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3168'White Talk' as a Barrier to Understanding WhitenessIn George Yancy (ed.), What's It Like to Be a White Problem?, Lexington Books. pp. 37-57. 2014.My project is to explain why the question ‘How does it feel to be a white problem?’ cannot be answered in the fluttering grammar of white talk. The whiteness of white talk lies not only in its having emerged from white mouths, but also in its evasiveness—in its attempt to suppress fear and anxiety, and its consequential [if unintended] reinscription and legitimation of racist oppression. I White talk is designed, indeed scripted, for the purposes of evading, rejecting, and remaining ignorant a…Read more
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2981"On Anger, Silence and Epistemic Injustice"Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 84 93-115. 2018.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 satu…Read more
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1047On White Shame and VulnerabiltiySouth African Journal of Philosophy 30 (3): 472-483. 2011.In this paper I address a tension in Samantha Vice’s claim that humility and silence offer effective moral responses to white shame in the wake of South African apartheid. Vice describes these twin virtues using inward-turning language of moral self-repair, but she also acknowledges that this ‘personal, inward directed project’ has relational dimensions. Her failure to explore the relational strand, however, leaves her description of white shame sounding solitary and penitent. My response devel…Read more
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894Navigating Epistemic Pushback in Feminist and Critical Race Philosophy ClassesApa Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy 14 (1): 3-7. 2014.My contribution to this conversation sets out to accomplish two things: First, I offer a definition of epistemic pushback. Epistemic pushback is an expression of epistemic resistance that occurs regularly in classroom discussions that touch our core beliefs, sense of self, politics, or worldv iews. Epistemic pushback is structural: It broadly characterizes a family of cognitive, affective, and verbal tactics that are deployed regularly to dodge the challenging and exhausting chore of engaging to…Read more
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848On Gaslighting and Epistemic Injustice: Editor's IntroductionHypatia 35 (4): 667-673. 2020.Social justice demands that we attend carefully to the epistemic terrains we inhabit as well as to the epistemic resources we summon to make our lived experiences tangible to one another. Not all epistemic terrains are hospitable—colonial projects landscaped a good portion of our epistemic terrain long before present generations moved across it. There is no shared epistemicterra firma,no level epistemic common ground where knowers share credibility and where a diversity of hermeneutical resource…Read more
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781Tracking Privilege‐Preserving Epistemic Pushback in Feminist and Critical Race Philosophy ClassesHypatia 32 (4): 876-892. 2017.Classrooms are unlevel knowing fields, contested terrains where knowledge and ignorance are produced and circulate with equal vigor, and where members of dominant groups are accustomed to having an epistemic home-terrain advantage. My project focuses on one form of resistance that regularly surfaces in discussions with social-justice content. Privilege-protective epistemic pushback is a variety of willful ignorance that many members of dominant groups engage in when asked to consider both the li…Read more
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739The Unlevel Knowing Field: An Engagement with Kristie Dotson's Third-Order Epistemic OppressionSocial Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 3, No. 10. 2014.My engagement with Dotson’s essay begins with an overview of first- and second-order epistemic exclusions. I develop the concept of an "unlevel knowing field." I use examples from the epistemic injustice literature, and some of my own, to highlight the important distinction she makes between reducible and irreducible forms of epistemic oppression. Next, I turn my attention to her account of third-order epistemic exclusions. I offer a brief explanation of why her sketch of at this level makes…Read more
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699Mothering, diversity and peace: Comments on Sara Ruddick's feminist maternal peace politicsJournal of Social Philosophy 26 (1): 162-182. 1994.Sara Ruddick's contemporary philosophical account of mothering reconsiders the maternal arguments used in the women's peace movements of the earlier part of this century. The culmination of this project is her 1989 book, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace. Ruddick's project is ground-breaking work in both academic philosophy and feminist theory. In this chapter, I first look at the relationship between the two basic components of Ruddick's argument in Maternal Thinking: the "practic…Read more
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615Tracking Privilege‐Preserving Epistemic Pushback in Feminist and Critical Race Philosophy ClassesHypatia 32 (4): 876-892. 2017.Classrooms are unlevel knowing fields, contested terrains where knowledge and ignorance are produced and circulate with equal vigor, and where members of dominant groups are accustomed to having an epistemic home-terrain advantage. My project focuses on one form of resistance that regularly surfaces in discussions with social-justice content. Privilege-preserving epistemic pushback is a variety of willful ignorance that many members of dominant groups engage in when asked to consider both the li…Read more
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594Book review: Chris Cuomo. The philosopher queen: Feminist essays on war, love, and knowledge. Lanham, md.: Rowman and Littlefield publishers, inc., 2003 (review)Hypatia 20 (3): 218-221. 2005.The Philosopher Queen: Feminist Essays on War, Love, and Knowledge. By Chris Cuomo. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2003. The Philosopher Queen is a powerful illustration of what Cherríe Moraga calls a "theory in the flesh." That is, theorizing from a place where "physical realities of our lives—our skin color, the land or concrete we grow up on, our sexual longings—all fuse to create a politic [and, I would add, an ethics, spirituality, and epistemology] born out of necess…Read more
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589Privilege: Expanding on Marilyn Frye's "Oppression"Journal of Social Philosophy 29 (3): 104-119. 1998.This essay serves as both a response and embellishment of Marilyn Frye's now classic essay " Oppression." It is meant to pick up where this essay left off and to make connections between oppression, as Frye defines it, and the privileges that result from institutional structures. This essay tries to clarify one meaning of privilege that is lost in philosophical discussions of injustice. I develop a distinction between unearned privileges and earned advantages. Clarifying the meaning of privilege…Read more
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406Interview: (Comments on White Privilege and Metaphysical Comfort)In Bailey Alison (ed.), On Race: 34 Conversations in a Time of Crisis, . 2017.George Yancy's interview with Alison Bailey addresses what it means for Whites to be "privilege-cognizant but metaphysically comfortable.”
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401Women of Color and PhilosophyHypatia 20 (1): 220-225. 2005.Book Review of Naomi Zack's Women of Color and Philosophy
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363The Weight of Whiteness: A Feminist Engagement with Privilege, Race, and IgnoranceLexington Books. 2021.Alison Bailey’s The Weight of Whiteness: A Feminist Engagement with Privilege, Race, and Ignorance examines how whiteness misshapes our humanity, measuring the weight of whiteness in terms of its costs and losses to collective humanity. People of color feel the weight of whiteness daily. The resistant habits of whiteness and its attendant privileges, however, make it difficult for white people to feel the damage. White people are more comfortable thinking about white supremacy in terms of what p…Read more
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313Locating Traitorous Identities: Toward a View of Privilege-Cognizant White CharacterHypatia 13 (3). 1998.I address the problem of how to locate "traitorous" subjects, or those who belong to dominant groups yet resist the usual assumptions and practices of those groups. I argue that Sandra Harding's description of traitors as insiders, who "become marginal" is misleading. Crafting a distinction between "privilege-cognizant" and "privilege-evasive" white scripts, I offer an alternative account of race traitors as privilege-cognizant whites who refuse to animate expected whitely scripts, and who are u…Read more
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292The reproduction of whiteness: Race and the regulation of the gendered bodyHypatia 22 (2). 2007.Historically critical reflection on whiteness in the United States has been a long-standing practice in slave folklore and in Mexican resistance to colonialism, Asian American struggles against exploitation and containment, and Native American stories of contact with European colonizers. Drawing from this legacy and from the disturbing silence on "whiteness" in postsecondary institutions, critical whiteness scholarship has emerged in the past two decades in U.S. academies in a variety of discipl…Read more
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288On Intersectionality and the Whiteness of Feminist PhilosophyIn George Yancy (ed.), THE CENTER MUST NOT HOLD: WHITE WOMEN PHILOSOPHERS ON THE WHITENESS OF PHILOSOPHY, Lexington Books. 2010.In this paper I explore some possible reasons why white feminists philosophers have failed to engage the radical work being done by non-Western women, U.S. women of color and scholars of color outside of the discipline. Feminism and academic philosophy have had lots to say to one another. Yet part of what marks feminist philosophy as philosophy is our engagement with the intellectual traditions of the white forefathers. I’m not uncomfortable with these projects: Aristotle, Foucault, Sartre, Wit…Read more
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285The Philosopher Queen: Feminist Essays on War, Love, and KnowledgeHypatia 20 (3): 218-221. 2005.Book Review of Chris Cuomo's The Philosopher Queen
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232Strategic IgnoranceIn Shannon Sullivan & Nancy Tuana (eds.), Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, State Univ of New York Pr. pp. 77--94. 2007.I want to explore strategic expressions of ignorance against the background of Charles W. Mills's account of epistemologies of ignorance in The Racial Contract (1997). My project has two interrelated goals. I want to show how Mills's discussion is restricted by his decision to frame ignorance within the language and logic of social contract theory. And, I want to explain why Maria Lugones's work on purity is useful in reframing ignorance in ways that both expand our understandings of ignorance a…Read more
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197Reconceiving Surrogacy: Toward a Reproductive Justice Account of Indian SurrogacyHypatia 26 (4): 715-741. 2011.My project here is to argue for situating moral judgments about Indian surrogacy in the context of Reproductive Justice. I begin by crafting the best picture of Indian surrogacy available to me while marking some worries I have about discursive colonialism and epistemic honesty. Western feminists' responses to contract pregnancy fall loosely into two interrelated moments: post-Baby M discussions that focus on the morality of surrogacy work in Western contexts, and feminist biomedical ethnographi…Read more
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183Naomi Zack Women of Color and Philosophy. Malden, Mass., Blackwell Publishers, 2000 (review)Hypatia 20 (1): 220-225. 2005.Naomi Zack’s unique and important collection, Women of Color and Philosophy, brings together for the first time the voices of twelve philosophers who are women of color. She begins with the premise that the work of women of color who do philosophy in academe, but who do not write exclusively on issues of race, ethnicity, and gender, merits a collection of its own. It’s rare that women of color pursue philosophy in academic contexts; Zack counts at most thirty among the ten thousand members of th…Read more
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153Book Notes (review)Ethics 113 (4): 923-928. 2003.It's surprising that contemporary moral philosophers have not thought more about food. The rapidly expanding industrialized landscape of modern western agribusiness raises moral concerns about large-scale livestock production, the increased usage of genetically modified crops, and the effects these now common practices may have on long-term environmental and human health. Here Pence argues that biotechnology is more helpful than harmful, on the ground that it will abate world hunger. Positioning…Read more
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126The Feminist Philosophy ReaderMcGraw Hill. 2008.The most comprehensive anthology of feminist philosophy available, this first edition reader brings together over 55 of the most influential and time-tested works to have been published in the field of feminist philosophy. Featuring perspectives from across the philosophical spectrum, and from an array of different cultural vantage points, it displays the incredible range, diversity, and depth of feminist writing on fundamental issues, from the early second wave to the present.
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117"On White Privilege and Anesthesia: Why Does Peggy McIntosh's Knapsack Feel Weightless," In Feminists Talk Whiteness, eds. Janet Gray and Leigh-Anne Francis (edited book)Taylor and Francis. forthcoming.It is no accident that white privilege designed to be both be invisible and weightless to white people. Alison Bailey’s “On White Privilege and Anesthesia: Why Does Peggy McIntosh’s Knapsack Feel Weightless?” extends a weighty invitation white readers to complete the unpacking task McIntosh (1988) began when she compared white privilege to an “invisible and weightless knapsack.” McIntosh focuses primarily making white privilege visible to white people. Bailey’s project continues the conversatio…Read more
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102Despising an Identity They Taught Me to ClaimIn Chris J. Cuomo & Kim Q. Hall (eds.), WHITENESS: FEMINIST PHILOSOPHICAL NARRATIVES, . 1999.This essay is a personal philosophical reflection on particular dilemma privilege-cognizant white feminists face in thinking through how to use privilege in liberatory ways. Privilege takes on a new dimension for whites who resist common defensive or guilt-ridden responses to privilege and struggle to understand the connections between ill-gotten advantages and the genuine injustices that deny humanity to peoples of color. The temptation to despise whiteness and its accompanying privilege is a c…Read more
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100Locating Traitorous Identities: Toward a Theory of White Character FormationIn Sandra Harding & Uma Narayan (eds.), Hypatia, University of Indiana Press. 2000.This essay explores how the social location of white traitorous identities might be understood. I begin by examining some of the problematic implications of Sandra Harding's standpoint framework description of race traitors as 'becoming marginal.' I argue that the location of white traitors might be better understood in terms of their 'decentering the center.' I distinguish between 'privilege-cognizant' and 'privilege-evasive' white scripts. Drawing on the work of Marilyn Frye and Anne Braden, I…Read more
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99On Intersectionality, Empathy, And Feminist Solidarity: A Reply To Naomi ZackJournal for Peace and Justice Studies 19 (1): 14-36. 2009.Naomi Zack’s Inclusive Feminism: A Third Wave Theory of Women’s Commonality begins with an original reading of the paradigm shift from gender essentialism to intersectionality that ended U.S. second wave feminism. According to Zack there has been a crisis in academic and professional feminism since the late 1970s. Her project is to explain the motivation behind the shift from commonality to intersectionality, to outline its harmful effects, and to reclaim the idea that all women share something …Read more
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98The Center Must Not Hold: White Women Philosophers on the Whiteness of PhilosophyLexington Books. 2010.In this collection, white women philosophers engage boldly in critical acts of exploring ways of naming and disrupting whiteness in terms of how it has defined the conceptual field of philosophy. Focuses on the whiteness of the epistemic and value-laden norms within philosophy itself, the text dares to identify the proverbial elephant in the room known as white supremacy and how that supremacy functions as the measure of reason, knowledge, and philosophical intelligibility.
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88White Self-Criticality Beyond Anti-Racism: How Does It Feel to Be a White Problem?Lexington Books. 2014.George Yancy gathers white scholarship that dwells on the experience of whiteness as a problem without sidestepping the question’s implications for Black people or people of color. This unprecedented reversion of the “Black problem” narrative challenges contemporary rhetoric of a color-evasive world in a critically engaging and persuasive study.
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61Taking Responsibility for Community ViolenceIn Peggy DesAutels & JoAnne Waugh (eds.), FEMINISTS DOING ETHICS, . 2001.This article examines the responses of two communities to hate crimes in their cities. In particular it explores how community understandings of responsibility shape collective responses to hate crimes. I use the case of Bridesberg, Pennsylvania to explore how anti-racist work is restricted by backward-looking conceptions of moral responsibility (e.g. being responsible). Using recent writings in feminist ethics.(1) I argue for a forward-looking notion that advocates an active view: taking respon…Read more
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