Andrea Pitts

In this project, I combine theoretical resources from metaethics and philosophy of language with contemporary issues in critical philosophy of race. Drawing from these literatures, I examine the nature of racial norms by developing a non-ideal, situated, and intersectional approach to second-personhood. Second-personhood, as I propose in the first half of the dissertation, serves two explanatory functions with respect to the nature of racial norms. First, second-personhood highlights how manifestations of moral and political agency are embedded in interdependent forms of I-you and we-you relationships. Second, with respect to language, second-personhood provides an account of how speech acts, when understood as a subset of embodied action, come to bear normative force. These features of second-personhood then undergird the three distinct sites of analysis that I examine in the latter half of the dissertation. There, I propose that we can examine collective, interpersonal, and personal levels of racial discourse to see the functioning of racial norms through second-personhood

Through a study of Fanon’s writings on colonial medicine, this paper focuses on the intersection of clinical medicine and mass incarceration. I argue that correctional medicine operates as an extension of colonial medicine via structural white supremacy. To clarify this position, I first draw from the recent literature on mass incarceration to highlight the relationship between carceral punishment in the U.S. and structural white supremacy. In the second section of the paper, I combine my analysis of structural white supremacy and mass incarceration with an analysis of colonial medicine. Here, I focus on Fanon’s writings on medicine and health under conditions of structural oppression to clarify a pattern of violence inflicted upon communities of color and poor communities in the United States, i.e., the communities most affected by mass incarceration.

In this article, I examine the relationship between self-knowledge practices among women of color and structural patterns of ignorance by offering an analysis of Gloria E. Anzaldúa's discussions of self-writing. I propose that by writing about her own experiences in a manner that hails others to critically interrogate their own identities, Anzaldúa develops important theoretical resources for understanding self-knowledge, self-ignorance, and practices of knowing others. In particular, I claim that in her later writings, Anzaldúa offers a rich epistemological account of these themes through her notion of autohistoria-teoría. The notion of autohistoria-teoría demonstrates that self-knowledge practices, like all knowledge practices, are social and relational. Moreover, such self-knowledge practices require contestation and affirmation as well, including, resistance and productive friction.