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On Anger, Silence, and Epistemic Injustice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 November 2018

Alison Bailey
Alison Bailey*
Affiliation:
Illinois State University
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

If anger is the emotion of injustice, and if most injustices have prominent epistemic dimensions, then where is the anger in epistemic injustice? Despite the question my task is not to account for the lack of attention to anger in epistemic injustice discussions. Instead, I argue that a particular texture of transformative anger – a knowing resistant anger – offers marginalized knowers a powerful resource for countering epistemic injustice. I begin by making visible the anger that saturates the silences that epistemic injustices repeatedly manufacture and explain the obvious: silencing practices produce angry experiences. I focus on tone policing and tone vigilance to illustrate the relationship between silencing and angry knowledge management. Next, I use María Lugones's pluralist account of anger to bring out the epistemic dimensions of knowing resistant anger in a way that also calls attention to their histories and felt textures. The final section draws on feminist scholarship about the transformative power of angry knowledge to suggest how it might serve as a resource for resisting epistemic injustice.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 84: Harms and Wrongs in Epistemic Practice , November 2018 , pp. 93 - 115
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2018 

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References

1 As Aristotle says, ‘anger is an appropriate response to perceived injustice’. Nicomachean Ethics V.8 1135b28–9.

2 Bailey, Alison, ‘The Unlevel Knowing Field: An Engagement with Dotson's Third-Order Epistemic Oppression.’ Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 3.10 (2014), 62–68Google Scholar <http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-1Gs>. ‘Epistemic twilight zones’ are undefined or intermediate conceptual areas where there are insufficient or inadequate epistemic resources. Here, epistemic resources are not shared as much as people think.

3 Kristie Dotson, in conversation. Dotson's claim is intentionally strong. Unpacking the ‘all’ is beyond the scope of this project. I ask readers to feel the weight of the all in Dotson's claim by considering how the epistemological dimensions of violence are integral to the process of dehumanization: Reducing knowing subjects to dehumanized subjects or objects (i.e. non-citizens, property, animals, savages, criminals, etc.) is the first step toward doing violence to them. Charles W. Mills makes a weaker claim: the historical production of the racial contract has prominent epistemic dimensions. See his The Racial Contract (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

4 Bailey, ‘The Unlevel Knowing Field: An Engagement with Dotson's Third-Order Epistemic Oppression’, 63.

5 Dotson distinguishes between episodic, non-repetitive instances of silencing and deeper systemic and socially functional practices of silencing that concern ‘a repetitive reliable occurrence of an audience failing to meet the dependencies of a speaker that finds its origins in a more pervasive ignorance’. I focus on Dotson's repetitive reliable occurrences. See ‘Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing’, Hypatia 26.2 (2011), 236–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Fricker, Miranda, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 130CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 ‘Epistemic objectification’ is Fricker's term. See, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, 133. The term ‘truncated subjects’ comes from Pohlhaus, Gaile Jr., ‘Discerning the Primary Epistemic Harm in Cases of Testimonial Injustice’, Social Epistemology 28.2 (2013), 99–114CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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32 To reduce both the conceptual clutter for those unfamiliar with Lugones's pluralism, and to focus on the textures of anger, I've substituted hard/heavy anger for first-order anger and hard/rebellious anger for second-order anger. First-order anger sees the oppressed reality and second-order anger resists.

33 Lugones, ‘Hard-to-Handle Anger’, 107.

34 Lugones, ‘Hard-to-Handle Anger’, 104.

35 Lugones, ‘Hard-to-Handle Anger’, 104–5.

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43 Lorde, ‘The Uses of Anger’, 129.

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46 Consider how Fricker drains anger from her paradigm example of testimonial injustice. She selects the anger-free hotel room conversation between Marge and Herbert in The Talented Mr. Ripley rather than the water taxi conversation where Marge's clearly-focused anger is resistant and alive. Anger is also drained from the courtroom testimonial exchanges in her To Kill a Mockingbird examples, even though it's clear that Tom Robinson, a Black man, must swallow his anger to be heard, and that Mayella, a young white woman, uses anger to bolster her false rape charge against Tom.

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50 Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance, 45.

51 Lugones, ‘Hard-to-Handle Anger’, 107-8. See also Frye, ‘A Note On Anger’, 94.

52 Frye, ‘A Note On Anger’, 90.

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