The Department of Philosophy is excited to welcome Kristie Dotson (Michigan State University) as she gives a special talk on race relations in the United States.
Accumulating Epistemic Power: The Case of Joe Scarborough on #BlackLivesMatter.
Abstract: In a 2014 Salon piece, “White America’s Scary Delusion: Why Its Sense of Black Humanity is So Skewed,” Brittney Cooper labels the stupefaction many people in the US have in the face of today’s Black rage and civil unrest an “epistemology problem.” It is a problem, she explains, of people utilizing inadequate frameworks for understanding “reasonable” responses to relentless state sanctioned violence against Black people. In this paper, I lend support to Cooper’s claim by outlining the accumulation of epistemic power that appears to result in a kind of oblivion concerning realities for Black people and police conduct, in a US context. Ultimately, I claim that some accumulations of epistemic power can lead to resilient oblivion - that is, impaired schedules of salience.
University of NottinghamUniversity Park Nottingham, NG7 2RD
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