Remaking Epistemic Systems: Lessons from Activist Communities

DRAFT: Please do not cite or reference without permission of the author. Remaking Epistemic Systems: Lessons from Activist Communities 1 by Lacey J. Davidson Last Changes: 9/30/19 LJD That popish recusants convict, negroes, mulattoes and Indian servants, and others, not being christians, shall be deemed and taken to be persons incapable in law, to be witnesses in any cases whatsoever. – Laws of Virginia, Chap. XIX.XXXI, October 1705 Section 394 of the Civil Practice Act provides, “No Indian or Negro shall be allowed to testify as a witness in any action in which a White person is a party.” Held, that the words, Indian, Negro, Black and White, are generic terms, designating race. That, therefore, Chinese and all other people not white are included in the prohibition from being witnesses against Whites. - People v. Hall, 4 Cal 399 (1854) Section I: Unreliable Testifiers From coast to coast in the United States, there were laws in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries prohibiting the testimony of People of Color from being used in courts when a white person was involved with the case. This included cases in which the white person was the perpetrator of violence and murder and People of Color were the only witnesses to the crimes. According to a (1864, 14) Senate Report, the cited justification for these laws was the “the degraded condition of the slave, and the interest which he may have to conceal or deny the truth (Wheeler’s Laws of Slavery).” The report (1864, 15) goes on to claim, however, that the laws which prohibit testimony are not limited to enslaved persons (nor those who are not religious), and thus, the inability for People of Color to testify is merely “an incapacity attached by law to persons of color.” In other words, the report argues that all attempts to justify such laws are inconsistent with the practice of such laws, meaning that the exclusion of testimony is based on racialization alone. The laws that exclude People of Color from giving testimony in court in cases involving white people have long since been repealed. However, that doesn’t mean that the practices that brought about the codification of the practices into law do not persist or that these laws don’t have long lasting effects on epistemic norms (for an example, see Acharya, Blackwell, and Sen (2018)). For an example also within the court room, Batson v. Kentucky (1986) outlaws the state from using its peremptory challenges to dismiss jurors based on race, but it is still common practice to dismiss jurors using cited reasons other than race while still targeting potential jurors of color. In fact, the DA has provided a “cheat sheet” to its prosecutors to get around the Batson ruling.2 Some of the reasons listed are relevant to epistemic matters, e.g. attitude, body language, juror responses, communication difficulties, and signs of defiance or antagonism toward the State, while others are purely coded-racial language, e.g. physical appearance. The continued exclusion of jurors based on 1 I can be reached at [email protected]. Thanks to Leonard Harris, Daniel Kelly, Taylor Davis, Ron Mallon, and William Penman for useful comments on this draft. Thanks to Nancy McHugh for helping me work through the epistemic responsibility literature and for wrestling with the connection between the epistemic and action with me throughout my career. 2 https://www.aclu.org/legal-document/north-carolina-v-tilmon-golphin-christina-walters-and-quintel-augustine-batson 1 DRAFT: Please do not cite or reference without permission of the author. race is clearly tied to the specific outcomes desired by the parties involved, but in addition it tells us that our collective epistemic practices often exclude the testimonies of People of Color. Though these practices of exclusion are easily seen in the history of the legal system because of the systematic and public ways these exclusions have been recorded, these exclusions are present throughout dominant epistemic practices. Lowered credibility based on the racialized identify of the speaker alone are race-based identity-prejudicial credibility deficits (Fricker 2007, 28), a specific type of epistemic injustice in which a speaker is wronged in their capacity as a knower because their testimony is given less credibility than it deserves or when their status as knower is denied all together. When a persistent exclusion from the knowledge production community occurs, the result is epistemic oppression (Dotson 2014). These exclusions are prescribed3 by our current epistemic norms, which stabilize our epistemic practices. Our current epistemic practices lead to the epistemic oppression of People of Color. My discussion will proceed on the uncontroversial premise that epistemic oppression is wrong in itself, which gives us reasons to intervene on epistemic practices that lead to and uphold these oppressions. However, in this paper, I’m interested specifically in the ways patterns in our epistemic practices raise problems in our collective ability to identify instances of racism. People of Color, those with racialized identities who experience racism, will be in the best epistemic position to identify when racism is showing up in our dominant ways of thinking and in our interactions, norms, and formal institutions. This is reflective of the thesis of epistemic advantage (Jagger 1988; Harding 1991; Mills 1998; Wylie 2004; Rolin 2009). Those who endorse this thesis argue that individuals have unique knowledges that arise from their social experiences, and in particular their experiences of oppression. Jagger (1988, 370) writes, “Their [oppressed people’s] pain provides them with a motivation for finding out what is wrong, for criticizing accepted interpretations of reality and for developing new and less distorted ways of understanding the world.” It’s important to note that epistemic advantage does not require that all people in a particular position will know. It is not a matter of biological causation or social determination, but rather of being in a position to know given certain similarly structured social experiences (Mills 1998). Alternatively, those who are in this position of epistemic advantage may adopt an adaptive preference (Khader 2011), a preference that arises from unjust social conditions, to not know because knowing more in these cases is difficult and painful. If we assume the thesis of epistemic advantage, that those who have experienced racism regularly are those who are in the best position to know when it is occurring, then the exclusion of People of Color from the knowledge production community means that our collective epistemic resources are both inadequate (Dotson 2014) and unjust. When the testimonies of People of Color are dismissed or not taken seriously due to epistemic oppressions, important information about the experience and nature of racism are excluded from the dominant epistemic resources or ways of knowing. Further, this exclusion means that the testimony of People of Color is not always intelligible within the dominant epistemic framework, meaning it is more likely the testimony will be excluded. As Medina (2012) argues, the gaps in our collective epistemic resources are due to testimonial injustices, but testimonial injustices cannot be addressed without expanding our collective resources for understanding. Testimony and epistemic resources are in a tight feedback loop, making interventions into the norms that govern our epistemic practices difficult. 3 I use the word ‘prescribed’ here to align myself with Mills (1997). He argues that the Racial Contract prescribes certain patterns of unknowing, certain epistemic practices, that cover over matters related to race. 2 DRAFT: Please do not cite or reference without permission of the author. Throughout this paper, I’ll discuss “our” epistemic practices. Because epistemic norms and practices are localized to particular populations, in a general sense, I’ll be using “our” to talk about epistemic practices within United States, since that’s the context with which I’m most familiar. But, in addition, when I use “our,” I’ll be talking about dominant epistemic practices, those practices that are common, utilized, and maintained by those who have the most social and political power. My critiques are not directed toward subaltern epistemic practices that have been developed within communities that the dominantly situated oppress both epistemically and materially. There are clearly very valuable epistemic practice shifts and resources developed within these non-dominant and epistemically oppressed groups (as well be discussed in Section V). However, due to the pervasive and invasive nature of dominant practices, even those who have developed resources for understanding outside of the oppressive dominant practices will be subject to them (Lugones 1987). Thus, in an important sense, the dominant resources are “our” resources. This line of thinking is informed by Pohlhaus’ (2012) articulation of willful hermeneutical ignorance in which the dominantly situated willfully refuse to take up the epistemic resources developed by those they have oppressed in order to maintain current epistemic and material systems that benefit them. The resources developed in this paper are meant to begin to push against willful hermeneutical ignorance4 and deconstruct the ignorance inherent to our dominant epistemic resources through intervention into epistemic norms. Here’s how the paper is organized. In Section II, I’ll outline the contemporary research on social norms, focusing on Bicchieri’s social expectation view (2006, 2017), as well as the cognitive evolutionary view of norms presented by Kelly and Davis (2018) (see also Sripada and Stich 2007; Richerson and Boyd 2008; Henrich 2016). In Section III, I situate my project with respect to the current work on epistemic norms within mainstream analytic epistemology. In Section IV, I’ll connect norms to epistemic practices, showing some ways in which epistemic practices are governed by norms, and show the ways in which dominant practices serve to obscure thinking about racism.

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