Abstract
In this paper I show how fact and fiction, collaboratively, can inform a moral epistemology that moves toward deriving principles for understanding difference; responding well to alterity. Specifically, I examine impediments to knowing, from positions of white privilege, how it is to live racial inequality. Starting from Nadine Gordimer’s novel, July’s People, written when South African apartheid was moving violently toward its dissolution; yet where polite, concepts/ideals integral to liberal enlightenment discourse, such as emancipation, equality, and welfare, were under strain, I examine the phrase ‘they treated him well’ for how it permits the novel’s white protagonists to ignore the extent of an Otherness that is allegedly erased in the provisions they make for the comfort and welfare of July, their black servant. The language is neutral, well-intentioned, self-confessedly liberal, and oblivious to the barriers and exclusions it sustains. Yet contains the “white folks” within an epistemological-ethical imaginary of sameness where they cannot understand the need to relinquish taken-for-granted distinctions, taxonomies and assumptions about “natural kinds” through which they know “their” world, even when those distinctions lose their pertinence. July knows their world and their ways far better than they know his, yet their failure to recognize the extent of his epistemic privilege ultimately leads to disaster. The paper will elaborate the epistemological consequences of this apparent incommensurability.
* An earlier version of this paper is published under the title ‘The Power of Social Imaginaries: Fact, Fiction, and the Politics of Knowledge’ in Trans-Humanities, (June 2010) 2(1): 9-31 (Seoul Korea: 2010 Ewha Institute for the Humanities).
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Notes
- 1.
I discuss Fricker’s analysis of epistemic injustice at greater length in Code (2008).
- 2.
See also Mills (2007), where (citing David Roediger) he refers to ‘the fundamental epistemic asymmetry between typical white views of blacks and typical black views of whites: these are not cognizers linked by a reciprocal ignorance but rather groups whose respective privilege and subordination tend to produce self-deception, bad faith, evasion, and misrepresentation on the one hand, and more veridical perceptions, on the other hand’ (17). This asymmetry is central to my reading of July’s People.
- 3.
Raimond Gaita (2003, 265), in a related context, reminds his readers that words ‘can mean different things in different mouths’.
- 4.
Langton observes: ‘Many a woman has experienced vividly at first hand that demolition, that shaking of established belief, which Descartes thought necessary for the acquisition of knowledge… Foundations… are shaken, not by reflections on demons and sensory delusion, but by a life under inequality or oppression – a life which suddenly reveals for what they are those many falsehoods one had accepted as true’ (2000, 127–128).
- 5.
I have also benefited in thinking about these issues from Susan Babbitt’s (2006).
- 6.
Bailey writes: ‘Strategic ignorance is a way of expediently working with a dominant group’s tendency to see wrongly. It … uses dominant misconceptions as a basis for active creative responses to oppression. It seeks out resistant paths through the logic of purity that turn white ignorance back on the oppressor jiujitsu style’ (2007, 88).
- 7.
Schutte writes of ‘nodes in a linguistic interchange or a conversation in which the other’s speech, or some aspect of it, resonates in me as a kind of strangeness, as a kind of displacement of the usual expectation.’ She continues: ‘Cultural alterity requires that one not bypass these experiences or subsume them under an already familiar category’ (2000, 49).
- 8.
Raimond Gaita (2003, 277), for example, suggests that ‘if the discursive is not longer restricted to the exercise of the kind of thought in which form and content are separable, then, in roughly those parts of philosophy which the Europeans call philosophical anthropology, there will be no marked distinction between the narratives that must to some degree nourish inquiry and philosophical engagement with them.’
- 9.
See in this regard Code 2006b.
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Acknowledgments
My thanks to Heidi Grasswick and Sonia Kruks for their careful readings of this paper, and for helpful comments and suggestions. I presented earlier versions at Dalhousie University, the University of Dayton, McMaster University, the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Twente University in the Netherlands, the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) at Durham University, EWHA Women’s University in Seoul, and as the first of my 2008 Hanna Lectures at Hamline University. I am grateful to colleagues present at those events for insightful responses and recommendations.
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Code, L. (2011). ‘They Treated Him Well’: Fact, Fiction, and the Politics of Knowledge. In: Grasswick, H. (eds) Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6835-5_10
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