sold for the express purpose of prostitution (Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1999, 37). Celia faced “socially tolerable and necessary violence” on two fronts: enslavement and continuing sexual assault (Saidiya Hartman, “Seduction and the Ruses of Power,” in Callaloo (19)2, 1996, 542).
90.
According to scholars on American slavery, it was sometimes the case that enslaved women accepted sexual relationships with white men on the plantation in order to improve their situation, to gain favors, or to avoid physical harm; it is referred to as “sexual bartering.” Recognizing this reality does not alter the fact that enslaved women made these choices under duress and therefore did not “consent” in any traditional understanding of the word.
91.
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988, 282.
92.
Ibid., 338.
93.
Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and The Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 158.
94.
Vann C. Woodward and Elisabeth Muhlenfeld, The Private Mary Chestnut: The Unpublished Civil War Diaries (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 42.
95.
Susan Brison, Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 57.
96.
Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W.W. Norton & Co.1999), 63, 78.
97.
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988, 268.
98.
Ibid., 284.
99.
Melton A. McLaurin Celia: A Slave (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991), 55.
100.
The backdrop of Celia’s trial was perpetual fear of slave rebellions among white enslavers; a “sense of panic…gripped the state.” Melton A. McLaurin Celia: A Slave (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991), 73. Pro-slavery advocates and abolitionists were in heated debates. In an example of the institutional violence that upheld slavery, roving vigilante groups saw their purpose as “purging the communities of abolitionism and for the more thorough discipline of the slave population.”
101.
Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and The Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 131.
102.
Charles Mills, “White Ignorance,” in Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, ed. Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), 34.
103.
When recounting her own sexual assault, Susan Brison notes the uncomfortable realization that nearly all those involved in her case—from the perpetrator to the investigator to the doctor who treated her—were men. (See Aftermath, 89.)
104.
Melton A. McLaurin, Celia: A Slave (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991), 101.
105.
Ibid., 107.
106.
Ibid.
107.
Ibid., 117.
108.
Ibid., 107, 117.
109.
Saidiya Hartmann, “Seduction and the Ruses of Power,” in Callaloo (19)2, 1996, 539.
110.
Kate Manne, Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women (New York: Random House, 2020), 108.
111.
Manne’s concept of “himpathy” or “the flow of sympathy away from female victims towards their male victimizers” likely had a role in informing their decision. Kate Manne, Down Girl (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 23.
112.
Melton A. McLaurin, Celia: A Slave (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991), 138.
113.
Regarding the threat of sexual violence against Black women, Karen Getman argues that anti-miscegenation and rape laws were used to “keep white women apart from Black men and, at the same time, to permit and even encourage the sexual abuse of Black women by white men. Through this regulation of sexual behavior, white men ensured only they would be able to cross the racial lines of the South without subjecting themselves to severe social and legal penalties” (Karen A. Getman, “Sexual Control in the Slave-Holding South: The Implementation and Maintenance of a Racial Caste System,” in Harvard Women’s Law Journal 7, 1984, 115). Not ironically, this exact situation was revealed after his death about Strom Thurmond; at twenty-three, Thurmond fathered the child of his family’s teenage Black housekeeper.
114.
Thanks to Craig Agule for drawing my attention to this.
115.
Saidiya Hartmann, “Seduction and the Ruses of Power,” in Callaloo (19)2, 1996, 540.
116.
Grandison v. State 1841, 452 (emphasis in the original).
117.
Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Midwest,” in Signs 14(4), 1989, 172.
118.
Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1999), 162.
119.
Gaile Pohlhaus, “Relational Knowing and Epistemic Injustice: Toward a Theory of Willful Hermeneutical Injustice,” in Hypatia 27.4, 2012, 725.
120.
Ibid., 728.
121.
Ibid.
122.
Ibid.
123.
Charles Mills, Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 18 (emphasis in the original).
124.
Ibid.
125.
Claudia Card, “Rape Terrorism,” in the Unnatural Lottery: Character and Moral Luck (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 109.
126.
It is worth clarifying that I do not claim that the only ones resistant to epistemically virtuous behavior in the U.S. are conservative voters. Epistemic injustices are reinforced in multiple ways against multiple epistemically marginalized groups and all of us actively maintain some blind spots. However, it is often that those most vocally and proudly resistant to change today are those on the political right.
127.
Cited by José Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 159.
128.
Robert F. Williams, Negroes with Guns (BN Publishing, 2006), 23.
129.
Ibid., 33.
130.
Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and The Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 5.
131.
Ibid., 71.
132.
Ibid., 74.
133.
Ibid., 83, 84.
134.
Ibid., 89.
135.
Ibid., 168.
136.
Ibid., 169.
137.
Ibid., 170, 171.
138.
Ibid. 170.
139.
Ibid., 171 (emphasis in the original).
140.
Ibid., 173.
141.
Ibid., 167.
142.
Ibid., 174.
143.
Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co. 1971), 6.
144.
Ibid., 78.
145.
Ibid., 176.
146.
Ibid., 177.
147.
Arendt discusses the political implications of thinking on p. 192.
148.
José Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 160 (emphasis in the original).
149.
Ibid., 7.
150.
Ibid., 18.
151.
Ibid., 311.
152.
Robert F. Williams, Negroes with Guns (BN Publishing, 2006), 100.
153.
https://www.npr.org/2023/02/16/1157558299/fox-news-stars-false-claims-trump-election-2020.
154.
Cited by José Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 111.
155.
Mark Bray, Antifa: The Antifascist Handbook (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2017), 129.
156.
Ibid., 160–161.
157.
Arline T. Geronimus, Weathering (New York: Little, Brown Spark, 2023), 240.
158.
Chris A. Kramer in “An Existentialist Account of the Role of Humor Against Oppression,” in Humor 2013; 26 (4): 632.
159.
Mark Bray, Antifa: The Antifascist Handbook (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2017), xxiii.
160.
José Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 215.
161.
Arline T. Geronimus, Weathering (New York: Little, Brown Spark, 2023), 198.

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Philosophy, Rutgers University, Camden, NJ, USA
Margaret Betz

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Betz, M. (2023). Says Who? Epistemic Injustice. In: Modes of Protest And Resistance. Radical Theologies and Philosophies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47144-5_3

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47144-5_3
Published: 29 November 2023
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
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