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Episode post here. Thanks to Caroline Wall for another excellent transcription!


Matt Teichman:
Hello, and welcome to Elucidations, a philosophy podcast recorded at the University of Chicago. I’m Matt Teichman, and with me today is Kristie Dotson, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Michigan State University. And she’s here to discuss epistemic oppression. Kristie Dotson, welcome.

Kristie Dotson:
Well, thank you. Thank you for inviting me.

Matt Teichman:
So epistemic oppression—that’s made of two words, ‘epistemic’ and ‘oppression’. Oppression—we probably have some idea what that is. Epistemic—maybe we can begin with an explanation of what exactly that means.

Kristie Dotson:
So I take ‘epistemic’ to mean anything of or relating to knowledge. And what I mean by that is you can hear ‘epistemic’ in front of a lot of things. In, for example, a feminist epistemology talk, people will talk about epistemic exploitation. Nora Berenstain at the University of Tennessee did a talk on this that’s really very interesting and important, that talks about the ways in which people can ask for folks to explain things over and over again without really any intention of learning it, but just expect people to explain and explain. That she’s going to call exploitative. But what’s exploitative about it is that they keep trying to seep knowledge away from them. So she’s going to call it epistemic exploitation, right? Not because it’s about a theory of knowledge, per se, but because it seems to be related to whether or not I possess some bit of knowledge, right?

And so there’s all different kinds of ways to employ and deploy the term ‘epistemic’. When it seems as if whatever we’re talking about is related to knowledge in some particular way, maybe some theoretical way, that’s a term we tend to use. And I think it can be used in narrow and wider senses, but I have a very wide sense—anything of or related to knowledge.

Matt Teichman:
So you mentioned feminist epistemology. And that’s very interesting, because—well, what’s feminism? We often think of that as something like the political struggle for women’s rights, and maybe equality of the sexes. And you might wonder what that has to do with assessing evidence, and forming beliefs, and coming to know things. Aren’t those two separate—there’s what a detective does; they try to figure out what happened. That’s one set of issues. And then there’s e.g. women should have equal pay, and that’s another set of issues. So what is it that people look at in feminist epistemology?

Kristie Dotson:
So that conception of feminism is one that usually people bring up when they think about feminism. But that’s probably too narrow. It is the one that comes up in an intro to women’s studies class, where we’re like, well, if you think that women should get equal pay, you’re a feminist. Well, you know what? Actually, there’s far more details to what it would mean to be—some of the things it would mean to exist as a feminist. But I’m not going to say that’s not a feminist position, because I think it is.

But I think it gets to be a very complicated position when one identifies oneself as a feminist, particularly as a feminist academic. Right? We’ve done some serious study about this. And we realize it’s more than just a set of political commitments. It’s also a set of methodological concerns. Particularly in philosophy, it’s whether or not the ways we’re understanding the world, the ways we’re conducting our own philosophical investigations, and the targets of our analyses—whether those things are actually bearing out information that actually fully, robustly addresses all portions of our population, particularly and including women, gender non-conforming people, and trans populations, right? So that’s more than just equal rights. That is, do these tools—and it’s a specific investigation of philosophical tools—actually get at all of the things that we actually want to know about and understand, given the full, robust diversity of our populations?

So when you think about a feminist epistemological position, that’s essentially what they are saying—that there’s been a tradition in epistemology that has confined itself to certain kinds of questions. Necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge, ‘S knows that P’ propositional knowledge, and in many ways, what is knowledge, justified true belief models. And the question that many feminist epistemologists ask is, first, a meta-epistemological one, which is, are those good methods for understanding knowledge? And one way to test that is to see whether or not it turns up what should be considered true belief—that has a non-accidental relationship between the fact that it’s true and the fact that I believe it—for women, and what we women actually understand about our world. Does it confirm the things that we experience? And if the ways in which we understand justification, or even the way we understand knowledge and justified true belief, doesn’t bear out what we experience in our world, then the tools have to be thrown out.

So lots of feminist epistemologists got to a point in the beginning of the inquiry, and thought that maybe propositional knowledge, ‘S knows that P’, wasn’t as useful as knowledge production questions about what does it mean to produce knowledge in communities of knowers that can actually get at some of the power dynamics. It comes to: what does it mean to be a knower? What does it mean to be taken as a knower in your landscape, or not taken as a knower? How does that impact whether or not you possess it, but more importantly, whether or not people will attribute it to you. Whether they’ll say, yes, indeed, Kristie knows X or Y. What are the conditions for those kinds of things? And those are the questions that they wanted to ask and answer.

And what happened is that particular change, that turn from not just what is knowledge—because they’re still interested in that—but how it’s produced ended up being called something like feminist epistemology. That’s also an inquiry that comes up in science: what it means to have a scientific team, what it means to conduct science in collaborative formations. But also what it means to be part of the community, where you need people to listen to you in order to free your opinions and your understandings of the world—more than just opinions—in order for your understandings of the world to bear on anyone else. So in the end, I think the questions that feminist epistemologists started asking were questions about knowledge—epistemic, right?—but broadly had the litmus test of, do those epistemological theories and these epistemic inquiries actually cover robustly the populations that exist?

Matt Teichman:
Nice. So yeah, you might think these are two separate things. You might think: well, what are the principles on the basis of which we can effectively use evidence to corroborate hypotheses? That’s one set of questions. And you might think: eliminating gender-based discrimination is another set of issues. But they come together, or they can come together, if we view sharing knowledge with each other as a collaborative activity. If certain groups of people systematically don’t have the same clout to share knowledge with each other as others, that’s where these two topics can come together.

Kristie Dotson:
That certainly is one of the areas, yes. Yes.

Matt Teichman:
So you’ve been really interested, in your work, in some of these cases of epistemic oppression—which is the topic of today’s discussion—where certain groups of people’s ability to participate in the gathering and sharing of knowledge is systematically undercut. What are some examples of that?

Kristie Dotson:
Well, it’s important to understand about something like epistemic oppression. So we’ve got the epistemic in place. And so the oppression—let’s give a sense of what the oppression side is. I think that one way to think about this—and there are many ways to think about oppression, and certainly the epistemic oppression that will result. One way to think about oppression is to think about oppression as what Marilyn Frye called the double bind, where all the options that you have available to you are actually terrible options. I mean, you could either do some action or some other action as a result of a particular situation, but both action A and action B are equally as bad. She’s going to say when there’s these setups, these circumstances in the world where any action available to you is always already a compromised situation, you’re facing oppression. So to think about epistemic oppression in terms of the double bind is to say that there are some situations with respect to knowledge where one finds oneself in a compromised position no matter how one goes about it. Right? Actually, there’s going to be a problem with respect to knowledge that is going to result.

So some examples of that—because that’s not as clarificatory as I would like. One example, I guess—and I’ll give you an extended example—is one I use in my work. I use Patricia Williams’s example, one that she uses in her work, in The Alchemy of Race and Rights, about a trip she made to a Soho shop where in the Christmas season, she wants to go and buy a gift at a shop in Soho. And so she goes to knock on the door. And the person who is working in the shop takes a look at her, looks at her up and down, and says, we’re not open. Right? It’s Christmas season. There are people who are shopping in the actual store.

Matt Teichman:
Apparently they’re all employees, or something.

Kristie Dotson:
Right, exactly. And the closing hours clearly have not been met, right? So the store is open. But they’re not opening the store for her. In this moment, she’s going to say, this was a moment where she encountered racism. They looked at her, they saw she was Black, they thought this person is not going to probably buy anything, so better that we just not let her in the shop. Now, of course she was going to buy something. She’s a law professor. And that shouldn’t really be a contingent feature about getting let into a shop, anyway. However, she’s going to say that the story was bad, but the reception of the story was probably worse.

So when she tried to use that as an example of her experiences with racism, the response that she received from people was probably as bad, if not worse, than the actual experience with racism. Because people were like, no, that wasn’t racism. Every time she talked about it with someone, or talked about sharing it with a large class, there were these responses from people who largely were not themselves African-American, as well, who would say, no, that wasn’t racism. There are a thousand other ways we can explain this. We can explain it this way. We can explain it that way. Why choose racism? The fact that she was the only Black person in that whole exchange, and there were white people in this shop and she was outside of it, was just not enough for people to imagine that that was racism.

Now, why would this be an example of epistemic oppression? And to be clear, the example of epistemic oppression is not the experience of racism. It’s the experience she had in retelling the story, and the incredulity she reached that her audiences exuded towards her, like oh, that can’t be right. It can’t be right. Now, this may be a news flash for some people, but there’s racism in the United States, and Black people experience it fairly often. And then, one of the things that is interesting about our experience of racism is the fact that we can see it, but should we try to share it indiscriminately with audiences that may not have similar experiences, they can’t see it. They’ll come up with a thousand different explanations for it besides the one that you’ve come up with, the one that seems consistent with the rest of your experience in the world.

The idea of this as a kind of epistemic oppression comes back to the difficulty that Patricia Williams is going to have explaining it to other people, but also what that means for how other people understand the world. Because if she can’t explain to them that her experience was racism, then they can continue to believe that racism—should they believe this—something like racism rarely happens, and the instances of it are not nearly as everyday as Williams is trying to evidence. She was like, these experiences of racism are actually everyday. Everyday experiences with racism would become difficult to share with populations who don’t have experiences with racism, right? And what that means is their understanding—not my understanding of racism, and everyday conceptions of racism—but their understandings and everyday conceptions of racism would actually be malcalibrated for the world. They’ll have this sense that racism is not nearly as pervasive as it is. But I will also have no ability to explain that to them, as somebody who has access to the fact that it is as common as it might seem.

So you find yourself in a situation where even though you have the experience—you probably have the justified true belief—to say that this is this kind of thing, you can’t share that with anyone else who might need to know that in this particular landscape, because they don’t believe you. Maybe, like Fricker said, they don’t trust your credibility. Maybe they just don’t want to believe the world has racism in it. Maybe they’re slightly racist, and they don’t want to imagine that kind of action as racist because that’s something that they might do. There’s all kinds of reasons why they might want to resist it. But in resisting it, they construct an understanding of the world that is, I’m going to say, patently false. But you can’t change that with them. You can’t explain it to them. You can’t testify to it, right? And you can’t, by virtue of that, influence them as community members towards what would seem like the truth, right?

And that causes a significant amount of harm. This is the part where I think people like to balk. It causes harm primarily because the more people who imagine that racism doesn’t exist, the more people’s experiences with it are disavowed. But not just that—the more they testify to it, the more their credibility gets challenged. So their credibility is challenged in the first place. No one wants to believe it. But the more you testify to it, the more your credibility actually ends up being lessened. And so, over time, either you don’t testify to it, because you don’t want your credibility to actually be compromised, or you do testify to it in the off-chance you might convince somebody that your experience is a real experience. But in doing that, you run the risk of having your credibility continue to be challenged.

So you testify to it because you want people to understand that racism exists, so we can all work on it, or you don’t testify to it because you don’t actually want your credibility to continue to be lessened. And you need credibility in our communities, because people don’t listen to you, necessarily, without it. So you’re in a moment where you’re in a double bind. Either you testify to racism, and run the risk of your credibility being lessened, or you don’t testify to it, and you leave the imagined, the phantom understanding that racism is a less pervasive problem than it is, to prevail. Right? Neither one of these are actually wonderful options. And they’re related to knowledge in the community: who knows, who can know, who can be seen as a knower, and what some people can’t know.

Matt Teichman:
Great. Yeah. So this example is nice. It’s a slam-dunk case of epistemic oppression, because somebody’s ability to provide evidence and share knowledge that they have is being undercut. But it also exhibits this double bind feature that you mentioned, whereby if the person does nothing, well, for one thing, they continue to let it happen, which is a pain. And then, if they don’t say anything about it, they contribute to this impression that other people have, to whom this doesn’t happen, that it doesn’t happen. But then, if they do say something about it, given the way this kind of testimony is usually—

Kristie Dotson:
Dismissed.

Matt Teichman:
—right, exactly—is usually received by people, there’s no convention of not dismissing it. So you’re in a heads I win, tails you lose situation.

Kristie Dotson:
Right. Exactly.

Matt Teichman:
So one term that people sometimes use for this is gaslighting, this term for when a person tries to talk about some kind of prejudice they’ve experienced, and the person to whom they’re speaking is a little bit incredulous and wants more evidence, no matter how much evidence they’re given.

Kristie Dotson:
That’s right—no matter how much.

Matt Teichman:
Hasn’t there been some research on this to suggest that the experience of having your observations about the prejudice you’ve experienced discounted in this way is actually more painful than the original prejudice?

Kristie Dotson:
Yeah—well, depending on the prejudice, and depending on what results from it. But yeah, so I’m going to say they’re different kinds of pain. And I think that they also have different kinds of frequencies. So you have the moment where you feel like you’ve been treated poorly on the basis of race, gender, class, sexuality, disability—any range of ‘-isms’ in our society. You have that moment. And then, you have the reverberation of that moment, whereby the people you would expect to help you maybe combat the continued persistence of those moments challenge the very existence of that moment at all. And the predictability of that—if epistemic oppression is operative, that will keep happening again, and again, and again. Every time you tell the story to any new crop of people, there will be someone—and maybe all of the someones—in that population who will come and say, this didn’t happen, or there’s lots of explanations I can give for that besides that.

And I think it’s the persistence of it—they call it the microaggressive nature of it, the death by a thousand cuts kind of conception. That the moment of racism can be—you can have many of those in a day, but should you try to testify to those—for example, the Soho example—should you try to testify to those, what you can expect is the constant cutting of disbelief, and the constant sense that what it would mean to have a community rally behind you and attempt to address these, in either this situation or in another, is a futile hope. So I think that to call it painful, I think it’s all painful. I think that they both instill a kind of hopelessness. But the kind of hopelessness you can get at the end of realizing that epistemic oppression is something that is persistent. It is something that would be, if it’s existing, it’s widespread, it’s something predictable, and it’s something you can expect as a common experience, as the norm and not as the exception. That gives it a different character, insofar as it’s about remedy, it’s about redress, but it’s also about possibility. Is this situation ever going to change if I can’t explain to you what’s even happening? I mean, if I can’t, I guess at that particular point—is it ever going to be addressed if I can’t explain to you it’s really happening?

And I think that—sure. Because there’s going to be communities of people who are going to know that racism exists—the other people who actually experience racism, in most cases. And then, they’ll have their own community resources that will be important. But there is a degree to which that doesn’t mean that their ability to see, understand, conceive of resistant strategies is going to spread to the population that doesn’t know anything about it, and quite frankly might be the main perpetrators of it.

Matt Teichman:
So I think maybe I’m a little bit under the influence of my colleague Emily Dupree here, but my first take on that kind of situation would be that what’s happening there is there’s an inconsistency in what standards of evidence the person having the incident in Soho recounted to them is applying. So if you change the example a little bit, and it was, oh my God, I was walking through—probably not Soho—I was walking through wherever late at night. My bag was stolen. That’s something that’s considered more routine. And generally, when somebody recounts a story like that, they’re not going to be questioned. They’re not going to say, well, wait a minute, did you look like you were giving them your bag? Or how do you know that it really was a theft? Instantly, it’s taken for granted that, oh yeah, there was something that happened. It was a theft. And you don’t have to provide a ton of evidence for it. You can just say this happened.

Whereas in the case of reporting on a prejudice, it’s like the standards of evidence get raised, sometimes to the point where they’re impossible to meet, where it’s like—well, I’m not going to be convinced that this was racism unless we can apply telepathy or something. Read the mind of the person and make sure that they were thinking racist thoughts.

Kristie Dotson:
That’s right. No, I think that’s right. It’s something that I certainly believe. It’s something my book project, Varieties of Epistemic Oppression, tries to tease out. There are many different kinds of epistemic oppression. Right now, we’re just looking at the broad phenomenon. I think that it can result from the way a skeptical hypothesis actually ends up—I mean, yes, I think you can ratchet up levels of expectations for justification, whether it be evidentiary or whatever, that actually would make it so that the standards for knowledge and what it would mean to fulfill the standards for knowledge are so high that we could never possibly meet them, like what Emily Dupree would say. And I know I would say this, and in my book project, Varieties of Epistemic Oppression, I certainly do say this at one point. In those moments, it’s just skepticism. If I’m skeptical of the position that you’re offering, then you’re going to have to do more to convince me that what you’re saying is justified true belief—that it’s knowledge, right? And the more skeptical I am, the more you’re going to have to try to convince me.

But it’s not just that. Some versions of skepticism can just be washed away. And I think it’s also about who’s making the knowledge claim. What’s changing those standards of knowledge, it’s not only the circumstances. It’s not only that it’s an instance of racism. But it’s also a Black person, who may have some, what people think—imagine—vested interest in keeping the idea of racism alive. And there’s all these phantom mythologies about how much fun that is to do. Because it isn’t fun. But I think that you can imagine all the ways in which people try to explain away, well, of course you’re going to say it’s racism. You’re Black. You’re a Black woman, so you’re going to say it’s sexism. But all of those things can serve as levers on standards for justification, where then, you have to perform unusual feats of clairvoyance just to say, yes, indeed, there was a racial intent.

It’s also the case, that sometimes, when we think about these circumstances, when we think about who can make these claims—I like the example of the theft, of the robbery. Because I don’t think that it’s equally as easy for everybody to say, I was robbed, and then not be questioned about what you were doing. I think in many conversations, if you’re a woman and you get robbed, they’re like, well, were you out at night? And there’s this blaming the victim structure whereby you could have imagined the world in which somebody was coming to rob you, and you should have been able to avoid it. And the fact that you didn’t is a problem with you.

And the ways in which we can find ourselves in these situations—I think this also happens within sexual violence, right? I mean, you can find yourself in these moments where you try to testify to an experience with sexual violence, and the level of justification and evidence you need for something like that can be extraordinary. And they can map along a whole bunch of lines. So I think that a lot of this is mapping onto the consistency across all of these alternative cases about whether or not being robbed, and subject to you being blamed, how many standards of evidence you have to actually fulfill for a sexual harassment—sexual harassment, you’ve got to be in the harasser’s mind. And the same thing about an instance of racism is that there’s social injustice at the base of these.

There’s something about the ways in which one’s gendered identity in being robbed, one’s experience as the harassee in being harassed, and one’s experience with racism actually map onto certain different kinds of—and similar kinds of—social injustices that actually mean you have to, in an instant, prove it as a manifestation of a larger phenomenon. Right? It’s not to say that racism doesn’t exist. It’s just, how do you know that was a manifestation of it? It’s not to say that sexual harassment doesn’t exist. It’s just how to say that that’s a manifestation of it. Right? So part of the lever on the evidence is: how do you make this general thing manifest in this particular instance? And one of the ways to think about how we do that is we testify to it. I was there. But if that’s not going to be enough, how are we going to take this general idea of what could possibly exist and make this an instance of that possibility? Right? It becomes extraordinarily difficult. And something like epistemic oppression really thwarts that. Because people can concede—they do—racism does exist. That just wasn’t an instance of it.

Matt Teichman:
Right. And also, it’s not possible to be there for all of racism to testify to it.

Kristie Dotson:
No, you can’t. No, you absolutely can’t. You cannot. But I think this is where you start to see the real flaw of epistemic oppression. You can’t be there for every instance of racism. But if you concede something like racism exists—and so I’ve been giving the tough case, which is people who don’t even concede that, and then can’t actually see any of the instances. But let’s say you concede something like, racism exists. Then you’ve got to imagine that some people have routine and consistent experience with it. These people will still be the ones that say that that wasn’t an instance of that. Oh, I’m not saying racism doesn’t exist. That wasn’t an instance of that. So what actually epistemic oppression, with these problems with knowledge, can end up doing is really thwarting our ability to calibrate our understanding of the existence of racism with the manifestation of it by actually denying the relationship between the fact that I exist in this Black woman body, and by virtue of that existence, I see this a lot. So if there’s an expert on this, it might be someone who looks and sounds and acts just like me. But that’s denied.

And that’s a non-accidental epistemic feature. And what I mean by that is if you deny me the ability to know about my own experience with this, my ability to identify this manifestation of this larger phenomenon in this particular moment, then you are actually epistemically oppressing me. I should know that. If racism exists, if anti-Black racism exists, then I should have some sense of how it exists if it does, right? But people who would acknowledge that would still say, but why do you get to tell? Because I live in a Black woman’s body. And if we’re conceding something like anti-Black racism, then the problem between your ability to understand that I can speak to that and your understanding that it exists is an epistemic problem. You have somehow denied me the ability to know something about something you’ve actually acknowledged the existence of, right?

Matt Teichman:
Yeah. I like adverting to the language of expertise here, because there’s an interesting analogy maybe that carries over. So if you’re watching an expert—I don’t know, whatever—on the news talk about their latest finding, you grant them a fair amount of authority. And you think, oh, yeah, this person did a bunch of research. I didn’t do the research. If they claim that XYZ is the case, they probably have a good reason for it.

Kristie Dotson:
Right.

Matt Teichman:
You can do that without granting them complete, omniscient, godlike authority so that you have to believe every single thing they say. You can by default presume that there’s probably pretty good evidence for what they’re saying without having to never be skeptical about anything ever again.

Kristie Dotson:
That’s exactly right. And I think that that actually—the idea that you can grant someone the ability to know something without actually abeying even skepticism—I think that’s one of the things that we’re talking about. So the difference between saying that I doubt that Williams is an example of racism, and saying that I doubt that Williams can testify to racism—which are two totally different things, right?—is, I think, about what you’re cashing out in the expertise point. I’m actually not giving her the benefit of the doubt of knowing enough about this that I can actually ask for normal-level evidence and rely upon that. Because you can still say, well, why do you think that? Well, because of X, Y, and Z.

But then, what happens at that moment, in a moment of epistemic oppression, is that person imagines they have a meta-level ability to assess that evidence. Well, that’s not good enough evidence. Well, wait a minute. You’re not an expert on this. How is it that the person who may experience this day in and day out can say, these are the ways you would track those things, and that itself gets doubted? When we’re talking about expert testimony, we ask them—when they say X, we’re like, well, why would you believe X? They give us some range of reasons for why they believe, or some evidence for why they believe. We don’t then say, why are those reasons? That’s the expert part of that. Those are reasons because the expert knows them to be reasons. And I’m not an expert enough to know whether those reasons are salient or not. That’s what the expert knows.

So if I give you a range of reasons, now, you may or may not be convinced. You don’t have to be convinced every single time you hear about something. But I do think that there’s something to be said about sometimes the ways in which we can not just doubt the information given, but doubt whether or not a person should or could give the information, which is very different. And the kinds of questions that you get about whether or not an evidence is conclusive, I think—and that’s Emily Dupree’s point, you were saying—whether that evidence is conclusive seems to me a kind of doubting of whether or not the amount of evidence that has been marshaled by the person making the claim could ever satisfy the conditions for knowledge, mainly because we can’t count them as an expert about their own experience.

And there’s a certain degree that I think this is complicated. Because I think there’s a certain degree where we’re going to say, well, sometimes I’m wrong about my experience. But in this case, we’re not just talking about whether I saw a pink elephant the other night. We’re talking about, if you’ve acknowledged it, these kinds of systems of injustice that might exist. And presuming that are systems of injustice—we’re at that point now—presuming that there are systems of injustice, their manifestations should have regular features like anything else. Now, I think that’s the part that really shocks me sometimes. In Williams’s example about the Soho shop, people are imagining that she’s not producing reasons that are not themselves patterns—not patterns for them, of course, because they haven’t experienced it. But patterns for the people who—you know why they’re salient to me? Because it happens over and over again. So it may not seem like that’s evidence, but those are the salient patterns by which I recognize these kinds of things. Because every shut door is not racism. But some of them are.

Matt Teichman:
So let’s say we grant that this example we’ve been looking at from Patricia Williams, the incident in the Soho store—if we’re willing to grant that that phenomenon happens a lot, it’s kind of pervasive, an effect of people on a large scale not being able to report these incidents that happen to them—it seems like the large-scale effect of that is it’s hard to learn about these instances, even if you’re interested in learning more about them. Because people have this strong incentive not to report them, because they’re not going to be believed.

Kristie Dotson:
Right. I think that’s right. So one of the long-standing, I think, philosophical problems in for example, Black feminist thought is the problem of unknowability. We’ve been wrestling with this for 200 years in the United States in particular. I mean, just trying to figure out–identifying a particular kind of problematic, right? The idea that there are some propositions, for example, that we just don’t know. And then, there are some that are unknowable. The ones we just don’t know are just things that we haven’t yet come to know. Right? The other day, someone told me that Pluto was a planet. And I said, no, I don’t think it is anymore. And then, they were like, what? And then, they were like, oh, now I know better. That’s just something they didn’t know, and now, that they do.

Unknowable stuff is stuff that, should you try to testify to it, or should you try to explain it, should evidence come into view that would actually confirm some given understanding of the world, there are relationships to that that actually make it so that the evidence doesn’t take, so that the conclusions aren’t drawn, so that you could actually have these propositions that one should, could, and ought to know about the world that one can’t know—because the evidence for those propositions is denied, because the ways in which we understand the world don’t allow that to be true. This is one thing that Kimberlé Crenshaw says a lot when you work with her: if the facts don’t fit the frame, you forget the facts. You don’t usually change the frame. The frame supports this, and that’s what you’re going to remember. Everything out of that—it’s just irrelevant, really. So those things become unknowable. They can be presented to you over and over and over again.

Now, why, often, do Black women find this to be a problem? Because ultimately, we’ve been talking about race. We can talk about race and gender. The example of Daniel Holtzclaw, the Oklahoma police officer who was forcing Black women into any number of different acts of sexual violence, who ended up going to prison. But one of the survivors in this context was asked why she didn’t tell anyone. She was like, well, I’m a Black woman. Who would believe me, right? Who would believe that this police officer was doing this to me, to us, to other people? And the reality is that man was actually forcing himself on many Black women—unbelieved.

There was something unknowable about that. There was something about which producing evidence, or talking about it, or trying to bring light to it—there was resistance to that, some of which is because this is a police officer, some of which—these are Black women, whose credibility have been somehow damaged, and this is an institution of authority of the state. The ways in which our social roles can actually produce these actions about which it becomes difficult to tell other people about—they’re not going to believe you. They’re just not going to believe you. And it’s a non-accidental non-belief. We can actually predict that they’re not going to believe you. We can predict that the evidence that you can marshal for that is not going to be enough, and that the preponderance of evidence is going to have to be extraordinary. It’s going to have to be many numerous victims. Those are the kinds of things that feminist Black women have been talking about as unknowable.

There’s also the strange position of Black women where most people use the term ‘women’, and they imagine white women. And when most people have used the term ‘Blacks’, they imagine Black men. And then, there’s Black women, right? And the question of where we’re situated with respect to women when people talk about it—and they really do imagine white women—or Blacks and the police, for example, and they usually imagine Black men. Where’s the uptake for what’s happening to Black women in any of these populations? Part of the unknowability around Black women and police violence, which is getting much better right now because of some of the works by Say Her Name and other things, is precisely because the frameworks only frame in certain people. And if the framework doesn’t fit the facts, you just forget those facts. So there’s resistance to even the evidence. You can produce evidence after evidence, pieces of information, statistics, and all kinds of stuff. It’ll just go in, and there will be a question of relevance. Why do we have to know about this?

So unknowability can just be those propositions, those positions, those parts of our world that literally are obscured to the degree where they’re unknowable, that the production of evidence is not going to be enough. And I’m going to say this is another way in which epistemic oppression manifests. Unknowability, that there are just some things that you can produce—and it’s more than just whether or not you can produce a copious amount of evidence. It’s also a question of whether or not that evidence will actually appear salient, right?

Are we going to talk about police brutality and only talk about Black men? This is serious, because Black men are experiencing large numbers of police brutality. But so are Black women, right? What is the narrative by which we’re all being counted? So are trans Black women–so are trans Black people in general, right? How do we understand these narratives so that everybody’s being understood, so that the experience that we’re all actually encountering at the hands of state violence is being brought to light and being made known so that there can be some remedy. Some redress. Some understanding of the scope of the problem, so that people don’t imagine that state violence against different populations is just this particular example. It just happened once or twice, and it’s only just them, and not all of them. I mean, how do we get a robust understanding about what’s happening in our social world? Because at the end of the day, that is the stakes of epistemic oppression: our robust and full understanding of our social world. Do we have a good understanding of what’s going on around us?

And arguably—and this is the epistemologist in me—I want to have a robust, accurate understanding of my social world. I think that it’s a better place when we all have that. I think we’re actually better people maybe, sometimes, when we all have that, when we have all the information necessary—which is not to say that morality is not important, because it is. Because you can know a whole bunch of terrible shit, and if you don’t care, then—you know? But if you don’t know, you don’t even know if you don’t care. If it never occurs to you that these things are happening, if it never becomes apparent that there’s any number of different social injustices that are occurring for all different ranges of populations, then the morality point is part of the point, but we haven’t gotten that far. The problem hasn’t presented itself.

Matt Teichman:
Okay. So this is starting to seem like a pretty vexing issue. Of course, the moment you become aware of oppression and various forms of injustice, your mind immediately wanders to: how are we going to address them? So what do you think are some of the strategies we might employ to enhance the visibility of these issues? Maybe getting more people into the conversation—is that a potential strategy? Or going to the blackboard and writing ‘I’m going to believe my friends more’ 10,000 times—is that a strategy?

Kristie Dotson:
Yeah, that’s a good question. Because I think it’s the question of whether or not something that is pervasive in the way this can be—I mean pervasive at the level of broad-scale population pervasive—can be handled the level of the individual. I think the difficulty of answering that question is whether or not we’re the kind of beings that can fix this. I’m not certain of that. I actually am not optimistic that we exist with respect to knowledge—either social, or perceptual, or any other form, testimonial—that we exist as the kind of beings that are really capable of knowing what we don’t know. It’s not clear that we’re good at that. I think that we tend to be bad at not knowing what we don’t know. And that would be about the level about what we would actually have to learn to become capable of—to tracking the very end of our ability to understand the world, and then imagining a beyond of that. What it would mean to live as beings with that at the front and not at the back of our comprehension. It strikes me that that would be—I mean, that’s a whole other mode of existence to most of us. And I’m not certain that it’s one that’s desirable.

But this is one of the things that I imagine. So thinking about this in terms of the individual—I’m not as optimistic as some other people. I think that Miranda Fricker, for example, is optimistic. She’ll posit some virtues. I think that Jose Medina, for example, is more optimistic than I, as he’ll posit certain community structures. But I think that that’s what we’ll be looking at. Either virtues at the individual level, certain kinds of compositions of epistemic communities whereby diversity becomes a value—so it may be virtue for communities. I actually err on the side of social and political change. So one of the things that I imagine is that the sum of the limits of our ability to understand what happens in our social world has a great deal to do with the organization of our social world.

So I tend to think that maybe all of these—virtues, robust epistemic communities, whereby we cultivate certain kinds of values, whereby we’re being calibrated by other people, because we shouldn’t expect ourselves to calibrate ourselves—but also, I think worlds where Liz Anderson is going to say something like institutional virtues when she starts talking about this. I also think that some of this stuff has to be kicked out to social and political struggle. And what I mean by that is Black Lives Matter kind of agitation where the actual political/social institutions change so that certain kinds of behaviors become more apparent. I think that’s what happened with Black Lives Matter. You have Ferguson and the tragic death of Michael Brown. And you just have people saying, no, no, no more. You know what? We’re going to protest this. This has to stop. We’re dying. We’re dying.

And I think now, more than before Ferguson, before Black Lives Matter, which was started for Trayvon Martin, but before that movement and its momentum, police brutality or state-sanctioned violence against Black people was not necessarily something anyone thought about. And you could talk about it. No one was like, oh, it can’t be that pervasive. I think that that’s actually—there are some people who are probably going to resist that. But there’s probably less naysayers than there were before Ferguson. And I think that those kinds of things end up actually cultivating awarenesses where the interpersonal thing doesn’t. Right? So what’s the role of social movements? What are the roles of not just individual virtues, not just community virtues, but social movements? And I think that has a great deal to do with social organization. I mean, can you build a social and political structure where movements are the norm, not the exception? Because those are needed for epistemic calibration. Would that change our understanding of democracy? Would we need something other than democracy? What is the best political system for epistemological beings? All of those, I think, would have to be considered.

Matt Teichman:
Kristie Dotson, thank you so much for joining me.

Kristie Dotson:
Thank you for asking me. It’s been fun.


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