•  744
    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
  •  322
    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
  •  35
    Newark Lessons
    Philosophy Today 62 (4): 1213-1217. 2018.
    "Newark Lessons" offers a response to the harassment and threats that George Yancy faced after the publication of his "Dear White America" letter, published in the New York Times on 24 December, 2015. The Newark Lessons are an autobiographical account how the white community of my childhood used the Newark Race Riots/Rebellions as a trope to teach me about the value of whiteness. I discuss the damaging effects of these lessons in terms of the collateral damage of white supremacy for white peo…Read more
  •  574
    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
  •  2854
    "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
  •  378
    George Yancy's interview with Alison Bailey addresses what it means for Whites to be "privilege-cognizant but metaphysically comfortable.”
  •  737
    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
  •  76
    White Self-Criticality Beyond Anti-Racism: How Does It Feel to Be a White Problem?
    with Rebecca Aanerud, Barbara Applebaum, Steve Garner, Robin James, Crista Lebens, Steve Martinot, Nancy McHugh, Bridget M. Newell, David S. Owen, Alexis Sartwell, and Karen Teel
    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.
  •  39
    Whiteness: Feminist Philosophical Reflections
    with Bat Ami Bar-On, Linda Lopez-McAlister, Lisa Tessman, Judy Scales-Trent, and Naomi Zack
    Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 1999.
    Written in an engaging narrative style these philosophical investigations undermine racist hierarchies along with false natualistic conceptions of the meanings of race and universalistic understandings of gender, by considering whiteness as it shapes and is infused by gender, class, sexuality, and culture. Central to this project are questions about how it is that culture and the state create such a wide range of different people who understand themselves as white. The essays collected here disc…Read more
  •  574
    Privilege: 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
  •  295
    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
  •  1004
    On White Shame and Vulnerabiltiy
    South 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
  •  275
    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
  •  52
    Good White People: The Problem with Middle-Class White Anti-Racism by Shannon Sullivan
    philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism 6 (1): 142-145. 2016.
    Review of Shannon Sullivan's Good White People
  •  138
    Book Notes (review)
    with Jan M. Boxill, Emmett L. Bradbury, Maudemarie Clark, Samir J. Haddad, and Colin M. Patrick
    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
  •  84
    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.
  •  186
    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
  •  628
    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
  •  115
    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.
  •  46
    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
  •  97
    Locating Traitorous Identities: Toward a Theory of White Character Formation
    In 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
  •  552
    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
  •  855
    Navigating Epistemic Pushback in Feminist and Critical Race Philosophy Classes
    Apa 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
  •  223
    Strategic Ignorance
    In 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
  •  17
    This book has its philosophical starting point in the idea that group-based social movements have positive implications for peace politics. It explores ways of imagining community, nation, and international systems through a political lens that is attentive to diversity and different lived experiences. Contributors suggest how groups might work toward new nonviolent conceptions and experiences of diverse communities and global stability.
  •  3103
    'White Talk' as a Barrier to Understanding Whiteness
    In 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
  •  669
    The Unlevel Knowing Field: An Engagement with Kristie Dotson's Third-Order Epistemic Oppression
    Social 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
  •  93
    On Intersectionality, Empathy, And Feminist Solidarity: A Reply To Naomi Zack
    Journal 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