 So welcome everyone to our sixth edition for the Swar's World Philosophies lecture. And this will be the last for the year 2021. And we are pleased to have guest speaker, Professor Veli Mitova with us. As you know, the Swar's World Philosophies lecture is organized by the Swar's World Philosophies program. And one of my colleagues is here with us, Dr. Andrew Hines. Thank you for joining us. And it's organized in line with our approach to doing philosophy here at Swar's in a way that is inclusive and decolonized where we see philosophy not simply from the Western lens but from a global lens looking at different philosophical traditions. And to this theme, definitely speak to that approach to doing philosophy because it has to do with questions about epistemic decolonization as well as epistemic injustice. And so we are really looking forward to hearing from Professor Veli Mitova about her topic. Professor Veli Mitova is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Johannesburg. She is also the Director of the African Center for Epistemology and Philosophy of Science. She is also the South African team leader for the Geography of Philosophy project and the Principal Investigator for the Epistemic Injustice Reasons Agency Project which is funded by a Newton Advanced Fellowship. Professor Mitova has reached out widely in this area, in the area of epistemic. If you could mute yourself please. Yeah, in this area of epistemic decolonization and epistemic injustice and some of our works include the book, Belivable Evidence and the Factive Tone in Epistemology. She also edited the Special Issue for Philosophy, it's a philosophy paper, yeah, in 2020 titled Epistemic Decolonization. Today she'll be speaking on the theme is Epistemic Injustice, White People Stuff. So we really look forward to your talk and you have our full attention. Thank you so much Elvis and thank you for giving me the last word of the year. It's such a privilege. Though obviously one could have chosen the year better but it's a great privilege having the last word. And I also wanted to thank you for running the series because I think that in the last two years it's been people like you who have been keeping the same and connected through a series like this where we can exchange ideas. So I really appreciate that. So you should be able to see my screen if you can just give me the thumbs up. Awesome, thank you. So the inspiration for this talk was another talk that Lewis Gordon gave at the University of Johannesburg last year. And there he was trying to build up a kind of toolbox for a critical race theory. And when the discussion time came, one of the audience, I won't say who to protect the guilt, asked him why he's not using any epistemic injustice tools. So it seemed like some epistemic injustice tools could be quite useful for what he was doing, things like epistemic exploitation and so on. And his answer was lengthy. You can find it in my bibliography but it started with the statement that epistemic injustice is stuff that white people do. I won't tell you how it goes on, not to spoil it. And this kind of got me thinking because you do hear this stuff. Very often you hear people say epistemic injustice talk is kind of white people stuff or some people say white women stuff. I prefer keeping it more neutral, gender-wise, but one certainly hears these statements in general in academia. And I was a bit puzzled by this comment of Godness as well as others because it looks like the epistemic injustice literature, sorry, the epistemic decolonization literature bounds in epistemic injustice talk. So you get it in, so people are talking about epistemicide that's cross-fogel, for example. And certainly Boventura, this was a Santos, was born in several of his books and the last source lecture, the fifth source lecture a few weeks ago. Other people closer to my home in Africa talk about cognitive justice. One of the theorizers of epistemic decolonization, Sibel and Lovlga Cheney is such a person. And others as well talk directly about epistemic injustice. So someone like Jonathan Chinakonin and Edwin Etihadou. So let me just start my timer so I don't abuse your patience. So the literature on epistemic decolonization abounds in epistemic injustice talk. Moreover, many decolonial notions are easily translatable in epistemic injustice terms. So for example, Walter Mignola's Zero Point, which is a kind of universalist conception of knowledge with a disembodied subject that it sends up, very easily translates into the kind of Cartesian picture of the knower that has been reviled for a long time by both feminist epistemologists and epistemic injustice theorists. Such as, for example, Patricia Hill Collins and Sarah Herding. So then the puzzle is, well, how could this be white people's stuff if it's useful for dismantling white people epistemic hedging right? And I really couldn't understand the problem and why people were saying this. And obviously I take it for granted that this is a majority thing to say, right? Until I saw this talk by Gail Paulhouse at Vienna, that's the way we go around the world nowadays. And I won't immediately give away the game. I'll hold off a little bit for the realization. So what I want to do in this talk is to show you that at least, or at least people who say that this is white people stuff, to show you that at least some epistemic injustice tools can be theoretically useful. And here my paradigm example is going to be of epistemic decolonization. So the thinking is white people stuff means that it further oppressives those whom it's meant to liberate. And epistemic decolonization, of course, is the paradigm of just the opposite. So I'm going to try and show you that epistemic injustice tools can be useful for epistemic decolonization and moreover, being useful without falling prey to the white people stuff challenge. And so those of you who like bumper stickers, here's what I would have on my car if I wasn't to bumper stickers, epistemic injustice tools, I will argue both sharp and safe. Now, why should anyone care? Why should this world series care? Well, I think that if the white people stuff challenge is correct, then a whole body of literature becomes extremely dubious. The whole epistemic injustice literature becomes dubious. And I think that that's not just going to result in job losses given what an industry epistemic injustice has become, but I think that we'll really lose some fundamental insights and a kind of influence over both the academic and public worlds that theorizes, feminist theorizes have gained recently in for the good of humanity in general. So that's why I think that one should care about whether the epistemic injustice debate can meet the challenge. So the way I'm going to proceed from here is first I'm going to sharpen the challenge of bits to see what it amounts to. Then I'm going to give you a very kind of basic baby version of what I take epistemic decolonization to be. And then I'll think of three notions from the epistemic injustice literature and show you that they're very useful for theorizing epistemic decolonization without falling prey to the white people stuff challenge. So let me start with a couple of disclaimers. This is world philosophies, but I come from a kind of analytic background where one feels the need for this kind of stuff. So the first disclaimer is that I'm not interested in a couple of things, in doing a couple of things. So first of all, I'm not interested in addressing potential concerns or sensitivities that some white people might have about the crude way I'm framing the challenge. I'm doing it in terms of white people. It's deliberately crude because people make the statement but if some people are offended, I think I'm not going to address that kind of offense. I think we've heard enough of white people's perspective and we're now addressing other perspectives. I'm also not interested in this question because to kind of exonerate myself because I work in this area, right? Or to justify my work in this area. And I'm also not really interested in it for exegetical reasons. So I'm not particularly concerned about whether I get right Gordon's objection precisely or whether I get it right at all. Rather, what I want to do is how the challenge can be formulated in its most philosophically fruitful way and also in a way that's the most potentially threatening in the fight against epistemic oppression. So that's the aim here. And with that in mind, I think you could give two readings to the challenge. So the first reading is a kind of statistical reading. Well, most people who work on epistemic injustice are white. And this might or might not be true, I'm not sure actually but either way on its own, it's not going to be a very philosophical interest, I presume. Of course it could be if it means that a certain privileged perspective dominates and marginalizes others, obviously that would be a problem. But then we're going to be into some form of a normative reading. So what would that amount to? And I think that there's at least four ways of spelling out the normative reading. And I'll start with a relatively most innocuous one and kind of work my way to the worst possible one as far as I'm concerned. So the first one, the first reading would be something like what Christy Dotson calls a rhetoric in the beginnings. So in this context, it would be something like, well, the black feminists have forever discussed these, these, the ideas of the epistemic injustice literature discusses and then came along a few white feminists, epistemologists. They rebranded the terms, claiming them as their own and off we go and we collaborate. I mean, obviously this is a caricature but you know what I mean. And obviously if this is the case, then it's a serious problem, if especially if these notions are claimed to be new or exclusive property to white feminists and or used to perpetuate white privilege. And in case this needs spelling out, this kind of thing would be an epistemic injustice if I'm allowed to even use this term in this context in itself because it would involve in Gale-Plohaus's terms, disrespecting whole groups of knowers and encouraging habits of attention that disregard certain knowers as knowers. And this, if anything, is the sort of definition of epistemic injustice. So that's one way of hearing the challenge. The second way is what Patricia Hill Collins calls institutional incorporation and the kind of resultant as she puts it deterioration of emancipatory possibilities. So here the idea would be that you're institutionalizing epistemic resources, the epistemic resources of the marginalized and then you start using them as an institution for the benefit of the dominant knower because institutions are dominated by the dominant knower. And Hill Collins gives the example of the notion of intersectionality. So she argues I think correctly that it's been completely decontextualized in academia and therefore it's been stripped of its emancipatory powers which it had from the political activist context in which it arose initially. And there's a clear connection between these two ways of hearing the challenge, right? So for example, it's been to a large extent Kimberly Cresshaw has been credited with the origin of the notion as Patricia Hill Collins notes. And so there's a sense in which instead of crediting political activism of the notion we now also assume that the origin of the notion comes from us academics, right? And in this to reiterate has the results and this is Gail Pullhouse speaking that you're basically you're taking resistant resources which are initially shaped to serve the interests of the oppressed. You're now taking them over for those who already have all the privilege. And in her words, she says they shape to serve the interests of those with social power and they can become distorted and made to serve dominant interests in these distortions. So that's the second way of hearing the challenge. Third way, again, Christy Dotson in a different paper where she thinks of ways in which the epistemic injustice literature has perpetuated, sorry, perpetuated certain wrongs in the process of attempting to address them because of its use of close what she calls close conceptual structures. And she thinks she's thinking here of Fricker's initial distinction between epistemic bad luck and epistemic injustice. And she argues that contrast in itself forecloses the possibility of what she terms contributory injustice. And I'll have a lot more to say about contributory injustice later. So the fourth way and final way that I'm going to discuss that we can hear the challenge is that somehow the very perspective of epistemic injustice, the perspective that people in the debate adopt is intrinsically marginalizing. And this was certainly something that Louis Gordon discussed in his objection to epistemic injustice that I said inspired this talk, partly because justice is already a kind of liberal concept. And so it comes with a framework that's precisely responsible to that extent for capitalism, colonialism, all the things that have caused epistemic injustice in the first place. So it seems weird to be expecting to be expecting this kind of framework to address the problem that it's caused to a large extent. And also, and this was my revelation in that I promised to share with you from Gail Paul, Paul Hauser's talk earlier this year, that somehow epistemic injustice, the whole debate leaves us stuck in ways of fixing the problem from the dominant perspective. So I mean, even if you think about the original stuff that Fricka discusses, it's how do I become more just? How do I become more virtuous? And I, of course, am the dominant person who's asking these questions. And then the worry is that if you do that, then you're re-marginalizing the very people that you're trying to unmarginalize through this whole work, body of work in epistemic injustice. So I think that this is the most damning way of hearing the white people stuff challenge. And I think this because the other ways or the other normative ways are kind of contingent and fixable problems. I mean, I'm not saying that they're easily fixable, but there's nothing intrinsically about the epistemic injustice this cost that causes these problems. And so the way to fix, for example, the rhetoric of beginnings would be to say, guys, like can we, sorry, guys is probably inappropriate in this context, but whatever, can we please stop for a second and credit the original authors of these concepts? And then likewise, institutional incorporation, can we please think about the way these concepts and these tools have been designed by marginalized communities? So instead of adopting them for our own purposes as dominant nor as an institutions, can we please revive them, return them to the original emancipatory and empowering state? So I mean, obviously this is easy, it's said, but at least it's in principle doable, right? Whereas if the fourth reading is correct, if the very perspective of systemic injustice is intrinsically marginalizing, then we should really just scrap the epistemic injustice talk altogether. And one way of making this vivid is with Audrey Lord's fifth year remark that you can't dismantle the master's house with the master's tools, right? So to put it in a bumper sticker version, this version of the challenge would be that epistemic injustice tools are the master's tools. You should just abandon them. These are the wrong tools for the fight. So this is the challenge that I want to focus on. And I think that it can be met. And remember, I'm going to show you this by showing you that some of, at least some of the epistemic injustice tools can help us with epistemic decolonization. And therefore they can't be intrinsically marginalizing. On the contrary, it's to turn out. So I will be really stick to basics with epistemic decolonization. This is obviously a new debate on its own, and it's a very rich debate, and it's increasingly growing. So I can't possibly do it justice. So I'll just stick to a couple of points, features of epistemic decolonization that will enable me to say what I want to say about how epistemic injustice tools can help with epistemic decolonization. So I take, and I argued about it for this and what others have as well, the project of epistemic decolonization to be essentially a project of epistemic recenting. And that means to use again, Sebelov-Lovogorcheny's notion. It's reclaiming and also being able to use the right to think and theorize from your own geographic and sociocultural location. And that in turn means that you get to choose for yourself the focus of your epistemic endeavors in accordance with this geographical, political, socio, whatever location, right? Which comes with distinctive epistemic schemas, which comes with distinctive social identities. And because of these, it comes with distinctive epistemic interests. So, and this kind of resonates, this conception of epistemic decolonization resonates with several kind of big cheese figures in the debate, right? So most importantly, it resonates with Quasi Moredu's idea distinction between a negative and a positive program to epistemic decolonization. So he takes the negative program to involve, and this is a quote, the elimination from our thoughts of modes of conceptualization that came to us to colonization and remaining our thinking owing to inertia rather than to our own reflective choices. And the positive program involves exploiting as much as his judicious, he says, the resources of our own indigenous conceptual schemas. Now, this is a very modest version of epistemic decolonization. Epistemic decolonization, conceptions come in degrees. So sometimes people want to throw away every colonial influence. Quasi Moredu is not like this. So you'll note that he says things like, as much as his judicious, as much as things that remain in our thinking to inertia rather than choices, and so on. But this is at the minimum what epistemic decolonization must involve. And everyone's agreed on this. So that's why I've chosen mild as it is. And it's echoed by other more contemporary authors. So here's a Shion Bembe more recently saying that epistemic decolonization is rejecting the assumption that the modern West is the central root of Africa's consciousness and cultural heritage. And so these are African ideas about what decolonization is. But they're very similar to Latin American ideas such as Mignolo's epistemic disobedience, for example. Which I mentioned earlier is the rejection of the tyranny of the zero point. Sorry, I mentioned zero point early in the epistemic disobedience. And that simply, excuse me, the universalist conception of knowledge that centers around the kind of Cartesian subject that the global North suggests is the objective neutral notion of knowledge, but actually just reflects the global North's own sociopolitical location. And so this kind of recentering is by all counts, an ongoing project. So here's Guggy Watyongo, for example, talks about decolonizing rather than decolonization. So it's a process. And in Latin America, Kikhano talks about decoloniality rather than decolonization. This is all meant to suggest that colonization is not over, right? And so decolonization is not, we're not done yet. And the consequences of this view of epistemic decolonization, firstly, that recentering is an ongoing dynamic and diachronic process, which kind of maps and moves along in changes and shifts with our intersection. The changes around intersecting social identities and the kinds of correlations that we, the changing correlations in which those and the identities in measures. And as I mentioned, there is no map between historical end of colonialism and decolonization. So we don't live in post-colonial society. So I live in a country with about 30 languages, 13 of which are official, and most of the instruction at university level at least happens in English. So colonization is, colonialism is alive and well. So this is, and hence the protests of five years ago. So this is the kind of conception of epistemic decolonization that I'll be working on. So here's what I take myself to have achieved so far, not to have a lot. So I've just tried to sharpen up the white people stuff challenge. And I've argued that there's one way of hearing that's particularly troubling. And that's the challenge that epistemic injustice talk is somehow intrinsically marginalizing. And so far, I have just given you my basic idea of epistemic decolonization as a project that re-centering towards geopolitical social here and now. So now, for the rest of the talk, I want to kind of showcase three epistemic injustice concepts and show you that they can be useful for epistemic decolonization by way of showing that they are theoretically useful and they don't fall prey to the white people stuff challenge. So, and to just spoil the show, I'm going to argue that epistemic oppression is, provides us with a good descriptive diagnostic tool. The notion of white ignorance provides us with a good tool for gauging the obstacles to epistemic decolonization. And finally, the notion of contributory injustice provides us with a good normative diagnostic tool. Now, the notion of epistemic oppression, and I don't want to commit any sins of the rhetoric of beginnings, but as far as I know, it was Fricker who discussed it first and then Dotson who gave it a little more richness and theoretical kind of oomph. And Dotson thinks of it as, quote, the persistent infringement on one's ability to use persuasively shared epistemic resources, sorry, to use persuasively shared epistemic resources for effective communication of one's experience. And by this she means to be able to change these resources as well as to be able to rely that the resources will be used fairly against one for one's benefit. And she gives the example of the way black feminist thought has been treated in academia. So in the way it has not been incorporated in the mainstream body of feminism and very often black feminist writers have not been able to rely on, first of all, they have not been able to change feminist resources and to contribute to them, but also they've not been able to rely that these resources are used fairly around them. So, and I should say here that Christy Dotson thought about initially, I don't think she does anymore, but she thought of epistemic oppression exclusively as a form of marginalization and exclusion, sorry, marginalization is fine, but exclusion. Whereas later writers, sorry, people later have argued that for example, Gail Polhouse have argued against this conception of epistemic oppression. And in particular, they've argued that certain forms of inclusion can be as epistemically oppressive as exclusion. And I think that Linda Alcoff, although I don't know if she's written on this explicitly, but certainly her suggestion of an extractivist epistemology would be another example of ways in which epistemic oppression, sorry, forms of inclusion can be epistemically oppressive as well as exclusion. But regardless of where your bread is buttered on this one, I wanted to just persuade you here that this notion of epistemic oppression, no matter how you conceive of it, it is a really useful descriptive diagnostic tool for epistemic decolonization. And in particular, I think that considerations of epistemic oppression can be useful by, because they place the experiences distinctive of the colonized at the center of the knowledge enterprise. So, and by so doing, they also make it clear why it is immoral and epistemic wrong to marginalize the resources of the colonized. So, I think that this idea that changing the resources, you're enabled when you're epistemically oppressed, you're enabled to change the dominant resources is an epistemic ill. And then your right to rely that these resources are used fairly against you is a moral right, I think. And so the infringement of that right, again, right is probably the wrong language in this context. But the infringement of that right is a moral wrong. So, and if that's right, so if epistemic oppression can tell us what's morally and epistemically wrong with marginalizing colonized resources, then I think that the notion of epistemic oppression provides a very plausible rationale for decolonization. And remember, I understand decolonization is re-centering. So here's my stickman version, stickperson version of decolonization as reclaiming the right inability to think and theorize from your own geographical and socio-cultural location. In epistemic, the notion of epistemic oppression can tell us why we should be the way we have this right. And in fact, I say that it's a useful descriptive diagnostic tool, but I would, if I were feeling a little bit braver, I would argue that it's also necessary to this kind. In particular, any rationale for epistemic decolonization that misses talk of, or that doesn't feature talk of epistemic oppression, I think would be a poor story to tell that one that does feature epistemic oppression. But I'm not going to be feeling brave and I'm not going to argue for this here. And what I had to show you remember is that what I promised was that not only that these epistemic injustice tools are sharp ones, but they also say so by which I meant that not only are they theoretically fruitful, but also they're not prone to the white person stuff challenge. And I think that that should be hopefully obvious that they're not. So that epistemic oppression isn't in any case because it's clearly talk of epistemic oppression as precisely concerned with the perspective of the marginalized, right? So it's defined as the persistent infringement on one's ability to use shared resources. And one here is for a change, not the dominant one. So that is essentially the notion of epistemic oppression centers around what the oppressed perspective. And likewise, I want to explain why considerations of epistemic oppression are useful for epistemic decolonization. Again, I thought of it in terms of placing the marginalized resources at the center of the knowledge enterprise. So epistemic oppression is concerned precisely with the perspective of the oppressed. Indeed, it actually allows us to spell out the white person stuff challenge in better terms. So we can spell it out like this. If it's of the challenges, then epistemic injustice discourse obscures marginalized the experiences by excluding them from the communal epistemic resource or bank or whatever you want to call it. And if that's right, then we kind of boost the notion of theoretical fruitfulness credentials. But also what we show is that if that's the case, then it's highly unlikely that thinking about epistemic oppression would be adopting an intrinsically marginalizing point of view. And so we show that this notion, at least the epistemic injustice literature is not prone to the white person stuff challenge. So that's my first showcase notion. The next one is a white ignorance by, this is Charles Mills, who passed away this year to the great loss of philosophy. And so I find his notion of white ignorance incredibly theoretically fruitful and so much so that I'll have to contain myself with all the directions in which I find it theoretically fruitful. So I'll just think about how it could be used in the context of epistemic decolonization. And so, I mean, if you've, hopefully you've all read this paper of Mills's but he there is very careful about distinguishing various features of white ignorance. But let me just focus, and it's a complex notion but let me just focus here on the coins that will allow me to make my point. So Mills defines white ignorance as a non-knowing that is not contingent, but in which race white racism and or white racial domination and their ramifications plays a crucial causal role. And what he means by this is, I mean, various, the various qualifications to what he means by causal mechanisms. Sorry, by causal role. Sorry, I just had like a weird pop-up thing saying that you can now see my application. I hope presumably you've all been seeing my screen. You did give me the thumbs up so. Yeah, we can see you, see the screen, yeah. Thank you. Okay, so the first thing is that he says is that the causal mechanisms of the racist causal mechanisms involved associate structure rather than biological because most people are now social constructivists about race. He also says that not any ignorance of white people matters, white ignorance is not, for example, it's not my ignorance of Twitter or whatever, so I don't know how Twitter stuff works and I'm white, but that's not it, right? But rather, it has to be racially motivated by some form of racism. And he says, I think perhaps rather generously to individuals that this kind of racialized causality should be understood broadly, so both at the individual level where individuals have responsibility for it, but sometimes also just structurally so that it may be that a particular white person who is ignorant, white ignorance is not complicit in this ignorance or this is not a blame-worthy kind of ignorance. I think he's wrong about this, but anyway, that's the big picture. And then white ignorance can range over a whole spectrum of beliefs, right? So from the very descriptive beliefs such as ignorance about routine and institutionalized police brutality towards black people to more ethically thick kind of beliefs such as the mysterious beliefs on people have that black and white people have equal socioeconomic opportunities to outright moral judgments such as color blindness is not racism but the way of overcoming it. Another belief that some white people mysteriously hold still to this day. So these are the kinds of beliefs kinds of beliefs that it can range over. And this is very, very interesting, I think, but I won't talk about it. He treats this as a form of group irrationality white ignorance. So he thinks that it's not obviously it's not driven by evidence, beliefs found in white ignorance are not responsive to the evidence they're driven by group interest. And then here's the really scary thing that white ignorance affects all areas of a white person's cognition. So, and here he's terms for the four areas. Conception, he says, perception, memory and testimony. And just to give you a little idea of how it affects conception what he calls conception. So historically, it plays itself out in categories such as the savage, the idea that white people discovered empty lands, the notion of civilizing all of these concepts and ways in which white ignorance manifests itself in vicious ways. And nowadays, of course, we have our equivalents of these things such as color blindness. Mill says it's subtle, I'm not sure how much subtler it is, but I guess there's a point to that. And color blindness is a wonderfully important tool for maintaining white hedgingly. So it amounts to conceptual, the conceptual erasure of white privilege. And of course, the advantage of white people that the white people enjoy through this emphasis on individual achievement and the self-made man. And this kind of erasure is erasing the very thing that's responsible for white flourishing, right? So black bodies and their suffering through slavery, through colonialism, through currents, this continued current disadvantage, both in Africa and in the former colonies and so on, sorry, in the former colonizers, the countries. And the thing about white privilege is that it keeps the white person free of guilt, innocent, the good father, the good husband, all of these lovely things, and free of debt. So this is just one way in which white ignorance plays itself in white people's commission. Now, I think that white ignorance is a really theoretically very fruitful tool for understanding resistance to epistemic decolonization. So I have no idea why to this day, as I said, epistemic decolonization is not over, it's not, it's very much still, sorry, epistemic colonization is still very much with us, right? So we still teach in colonial languages, we still are curricula full of the global Norths, basically our curricula identical pretty much to the global North. And one would think, well, why after all of these years of freedom, why would we still have this kind of problem? Why are we still epistemically colonized? And I think white ignorance might be a very good explanation for this to a great extent. Although Elvis and I were earlier talking about the situation in certain countries where the white person is no longer there, but the colonial kind of frames continue to self perpetuate and maybe for that kind of thing, then that wouldn't be such a helpful tool. But certainly for a country like mine, I think it would be very helpful to explain why we still epistemically colonized. And moreover, theoretical fruitfulness of this concept also extends to helping explain the white person stuff challenge to begin with, right? So you can, it helps us situate it in a larger kind of framework, conceptual framework of self-perpetuation, illegitimate epistemic authority. And that is Gale Paul Houser's notion of both human and political ignorance. And so that's the kind of deliberate ignorance and it's not just now about race, but deliberate ignorance of resistant epistemic resources that helped maintain one self-harrogated epistemic authority. So that's the way in which I think that epistemic decolonization, sorry, that white ignorance is a useful tool. And again, I'm not gonna be brave enough to argue that it's a necessary one, but I thought I'd just stick it in there in case someone is. And remember, I'm always trying to show that it's fruitful, but also that it's not liable to the white person stuff challenge. And again, I don't think that it is, right? So it's concerned precisely with the perspective of the marginalized and coming from it. Although, I mean, there is an odd ring to this because it is about the white person, right? The negative, right? But I think that it's not a surprise that the concept didn't come from a white person. So I think that it really is concerned with the perspective of the marginalized and the way that that perspective is erased in through white ignorance. And I think it gives more theoretical oomph to the white person stuff challenge as I already mentioned. It really gives a kind of psychological possibility why it explains why the white person stuff is a real possibility and a real danger. And what we need to do, if we're going to keep our epistemic injustice, this goes free or invulnerable to this challenge, what we need to do. And that is to overcome white ignorance. So it's just not, we're not in the game yet if we don't do that. So given this, it's very unlikely that it will be marginalizing, intrinsity marginalizing. And so it should not be prone to the white person stuff challenge. So this was the second concept that I thought was useful. And finally, the third epistemic injustice concept that I think is useful is that of contributory injustice. Then contributory injustice, so what you get is what you get when you put together epistemic oppression and willful hermeneutical ignorance. This is the situation in which the marginalized epistemic resources not only are being sidelined, but when they try and join the main knowledge economy, they don't get the necessary uptake partly because of willful hermeneutical ignorance. And so they never come into the knowledge economy. And so then it's a vicious circle of reinforcing the obscurity of these resources because now no one is allowing them in. So we don't understand what you mean when you use the notion of white ignorance. And that further marginalizes you and excludes you from the process of knowledge production. And moreover, it makes you unable to effectively combat the epistemic oppression that live here and my willful hermeneutical ignorance, my being the dominant. And again, I think that this is a very fruitful notion for epistemic decolonization. In particular, it's helpful for spelling out, I think the core epistemic injustice of epistemic injustice, right? Not more injustice obviously, of epistemic decolonization. So it's the exclusion of marginalized resources, the relegation to witchcraft and superstition and so on. The exclusion from the main economy that is the contributory injustice, the core injustice of epistemic decolonization. And I think that again, contributory injustice, thinking about contributory, in terms of contributory injustice, is not prone to the white person stuff challenge, not to spell out the obvious. So to spell out the obvious, again, the perspective is entirely that of marginalized. And again, it's so much so that it can help us spell out the white person stuff with challenge itself. So it pins down why it would be epistemically wrong if the epistemic injustice literature were intrinsically marginalized. So the wrong would be that we can't combat epistemic oppression and were for hermeneutical ignorance. And the reason why it's a distinctively epistemic wrong is because we're doing so by being excluded from the main epistemic enterprise. And that's the fact that it helps spell out the white person stuff challenge, of course, boosts again its theoretical credentials. But also, if it's adopting the perspective of the marginalized, again, I don't think it can be intrinsically marginalized. And so it can be prone to the white person stuff challenge. This is not really a conclusion. It's more of a summary. So what I've tried to argue here is that at least some epistemic injustice tools are theoretically useful or even necessary. Any story about epistemic decolonization and a time gesture that the white person stuff challenge itself would be poorer without using these tools and those tools are theoretically useful without at least these three tools without falling prey to the white person stuff challenge. And I did this by first finding the harshest possible challenge in the idea that the epistemic injustice literature somehow is intrinsically marginalizing the perspective it does is marginalizing. And then I thought of epistemic decolonization in terms of an ongoing project of recentering the knowledge enterprise to ones here and now. And then I discussed epistemic oppression, white ignorance and contributory injustice. And hopefully you persuaded that at least those three tools are useful, sorry, are sharp and safe. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Veli. Yeah, I see you're very insightful and very rich. The way you carefully structured your presentation argued for the fact that there are tools within epistemic injustice that are definitely relevant and can be defended against the white people stuff arguments, essentially. So I'll now leave the floor open for questions. So if you have questions, please raise your hand, your digital hand, or you can put the question on the chat as well. Happy to take them. So I would like to start with the subject head for the World Philosophist Programme, Dr. Sean Hawthorne. Thank you, Veli, I just so enjoyed your discussion in this paper and having done a lot of work on Dotson, I found, you know, Lewis Gordon's phrase, you know, white people stuff, really quite extraordinary. And it makes me wonder whether he's not doing black women's stuff. That said, as much as I like Gordon's work and I really do, the one thing that I was kind of questioning and wondering throughout your paper, and it's beautiful and elegant and wonderfully laid out argument. And also, please kind of have a tutorial from you and have to kind of do the things you were doing with your slides, was if epistemic injustice is not merely white person stuff and the aim is to try and place at the centre of knowledge, those epistemologies and those ways of understanding and knowing the world from those who have traditionally or historically and continually are marginalised or oppressed from having a full share in epistemic contestation and articulation and so on. Who does this placing at the centre of knowledge? Don't we also, whilst confronting white ignorance, also need to confront that white saviour complex? That must also be part of the analysis. Ignorance is not the only problem here. It's also, I think this comes through also in Doxton's argument and also Hill Collins' argument about this kind of incorporation of criticisms that then become part of how whiteness kind of saves itself and reasserts its kind of beneficence and its goodness and so on and so forth. I think that's what I would love to hear you talk a bit more about is when we recognise that epistemic injustice is a kind of set of theoretical tools has this function. Who does this work? And how do we get rid of the white saviour who's, of course, then in the place of being able to allow this to happen? Thanks so much for this great question and for your kind words. I think it's a very, very difficult issue and one that my students and I are forever fighting and debating about and it's actually wonderful. I think the first thing is that we certainly need to listen. So the white person's function only comes in so far as if we don't listen, then we're all staffed, right? That's certainly not to say that we're going to have like some kind of saviour function and all of this. On the other hand, it is to say that there's white people still have a lot of power and if they don't do something about this, then nothing will get done about this simply because and my students are so frustrated like after all these years, we're still going around the same circles, right? So I mean, my black students, most of my students are black and so if you look at faculties and so on, the professors are mostly white, right? So there's no, it doesn't need any magic or any genius to work out that unless these professors do something, we're going to be like in the backwaters of colonization forever and ever. So it's a very delicate game to play, right? In terms of how much the white person has to do and so as far as I'm concerned, I take the responsibility to be guided by my students and my black colleagues into what I need to be doing because the other dangerous side of it is epistemic exploitation, right? So, and that's one concept that I also wanted to discuss. In fact, that's the one that this mysterious person mentioned to Lewis Gordon in the discussion. The other thing is saying, okay, like I don't understand this stuff, it's your experience, just tell me how to do it, please. And that's no better than the white person savior complex. So very delicate, I don't have the answer but I can tell you what I feel responsible for and I always ask my black colleagues and my black students to help in a way hopefully that's not, you know, help guide me in a way that's not epistemically exploitative. Yeah, I think, you know, there is that hard line before between foregrounding was not exploiting and not requiring our black colleagues and our colleagues of color to do the work for us whilst nonetheless being secure in our positions. And, you know, proceeding as though we're the good white people. So, yeah, I appreciate the dilemma very much. I think it's really good for us to have these conversations. So thank you. Thank you, Sean. Thank you very for your answer. Let's have Andrew. Hi, thanks, Elvis. And thank you very so much for your talk. This might follow on from Dr. Hawthorne's question. I was just reflecting as you were talking, I really, really was interested in the distinction between decolonizing versus decolonization. And I was struck by kind of the fact that the nature of the mind that I understand that knowledge is always a process. But I guess my question is about this contrast because your talks about epistemic injustice. And I was reflecting on how, you know, knowledge always has to be a process because the nature is how our minds work. And yet, you know, there's a certain luxury of reflection and of knowledge whenever you're in the space of theorizing. And you've used the phrase, you know, some of these tools are theoretically useful even necessary. And yet this is a very luxurious position. And yet some of the peoples and situations need justice yesterday. And so I think the reason I'm asking this question is it's not so much a criticism. It's more of a live question for myself about the tension between on the one hand, the fact that decolonizing is a process and the nature of knowledge is a process. And that we're talking in the realm of theory. We're on the other hand, we are dealing with concrete real-world situations that our students and colleagues are in. And I'm not entirely sure about where one stops and the other begins. So it's a messy question, but I just didn't know if you had the comments on this juxtaposition. Thanks again. Thanks, Andrew. Yeah, I guess my gut response is that it's a strange juxtaposition. So to my mind, decolonizing is precisely a process in which, so maybe I just misunderstood this business of the luxury reflection or the luxury reflection and so on. But to me, the knowledge process and the decolonizing process must be pulled together because decolonization is, sorry, epistemic decolonization is precisely about the way our knowledge develops at the moment, the practical situations which marginalize people face, the very ones that you're saying. So you're saying on the one hand, there's decolonization, on the other hand, there are these very practical situations and I don't know that they precisely, these kinds of practical situations are precisely the kind of dynamic diachronic thing, sorry, I was looking for the word diachronic, that forms are epistemic identities and our largest social identities. And so epistemic decolonization needs to keep a step with this. So maybe I just misunderstood the contrast. I probably did a terrible job of explaining myself. So let me just try briefly again and then we can drop it if I'm just modeling this. But I think I was reflecting on the fact that you've talked about useful and necessary theoretical tools, but there's a difference between the space of knowledge and theory and the realm of action. And I'm not saying the two don't go together, but I was reflecting on the difference between knowledge and action, basically. And I was kind of asking about where you see that line to be drawn and where we might have to go. We have useful tools theoretically, but that doesn't necessarily get us justice that these people may have needed yesterday. It's necessarily, yeah. So I think that's, I don't know if that's any clearer at all. Yeah, thank you. No, no, I don't think it was you being unclear. I think that I wasn't picking it up. So maybe because our conception, our kind of analytic Anglo-American conception of knowledge is already this kind of disembodied theoretical, purely theoretical thing. And maybe that's why the contrast looks starker. But I also hear you from the point of being like, sitting here talking about pretty tools is not going to help anyone in real life. But on the other hand, without talking about these pretty tools, we're not going to make any progress either. This is where I chickened out of making the stronger claim that these are necessary tools. But I think something like, so I was reading this paper by Emily Davis, a week or two ago and she was saying, so there's another kind of objection to the epistemic injustice literature, which is like, look, you've already granted that these are structural problems. You've already granted that these are problems to do with action as you put it. And to do with practical situations and practical discrepancy, not practical, but economic discrepancies and all sorts of other marginalizations, right? Then why don't we just fix those? You know, like these inequalities, why don't we fix those and forget about this fluffy stuff talking about epistemic injustice. Sorry, her response is to say, unless you're going to foreground the perspective of the marginalized and you're going to talk about epistemic injustice, then you'll never be able to address these structural, material, economic, whatever problems. And it's kind of like as a, but that's all to say that it's necessary to think about these things. It's not to say that it's sufficient. And as you say, a lot of the problems need to have been fixed, not yesterday, yes, the year, right? Yes, the same, five centuries ago. But yeah, so that's my- Thank you for that, yeah. That really clarifies, thank you. Yeah, and we'll have Benedita. Thank you for your patience, Benedita. I'm sorry. Good afternoon, everyone. And thank you for the talk, professor. So my question was actually partially answered already in this conversation between you and Andrew, but it was, I was interested towards the end of the presentation when you were asking why are we still, why is there still, why are we still colonized epistemologically, right? You had those slides with kind of questions. And one of the answers that was coming up is because of white ignorance. And kind of as a gut feeling, listening to those questions, my reaction would have been because of white hegemony, not ignorance. So I was kind of wondering, like in a way this I think relates a bit to this debate you were having with Andrew about this, you know, the two realms, but of course the epistemic colonialism follows the structure of an economy, a world, a society that is still highly colonized, racialized. So in a way, I wonder why the answer fell on ignorance more than on the structures of power and how they're still highly racialized. Yeah, I think you were right that I've only partially answered that question, right? So, and I think that I mean, to a great extent because we're talking about epistemic legalization, whatever hegemony we're talking about is epistemic hegemony, right? And I think that that white ignorance is a brilliant mechanism for perpetuating that hegemony, that epistemic hegemony, right? And I think that, I mean, so maybe, I mean, there comes a point with many people when I discuss issues with many people of various persuasions, there comes a point at which we kind of start thumping the table about the importance of epistemic considerations in their priority, right? And maybe that's what's, so I don't have a very satisfying response to that kind of question, right? My intuition is that there is a distinctive problem here, there is a distinctive epistemic dimension to colonization and therefore a distinctively epistemic liberation struggle that we need to be having, partly for the reasons, the Emily and Davis reasons that I spelled out, because if you don't see the problem clearly, you're not going to fix it clearly. Clearly you're not going to fix it, right? So to me, white ignorance is, I mean, I was going to say just a mechanism for the perpetuation of epistemic hegemony, but I don't think so because I think that it's to a greater extent through the story we tell ourselves, we allow these material structures to persist, right? Who got the scholarship again? Oh, look, it's the white guy, right? How did we do this? Well, we tell the story about how he was the only deserving candidate, right? He was the best. This is a material change, right? Because all his black colleagues now didn't get the scholarship. So these things do get, do you know what I mean? Like it's not a very clean streamlined answer, but. Sorry, just to, I liked very much how you answered to Andrew, which is about how those, I mean, perspectives have to be taken into consideration for material decolon. I mean, I think I really liked this idea about, I mean, how the kind of structure and superstructure relate in this conversation of, so you can't even challenge the structure without decolonial perspectives. I mean, I think that's exactly very good. Yeah, thank you very much. And here, and I think we can't really explain current lived experiences in terms of practice, what is really happening in our experiences as completely separate from the theories and concepts that were created 300 years ago. They were sort of theoretical at that point. Theories about race. And as Charles Mills talked about in terms of how white ignorance affects cognition in terms of conceptions, concepts that were formulated and how they continue to affect and influence the people's life and continue to sustain marginalization. And I think it's also part of the Western problem to want to maintain these hegemonies, sorry, these binaries between theory and practice, which obviously is not always the case. And that brings me to one quick question. If white ignorance does affect cognition, in particular conception, the concepts that were created, civilized and barbaric, primitive and scientific and stuff like that, discovering new words when those places were already there, having their cultures and so on. Why is it that we continue to use some of those concepts? Isn't it part of doing away with this epistemic oppression by rejecting those concepts, particularly if they continue to influence our experiences? And I'm particularly interested in these two concepts, which is really part of my current research now, whiteness and blackness. Whiteness and blackness obviously are constructions to describe race. I don't think I've seen a white person or a black person anywhere really, literally, that's its way. Why do we continue to use them even when we are trying to use them to overcome epistemic oppression? Why do those concepts continue to feature? Okay, just a quick question he says. Right, well, so I mean, obviously I could run through the general arguments in the reductionist, not reductionist today, but sorry, not reductionist. What are people who wanted to do away with race? Eliminativists. I think that, I mean, I'll just doubt out the standard one, which is also my feeling on the subject because otherwise we can't name these injustices because doing away with these concepts would be like me saying, I can't see color. And it would be extremely convenient for me to not be able to see color because then I can be feeling very good about myself and how I'm a self-made woman. So I think that that's why. So presumably one, so it's a very standard answer. I'm okay, I don't have anything more to say. That's exactly what I expected, but my thought is why don't we re-conceptualize? Why don't we form less violent concepts as it were? Why don't we use new concept? I'm not saying the concept should be completely done but why don't we re-represent and re-conceptualize and reconstruct in ways that are more inclusive and diverse as it were here? Because I don't think we're there yet. I think we need to be in a far better society before we can afford to do this. We need the ugliness of whiteness to attach and the justified violence to attach to the black concept, right? I've had enough. I mean, I've had enough. No one listens, right? And the only way is violence, right? And that goes with a long history of patience and waiting and being. Sorry, I'm trying to find a polite way of putting it. Oppressed, sorry. And- We don't mind swearing in this form. That will be very unworldly philosophy stuff. But yeah, so yeah, I think that hopefully one day we can re-conceptualize these concepts when these races have different histories and different standings in relation to each other. Fair enough. Peter, if only your hand was up. I don't know if you still want to go ahead with your question before Sean? Yeah. Thank you very much, Jeremy. Thank you, Professor Belling. The talk was quite engaging and very interesting. I just, I just wanted to know because of what from your thought and perhaps from other similar presentations in our tenure, the discussion on epistemic injustice because epistemic decolonization are always around the binaries of whiteness and blackness in the whole talk of race. So I was just wondering whether we can begin to talk about epistemic injustice and even reverse to epistemic decolonization with the right decolonization without necessarily referring to this binary of whiteness and blackness. I'm asking this question because in some of the examples you pointed to, I see similar scenarios play out in my own very lived experience without necessarily having the sort of binaries we talk about whiteness and blackness being more in that kind of place. So I'm still able to see how epistemic injustice and the whole talk of decolonization, more of that speak to that experience because like you said in during the talk, some of these structures are still in place. So the question is, do I with epistemic injustice and epistemic decolonization have conceptual relevance without reference to the whole race binary of whiteness and blackness or in the case of speaking for like in my own context where we don't have that in the whiteness and blackness, we need a whole new set of concepts to begin to understand what goes on in that kind of space. Thanks, Peter, and good to see you again. I'm not, I mean, so when you say that these concepts speak to your experiences, obviously I can't presume to know what the experiences are. Do you mind if I could just speak a little bit about my experience? Sure, I mean, I could quickly objectify you, but it would probably better for you to do it, yeah. Okay, so I'm talking about, maybe I think Dr. Evans would know this a little bit because we talked about, you know, ethnicism as the smaller cycles of racism. So the kind of belief I have is, in fact, I haven't shared it with people that, as long as you, but if further you go away from what you may call your tribal home, as it were, the more or the extent to which you feel this kind of marginalization. So if right now I'm not in, what you call my tribal home, I'm in a different location. I come from what usually referred to as the minority groups in Nigeria, minority tribe. I'm not Yoruba, I'm not Igbo, I'm not also. So when people talk about the tribes in Nigeria, you say Igbo, Hausa, and Yoruba. So I'm not from that, from any of these. But where I work, I still experience, you know, what you could describe as some form of injustice, so some form of marginalization. And I don't see color, I don't see, I don't see the binaries of whiteness and blackness, but yet these concepts you use speak to that. So that's what the kind of thing I'm talking about. So I'm away from my tribal home, I experience this. I think we may have lost Peter. Sorry, Peter, will you? I think we lost him, but perhaps it's enough for you to go on. Yeah, but you know, I don't want to be answering just you guys, you know. He has the question. It's like, can he hear us? I mean, it's not so of his problems, but you know. Yeah, so perhaps Sean can ask Hausa as well, and then you might still. I mean, in many ways, it's somewhat related. I don't think it's necessary on the way to an answer to what I think Peter has actually very poignantly laid out. Now it's the kind of degrees of separation or the kind of entanglement in various forms of structures of power that produce marginalization that can't be captured within black and white. But I've been doing a lot of kind of thinking and reading around the work that's come out of Afro-Pessimism recently. And there's a different binary work there that they're identifying, which is that between the human, which is the producer of knowledge and all the other things that humans produce, and then the slave or the kind of non-human. And people like Frank B. Wilderson are effectively arguing that what we need is not necessarily an analysis of epistemic injustice. We need to recognize that that system is always already epistemically unjust. What we need is to quote an epistemological catastrophe. And that is the only thing that is really going to change these dynamics, these kind of binarizations, these conceptualities, this cognition, this white ignorance, and so on and so forth. And I'm kind of wondering what you would think about that. I mean, of course, they're pessimistic because they are realized as well. They recognize that there's really nothing that is going to persuade structures of whiteness to allow such an epistemological catastrophe to happen. But that in itself, I think, is quite sobering. When it comes to the confrontation with epistemic injustice, because presumably, well, I would think that the epistemic injustice, in fact, is so serious that it calls for an epistemological catastrophe. Yeah, so I'm not familiar with the notion of epistemological catastrophe. So what exactly needs to happen? That it would be that the kind of epistemological systems that are so entrenched within particular white ways of thinking and being and moving in the world would have to be so entirely dismantled that all of the conceptual apparatus that goes along with that, the entire libraries that kind of support it, mandate it, perpetuate it, disseminate it, would have to effectively be destroyed in order for, in fact, epistemic justice to be delivered. And for that de-centering and re-centering and decolonization and for that fundamental binary of the human and the slave, the human and the inhuman, to no longer be the dominating paradigm in which underpins the division between the knower and the known. That would all have to be completely destroyed for there to be justice. So I guess as somewhat, if we have the intellectual integrity, then that would probably be the way to go. I don't know if I have the intellectual integrity to, so I would, but this would come out as terrible to say like, like a thousand flowers bloom, right? Because that's the whole point, that some weeds and we've got to get rid of them before anything blooms. So I assume that's the point of epistemic catastrophes. So, I kind of think like, actually they're saying that it's all weeds and until, yeah, it's the kind of burn the whole thing down argument, such that a thousand flowers can bloom, but they won't be the tulips of the Netherlands and they won't be the English ones, and so on and so forth, right? The, yeah. Okay, so then the, in that spirit, I should say that I'm equally fond of proteas as I have tulips, so like I, but that's a personal thing. And I think that if we were to be, to mean what we say, then that's probably the way to go. Although then the wonder is from where I mean, you don't just get flowers to grow from a fellow field, right? You need some sensing. Someone to grow them. Some sense of. A burnt and charcoaled field can actually be very good for a plant. Anyway, I want to actually take us back to Peter because I think what he had to say was more important. No, no, but I, no, I mean, then gardening, no. But, no, so I want to go back there as well, but yeah, so the answer to your question I think is that, and this speaks to something I mentioned about the kind of spectrum of your conception of epistemic decolonization, I think as well, right? So the one that I was playing with here was a very moderate one, but, you know, if you go the other way, it's go. And I think that that is the honest way to go, actually. But, yeah, Peter, are you, are you able to hear us? Yeah, yeah, I can hear you. So I think that's what I was just trying to, the context from which I was speaking from. No, thanks, thanks for that clarification. So I mean, this is why I paused my sentence because only five minutes earlier, we talked with Elvis precisely about the Nigerian situation and it's more complicated than, because what you seem to be describing is a kind of, I guess one, I mean, a lot of xenophobia, victims of xenophobia would have this kind of thing as well and it's part of the, except that it's your country, right? So, I mean, I don't know whether it makes it better or worse or, right? And, but that's why I paused when I was thinking of our conversation earlier with Elvis because in Nigerian, and some of my students are Nigerian and they've told me about this, that it's not just what you described, there's another thing and there's like deep rooted colonial roots of, I think Professor Hawthorne has gotten me thinking about plants now. So deep seated colonial influences that play out themselves in weird ways, like, even though there are no white people in Nigeria anymore, Nigerian little kids are not allowed to speak any of the native languages in schools and so on. So, I can't really presume to understand the kinds of things that you're experiencing from that angle as well as the one that you mentioned because those two must like really come together and become a Mozilla of a problem, not just in America. And I don't think that we need the language of black and white to describe those problems, although a lot of people argue that these sorts of tribalisms are to a great extent the colonial legacy because, I mean, but that of course then puts the white person back center stage, which is what we're trying to move away from. So we don't need to talk about these things in terms of black and white, but we do need to talk about them something that Professor Hawthorne mentioned as well as in terms of power relations. And I think that, so entrenched power relations of the kind that you're describing sound very similar and these similar power relations were described by feminists and so on. So not similar, but you know what I mean. So epistemic injustice concerns can run across various social identities and they get very complex when these social identities intermix in particularly bad ways like when you, for example, a black woman, right? Then you really become like, then it's like not Godzilla, but like whatever is the next problem of complication and disempowerment. But I do think so while we don't have to talk about black and white for the purposes of epistemic injustice, we obviously have to talk about black and white for the purposes of epistemic equalization. We do have to talk about social identities and power relations. Does that help at all? Yeah, it does very much. Thank you Professor Hawthorne. Yeah, so thank you Peter. And thank you so much for all your comments. I think, I mean, obviously these ongoing discussions can take all sorts of dimensions, but your lecture does shed a lot of lights on how to think about these things because there are a lot of things that are dear to my heart that you spoke about. And your answers as well would help me to kind of direct my thoughts properly as well. So thank you for a very fantastic lecture and thank you all for your comments and your questions. And we look forward to the February edition of the lecture series. Have a beautiful holiday ahead and enjoy the rest and wherever you are. Stay safe. So I'll stop recording now. Let me just thank you Elvis though for organizing such a fantastic series. There hasn't been a single lecture this year that hasn't just been incredibly gnarcing and provoking. And I think we ended on an extremely excellent note. So thank you for the care and the intelligence with which you've crafted this series. And I'm really excited to see what happens next year. But particularly thank you Dr. Mithila for a really, really wonderful way to end this year. Thank you. If you wanted to know those behind this scene, she's the one just speaking. Sean and Andrew. I'm the one they send out, you know, to do the running around, but she's behind the scene. Elvis, thank you all just to organize this whole.