Lisa Madura

Philosophers have come to regard habit as a useful concept for thinking about race. Theories of racial habit tend to proceed by identifying particular racist and white privileged habits, and then examining the way those habits are causally bound up with systems of racial domination. Less often discussed is how habituation itself—as a condition of embodied sociality marked by ease, comfort, and affordance—has come to demarcate racial boundaries and hierarchies. Proceeding from a ‘thick’ conception of habit as a core structure of social organisms and environments, race theorists are prompted to look not only at particular racist habits and their effects, but at how the benefits of habituation are asymmetrically distributed along racial lines. This paper examines the normative implications of this asymmetry, which come into view when we take seriously and contextualize the ambivalence of habit—that it is an enabling and inhibiting force, and that it is possible to be too ‘at home’ in the world. I argue that whiteness in particular, and dominant subject-positions in general, exhibit what I call “Anti-Social Habit,” which refers to hegemonic orientations that perpetuate existing dominance structures, and that are marked by a tendency toward homogeneity and world-closure.

This article challenges the distributive paradigm of testimonial injustice and contests the claim that there is a distinct form of ‘distributive testimonial injustice’ revealed by this paradigm. Distributive approaches to testimonial injustice regard credibility as a finite resource and epistemic justice as a matter of properly distributing credibility among members of an epistemic community. I engage primarily with Jennifer Lackey, who defends distribution as a way of capturing a wider socio-epistemic context relevant to the diagnosis of testimonial injustices. I begin by arguing that what Lackey takes to be a distinctly distributive form of testimonial injustice is nothing other than identity-prejudicial credibility deficit. I then turn to her defence of the distributive paradigm more broadly and challenge its three core claims: 1) that credibility is best understood as a finite resource, 2) that the evidentialist norm of credibility is insufficiently relational, and 3) that distribution can account for the relational dynamics missed by evidentialism. Although I find Lackey’s construal of the problem and solution unsuccessful, I agree with her call to take context seriously. I end by proposing a structural reorientation as a way to attend to context in our efforts to better track and understand testimonial injustice.

This dissertation argues that a sufficiently worked out concept of habit is crucial for understanding race, and specifically whiteness. It has become common for race theorists to think about white privilege as a matter of habit, but they have yet to realize the potential of this approach. This is in part because the existing accounts of white habit either omit or outright reject an explicitly phenomenological framework. This leads them to think only in terms of discrete habits of racism and white privilege. I agree that racism and white privilege operate through specific habits of perception, cognition, and bodily response. But racism and racial privilege amount to more than individual problematic habits. To fully appreciate the extent to which habit structures racial categories, we need to historicize habit at a more fundamental level. That is to say, we need to understand the ways in which habituation itself––the ability to be oriented in and enabled by certain spaces, and to feel at home in them––tracks race. I do this work through an account of racial habit that combines Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of habit as orientation, a Deweyan-pragmatist ontology of transaction, and a generally Du Boisian approach to race theory. It is not just the kinds of habits that differently racialized subjects acquire that determine their position within a socially and politically hierarchized landscape; it is the very ability to be oriented by and within certain spaces that constitutes one’s racial position. The differential ability to cultivate habits and to accrue the psychological, physiological, and affective benefits of habituation is a phenomenological asymmetry in our lived experience of race that constitutes a harm over and above the harms of individual racist habits. I give the name “anti-social habit” to those individual and collective habits that eventuate in this phenomenological asymmetry. I then draw on the framework of democratic egalitarianism to argue that this constitutes a distinct site of unjust social inequality. Finally, I argue for phenomenological disruption as a necessary form of social praxis and consider what this might look like in terms of political action.