Skip to main content
Loading Explore guides…
Standpoint Epistemology · Acedra
Home
Explore
Philosophy
Standpoint Epistemology
Sign in to save
Chat
If YouTube asks you to sign in, open the video on YouTube.
Watch on YouTube
Reload player
Transcript
141 segments
Copy
Hide video
0:15
David: Hello and welcome to Overthink. Ellie: The podcast where two friends and longtime professors... We're longtime friends and professors. Have we been professors for a long time? I seven years plus? David: Not for as long as we've been friends. So the order goes: longtime friends and now professors. Ellie: Talk about philosophy in everyday life. I'm Dr. Ellie Anderson. David: And I'm Dr. David Peña-Guzman. Ellie: And David, you and I were just talking about starting the recording
0:44
about how we are so overheated right now because it's the middle of summer. I'm recording in my closet. I don't have AC. You are recording under a comforter because you're trying to block out sound. So listeners, hopefully we'll be, we will be just as coherent in this episode as an others, but if our standpoints seem to you a little bit fuzzy, the heat may be why. David: Literal hot takes from Ellie and David.
1:09
Ellie: Ooh, that's a good one. Okay, David, are you ready for the story that I wanna start this episode with? David: I do wanna hear what you have to say, Ellie, all the time. You know this. Ellie: Oh, thank you. That's very kind. Actually it's less a story and more me reporting on a TV show that I watch. So my friend Jay recently recommended to me this 2006 reality TV show called Black/White. And when I say recommend, that's an overstatement.
1:35
He basically was like, look at this hilarious video of a white girl who's doing slam poetry. The less hilarious aspect of the video is that she, this white girl who's doing slam poetry very badly. I might say. That's not to say that all white girls are bad at slam poetry, but this one was like stereotypically what you would expect of a white girl doing slam poetry. The less hilarious part is that she's in blackface. And the reason for that is that she is a character in a 2006 reality TV show,
2:03
Black/White, in which a black family dresses in white face and a white family dresses in black face and they live in each other's shoes for a period of time. Both families live in the same house. And the idea was that they wanted to see what it was like to be the other race, classic example of a show with like maybe seemingly good intentions, to provide an interracial dialogue to enrich the idea that, you don't know what somebody's experience is like unless you've walked a mile in their shoes.
2:38
But as you can imagine, execution, not exactly the best! David: Well, Not just execution. I could just imagine the people pitching, the conception.
2:49
I would describe it as, good white people with good intentions. And I mean that kind of as an insult. Ellie: I know, totally. David: In the sense of people with access in a position of power who have the resources at their disposal to create a show thinking: do you know what I think would be amazing for solving the racism problem? If we just switched faces and white people were black and black people were white. Ellie: Exactly, and there is so much that I could say about this show, all the
3:18
episodes of which I watched on YouTube. Jay was so surprised. He was like, why did you watch it all? David: What the... What? That tells you how bad it is. Ellie: Well no. I think it was like, it was a network TV show that is now, like you can find, it's probably like a bootleg copy of it on YouTube. But in any case, it's partly interesting to me because I think it really runs through a lot of the stereotypes about like white people's ignorance of racism that you still see today.
3:46
For that reason, I think it could be pretty hard to watch, in addition to the fact that, it's like, David: Blackface. Ellie: Yeah. It literally blackface. But I, I think the reason that, beyond that sort of bizarre sociocultural study of this moment from 2006, that's like weirdly still relevant today, because we're having in some cases and circles the same debates, was a particular scene that I wanna share with you. In this scene, the black family and the white family are told that they
4:14
need to take classes in being white and being black respectively before they don their guises and go out into the real world as the other race. And the white people are super excited to take this class. They're like, oh, we really need to learn more about black culture. Like we wanna know what it's like to be black before we act black. And the black family's response, and the black family's just like amazing throughout the entire show as well.
4:39
Like their sense of humor and aplomb during the most bizarre of conditions is remarkable. But they're just like, dude, we don't, why do we have to take these classes? We already know how to act white. And the reason they already know how to act white is because they live in America in 2006, and so much of their everyday life involves having to act in a way that navigates the dominant norms of our culture, which are white norms, right?
5:04
You hear, for instance, the idea of the white voice on the phone, right? Adopting white voice or taking on a different persona when you're in a white dominated space. You hear this on college campuses as well, in terms of PWIs or predominantly white institutions. Anyway, that was like a lot of word vomit about this TV show that David, your thoughts and then I'll tell you why it's linked to the topic for today, listeners.
5:25
David: Okay, so I do get the sense that a show like this highlights some very clear asymmetries in people's relationship to racial knowledge, because of course, people of color are already familiar with what is sometimes called code switching. And that can include ways of speaking, that can include ways of perceiving, that can include even ways of walking and behaving in spaces that are themselves coded as white. So I remember when I first moved to the United States, I learned some
5:55
ways of coding my own behavior, so as to pass or so as to not register as especially colored in the eyes of a predominantly white public or audience. Ellie: David, can you share with us what some of those were? David: Yeah, so for example, it can include things like the sorts of things that you reveal about yourself. It can include making references to popular shows that you know are watched by white audiences. Ellie: Oh, like your obsession with Succession, it's all a lie.
6:30
David: No, Succession does transcend all racial boundaries. Ellie: You're like, I'm talking about Succession rather than Walter Mercado, just to fit in with a white audience. David: Yeah, the references that you make, the vocabulary that you use, the sorts of things that you even show interest in the company of different groups is something that you become aware of when you're a person of color, especially if you're doing so in an effort to fit in or in an effort to
6:58
blend into a larger social dynamic. And in my case, I went to a high school that was about 90 to 95% white, primarily Mormon. And so this was a pressure that I felt at all times, even if, I'm sure my high school classmates were not aware of that pressure, that they were exerting on me. Not by any intentional act, but simply by the law of large numbers. Ellie: Totally. And do you have a sense, David, of how, especially as an immigrant who moved to
7:28
the US when you were, we might say of the age of reason, as a tween, how you discovered what those norms of white culture were, such that you adopted them. David: Well, in my case, the thing that became the most pressing was language. And so from a very early age, and here I mean my age in the United States, I was told that I didn't speak like a Mexican because I didn't have the stereotypically Mexican accent when I speak English.
7:58
And that's because I tried very hard when I was 15, 16, and 17 to try to mimic the intonation, to try to develop the vocabulary that I knew would allow me to blend into white culture. And even now when people tell me that they know that I have an accent. They always make a point of pointing out that they don't know where that accent comes from. And when I tell them, especially if they haven't seen me, if they haven't seen what I look like, that I am Mexican, it the response that I often get is,
8:28
oh, you don't sound Mexican to me. And in this case, there's a very clear difference in my family between the way in which I speak English and the way in which, for example, my stepfather speaks English because he does have what for a white public is a recognizably Mexican-American accent in a way that I don't. And first and foremost, for me, it was about concealing an accent that would give me away. And it's something that over time became my way of speaking.
8:58
So it's very difficult for me to break out of that now. But I do know that it comes from this effort to assimilate at the level of speech. Ellie: So it seems fair to say then that David, in assimilating to that kind of speech, you developed knowledge of that kind of speech as well as already having the knowledge of what your, we might say, more naturally Mexican accented speech would sound like. And I wonder whether we might think about that as well in terms of some
9:24
of the values that you mentioned. Because you said that there's also a sense of needing to code switch in terms of all kinds of things like bodily comportments and interests, but also in terms of values. And I wonder if you have thoughts on that as well. Do you feel you present different values in a predominantly white society versus like when you're around other Mexican Americans? David: Yeah. One place where I felt this ambivalence on my end about which values should I present
9:52
really have to do with circumstances in which I feel as if the values that I might naturally, my "natural values," from my genes, where things that may become more natural to me because of my upbringing, might not register in the same way to my interlocutors. So for example, whenever I think in ways that push against the pretty intense form of individualism that is espoused by a lot of white Americans, I dial it back. Or at least I frame my concern or the point that I wanna make in a
10:30
way that is more legible to them. And you and I have talked about this in a previous episode, but I really felt this during covid, where questions about individual responsibility versus collective risks really were very difficult to navigate because I approached questions of risk and danger and public health from a much more communitarian, I would say, and sometimes collective perspective, that didn't quite register to some of my white American friends who thought about it more in terms of who
11:05
is responsible for passing this virus to which other person, and how do we hold people individually accountable. So questions about responsibility, questions about what is owed. I thought about them in ways that made me realize I was at odds with the American worldview. So that would be one example but there are many others. Ellie: And I think this is useful because what it shows is that there are multiple layers of knowledge going on in this way of navigating the world.
11:36
One, is it, like you said, not "natural values," but maybe values that you were raised with in your community of origin. The second is a knowledge of the values of the broader culture, right? The hegemonic values of the society that we live in, generally speaking. And the third is figuring out what, from the perspective of that hegemonic culture, would be the view of the values that you're presenting and then responding from there.
12:07
So there's multiple layers of knowledge going on there, and to some extent we might say that this is true of all people living in society, right? My values as private citizen are different from my values as professor. We're not always showing up the same way in different contexts. However, the point that we get from philosophers of race, which really grounds what we're gonna talk about today, this idea of standpoint epistemology, is that
12:32
there are certain ways of navigating society that are fundamentally different for marginalized subjects than they are for dominantly situated subjects. And I think a really dominant thread in this line of thinking comes from W.E.B. Du Bois, in his book, The Souls of Black Folk, he writes about the notion of double consciousness. So I wanna quote Du Bois here, partly because I think what he's talking about here, not only sheds light on what you've just been saying, David,
12:57
but also on why that Black/White scene was so interesting to me. This idea that the black family doesn't need classes in whiteness, whereas the white family does need classes in blackness. Du Bois suggests that black people living in America have to see themselves through the revelation of the white world rather than having just their own direct self-consciousness. And he writes the following: it is a peculiar sensation, this double
13:25
consciousness, this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness.
13:38
David: Yeah, this notion of duality or doubleness or twoness that we get out of Du Bois is really interesting and especially because he calls it a peculiar sensation. So it is, let's say, a recognition or an awareness or a eureka moment that you have, but that is bizarre and weird and hard to pin down. And in fact, I would say, Ellie, that the levels of awareness that you mentioned earlier, that people in marginalized positions develop, what's
14:06
interesting about them and what makes them peculiar in this Du Boisian sense is that those of us who find ourselves in a marginalized position learn to navigate and move through those levels before we are able to thematize them. And so it is something that is pre-cognitive in many cases, that can reach the level of conscious awareness with education, with consciousness racing efforts. But that originally it's just a sense of being and not being at home in a
14:39
particular space and realizing that you are seeing yourself refracted through a prism that is external to you. And of course, Du Bois is a thinker that gives us this notion of a double consciousness and is considered by many people one of the precursors to standpoint epistemology. Now standpoint epistemology. There are a number of ways to tell its history. You can trace its history back to debates in the 1980s in feminist science studies.
15:13
Especially the work of Sandra Harding was very influential in this regard. You can also trace the origins of standpoint epistemology. To feminist social theory that comes out of the Marxist and the Hegelian tradition especially the work of Nancy Hardstock. But you can also trace its origins in the 1970s, eighties and nineties to developments in black feminist thought in the work of people such as Patricia Hill, Collins, Kimberly Crenshaw, bell Hooks, many of whom were thinkers of
15:47
intersectionality, but who, in thinking about intersectionality also thought about the importance of perspective and the development of a standpoint. And you could even say that it goes all the way back to the works of Marx and Engels themselves and their argument that the proletariat has a way of understanding capitalism and its irrationalities that the bourgeoisie simply does not. So for Marx and Engels, there is also a duality at the level of class
16:18
that down the road got theorized more explicitly by people such as Lukács. But that, in standpoint epistemology in the 1970s, eighties and nineties, then really gets whipped into an entire feminist philosophy and a philosophy of race that tells us that standpoints are things that people achieve when they come to reflect on the position that they occupy within the social checkerboard. Ellie: And I think this has had a real resurgence lately.
16:48
Relates a little bit to our lived experience episode in the idea that those who are marginalized have more knowledge of their dominant society than those who are privileged, at least from a sort of default or implicit standpoint. This leads however, of course, to questions about whose testimony we should value over the testimony of others. Like, why should I listen to a woman over a man when it comes to questions of patriarchy? Should I? Which women, which men?
17:17
And for that, we are really excited to bring on a guest today who is an expert in these topics and who has a really refreshing perspective that I think will help us navigate a word we've like already used 10 times, these challenging waters.
17:32
Today we're talking about standpoint epistemology. David: Do our interpretations of social reality depend on our social position? Ellie: How do the standpoints of those marginalized by dominant societal norms shed light on the very nature of those norms? David: And, how do we go about cultivating a standpoint that can allow us to articulate a meaningful critique of the established order?
17:56
Brianna Toole is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Claremont McKenna College. Her publications include articles on objectivity, feminist epistemology, philosophy of race and standpoint epistemology. She was recently Lawrence S. Rockefeller visiting fellow at Princeton University, and is also the founder of Corrupt the Youth, an outreach program that brings philosophy to high school students. Ellie: Dr. Toole, welcome to Overthink. We're so happy to have you. Briana: Hi, Ellie.
18:23
Thanks for having me. I'm really excited to be here today. David: Brianna, thank you so much for taking the time and this is a topic that a lot of people on social media have told us they want to hear more about.
18:35
And so let's just jump right into it. One of the key claims of standpoint epistemology is that those who are powerless are actually in a better position than the powerful to see how power works within a given society. Why is this and how does it play out? Briana: Yeah, thanks so much for this question because I feel like when I'm on Twitter and I see the James Lindsays of the world talking about standpoint epistemology, it's pretty immediately clear that folks who talk about standpoint
19:04
theory don't really understand what standpoint theory is trying to say. So this is like my chance to redeem standpoint theory. People treat it as this super controversial claim, but I actually think it's very intuitive when you think about it from the right perspective. So in my paper that has just been published in the Journal of the American Philosophical Association, I use this example of an auto mechanic or a doctor. If your car breaks down on the way home from work, you're not gonna bring
19:35
it to me As a college professor, I'm really smart and I drive a car, but I don't have the training necessary to diagnose what's wrong with your car. But actually the example that I prefer to use is that of physical disability. And so whenever I teach standpoint epistemology, I asked my audience, have you been to New York? Did you use the subway? And if so, think about how you got from your hotel to Broadway or Times Square. You have to take the subway.
20:03
And then I ask them, can you tell me with certainty, like on pain of your life, if that subway had an elevator system or escalators for people who need walkers or canes or who have a broken leg or who are physically disabled. And by and large, people can't tell me. And that's because most of the time I'm teaching to people who are physically able to get to my classroom and physically able to get to my talks. And if you're not physically disabled, of course you're not attending to the
20:33
way the world looks and feels from the perspective of someone who has to navigate that world with a physical disability. And I like this example for several reasons. One, the physical the physical interaction with the world I think is so easy for people to latch onto because it's something you can see and feel really innately. But race and gender, those are so much more abstract. I think that makes it difficult for people to understand the claim that race
21:00
and gender can operate in much the same way that physical disability might in shaping how you attend to the world. But the other reason I like this example is that it's really easy to show that this isn't your fault. Like I'm not a bad person because I don't notice that the subway doesn't have an elevator system. I become a bad person if I notice that and then I don't care, or I don't think that it's a problem that the world hasn't been designed with as much attention
21:26
to how those people need to navigate the world as people like me need to. And so really what standpoint theory wants to say is it wants to take this physical claim I'm making about space and apply it to claims regarding race, gender, sexuality, religion, even perhaps the way we interact with the world is sensitive to our embodied positioning in the world. So how I'm race, how I'm gendered, how people look at me and see me, and then the expectations they impose onto me.
21:54
And so after a while, just like a person with a physical disability has to know which lanes are accessible on the street, which subways are going to have elevators. I need to know when I'm in a space that could be dangerous, where there might be a threat, where I might need to have my guard up so that I'm fully aware. And so standpoint epistemology invites us to think about the ways in which we're not seeing the world wholly and completely because of the way privilege allows us to
22:23
be insensitive to the way the other people with different embodied perspectives have to engage with the world. Ellie: That's super helpful. And I wonder if we could think a little bit more about the nature of expertise here. If, if you're comfortable with me using that word in the sense that there's something about the lived experience of the marginalized that gives them a kind of expertise that the privilege do not have.
22:49
And I could see somebody who's perhaps a little bit resistant to this claim, which as you said is controversial and taken to be like maybe more controversial than it is saying that there's something really different about, Being a woman in a patriarchal society versus being a mechanic such that the mechanic has an expertise in cars that women don't necessarily have just by virtue of living in a society that in many ways has not been built to recognize us as like full fledged human beings.
23:24
So I'd love to hear you see a little bit more about how we can think about that expertise or that epistemic privilege, like the kind of privilege of knowing that marginalized folks have. Briana: I love this question because it allows me to address, I think one of the biggest problems in standpoint epistemology, which is this thought that oh, all marginalized people think the same thing because they're marginalized and so
23:48
they're all having the same experiences, and it's yeah, no, we're not a monolith. Like we're pretty diverse within and across groups. I think here the mechanic analogy is actually really helpful because, people who become mechanics, for instance, just like people who become doctors, they might have a natural talent for picking things apart, right? But they still need that training in order to develop that natural talent. And in much the same way, the sort of experiences that I have as a woman
24:15
or as a person of color I have in virtue of that positioning, but how I make sense of those experiences, what inferences I can form on their basis. I still need some sort of training in order to help me. To develop those natural capacities. And so it's one thing, this is what I say in the paper. It's one thing to experience sexism in the workplace, but it's another thing entirely to know that you're experiencing sexism and then to understand how
24:43
that's the outgrowth of a patriarchal system that devalues the work that women do that prioritizes the cognitive and behavioral attitudes of men. And It, maybe I experience oppression, but what I can do with that is going to depend on how many resources I have to both understand what's happening to me and then to communicate it to others. And so the idea is, lived experience might be a little bit like natural talents.
25:09
Like you start out with a sort of baseline potential to have certain experiences, this potential to develop certain skills, but without the right sort of training, you're not gonna be able to do a whole lot with that natural talent or with those experiences that you have. That's how we get people like Ben Carson and Phyllis Lashley, like they're, yeah, of course they're being oppressed, in some ways by virtue of being a woman, by virtue of being a black person.
25:34
But if you don't develop the right framework for how to understand your experiences, you might internalize them as a thing that you deserve. You might internalize them as the result of a system that is ultimately just and correct. And I think a lot of people do that because it's so much easier to just go along with a system, even if that system is hurting you than it is to push back against it. David: And in thinking about that practice and work of developing one's
26:05
epistemic talents and building up that kind of ability to articulate knowledge claims that, tell us something about the social order. I'm here thinking about the early days of the feminist liberation movement in the US and the consciousness raising groups that were extremely important in that collective effort. Because many of these movements were gatherings of women where the point was for women to discuss their experiences in daily life.
26:31
That can be the workplace, that can be family, that can be romantic relationships with men. In order to discover the ways in which those experiences were similar and similarly reflected the sexism of the broader culture. So consciousness racing groups have now fallen out of fashion, I would say, in part because they were accused of failing to account for intersectionality, in fact. And so in your work, you suggest that we ought to take up this idea of consciousness racing.
27:03
And I suspect that it might be tied to this question of developing that ability, giving us that extra oomph for our epistemic position. So can you tell us a little bit more about that? Briana: Yeah. Consciousness raising is such a difficult task. I'm actually working on one more, hopefully my last, standpoint theory paper, developing and exploring this thesis, Ellie: We want more. Give us more! David: Stay here forever. Briana: I love it.
27:33
But you know what, when like you've been doing something for a while. You're like, I just wanna develop a new hobby. I'm like, I just wanna work on something else for a little bit. Standpoint epistemology can be so sad. David: You have the right to develop new standpoints as well. Briana: Exactly. But consciousness raising is actually really interesting because I think it's been going on in some forms for much longer than the sixties.
27:54
That's the point that we look back at and say, yes, there's where it happens. But I'm actually teaching this class in the fall philosophy through literature, and we're gonna start by reading Kate Chopin's the Awakening which was written in the early 19 hundreds, because I think it's such a great illustration of consciousness raising. Of course that has negative effects. I'm not gonna spoil the book for you all, but it's great. Check it out.
28:16
But yeah, consciousness raising really is this need or this activity of looking inward and asking yourself, what am I doing? Why am I doing it? Who is this for? So I like to think that it starts at this individual level, but for it to be fully realized, it has to happen in conversation with others. And that's why the women's movement of the sixties and the seventies end up being these really prime examples. Because we see these great gatherings of women coming together and sharing the
28:47
experiences that they have, developing the conceptual resource, sexual harassment, so that we can delineate what's happening to us in the workplace. But as David points out they did fail because those early movements largely organized around the interest and experiences of middle class white women. And so that sort of left this gap in the experiences of black women who aren't just experiencing racism but are experiencing sexism.
29:14
And they're also experiencing the unique intersection of that in misogyny.
29:18
But to go back to the essence of the question, consciousness raising is important because the ways in which our experiences shape who we are and how we attend to the world are the kind of thing we're not likely to notice until we're in conversation with someone else who can point out the weirdness of that experience. And so I'm gonna say a thing that's absolutely gonna get me canceled, feel free to include it. But I do this with my students too.
29:45
If you went to an American school, I can bet money, like whatever's in my savings account, I can bet money that you started every day with the Pledge of Allegiance. That's how I started my day every day in school. It took me a long time to step back and think, oh, that's really weird. That's a really weird practice. But it wasn't until I went to college and started interacting with people from different countries who don't have practices like that, or interacting with
30:10
people who did have practices like that, but under fascism that I was like, oh my God, that's a fascist thing that we do. And so that's why consciousness raising is important because.
30:24
So there's this David Foster Wallace quote that I used for another paper of mine, and it's this joke that he told a at a commencement speech once, but there are these two young fish swimming along and they come across an older fish swimming the other way. And he goes, how's the water boys? And they say, fine. And then they keep swimming. And then a little bit later, the one young fish looks over to the other and goes, what the hell's water?
30:44
Like you are not gonna notice the things that are just a part of your culture because those are normalized. You wouldn't think to question those. So the point of consciousness raising is to get you outside that so you can realize, wait a second, this has been happening to me. And the truth is I didn't like it. I just didn't know I was allowed to not like it. Or here's this thing I thought was normal, but it turns out it's not normal because that's the process.
31:07
That's the space where that critical interrogation happens, where you start to think, okay, I'm having these experiences. But why? What are the beliefs that make this experience seem justified? What is the system that makes this seem like a legitimate practice? And that's where we can get to those bigger questions. Regrettably, I think consciousness raising so often stops at let's name our experiences when it really needs to get to that further point of
31:30
what are these systems that are in operation that affect and inform our beliefs, our values, our behaviors? Because that's where the power is and that's where the action happens. That's the stuff that needs to be dismantled. Not people's belief systems, but the systems over and above that, that then influence what we think is normal, natural, and just. Ellie: And I think you're really getting at some of the complexities that are involved in conversations that involve consciousness raising.
31:59
Because one thing I'm thinking about, following what you just said is how we can navigate both homogenous and heterogeneous groups. When we're talking about things like gender and race. I've noticed a lot in recent years that public discourse has emphasized, and I think to some extent, rightly, the idea that say, black people don't have a responsibility to teach white people about racism, and at the same time, what you are gesturing towards is the fact that.
32:27
We do need some kind of clash of different experiences in order to have a sense of our own experiences. And so I think one of the ways that clash gets played out in our society, which just like favors and centers whiteness in so many different ways, is the idea that mixed race groups that are trying to understand racism better end up becoming groups for people of color to educate white people. And so I'm curious what you think about whether there are certain frameworks or
32:57
environments or even tools that better facilitate learning between groups versus ones that are more homogenous, right? Like spaces that are meant for black people or people of color generally, or women, people who share certain experiences of oppression. Briana: Yeah, that's such a tough question and it's funny because this is the thing my students ask. Like they wanna know okay, what do we do now that we know all these things? And I'm like, ah, solutions. That's all I heard.
33:26
To be honest, I don't fully agree with the line that it's not the responsibility of people of color to educate white folks. And it's not that like I disagree. It's definitely not our responsibility, but I do think that there are people who are talented at that. I think I'm one of those people and it probably is my responsibility given that I have that talent and that as a mixed race woman, I myself live in this liminal space and so have had to learn how to talk to people from different groups
33:52
and to play the sort of translator role. And so my first response is always for the people who have that talent and that capacity make use of it. Because for folks who are in the oppressor group, sometimes you just don't know what it is. You don't know, right? It's if you're studying for an exam and you are so bad at the class that you don't even know where to start. Like I think a lot of life can be that way. And so I think when we're saying educate yourself, we need to be
34:20
clear that there are some things that folks can educate themselves about. Like you should just be able to Google. Why can't I touch a black woman's hair and get good responses. There are other things that aren't Googleable, like how I as a woman of color treat my hair when it's in braids, for instance. That's not a thing that's gonna be super accessible online. Like even for me teaching myself how to do that, it was really hard.
34:44
I think we need to be mindful about, again, what's in the water, what it is people are consuming, and how feasible it is for them to have access to the kinds of information that they're asking questions about. I don't mind telling people about my like, care, care treatment, because you don't see that on tv. There's a reason why the Sesame Street episode was such a big phenomenon. It's because you like, white audiences don't see that, so it was really important that they did that.
35:12
But then there are other things, yeah, that like you can figure out by yourself or like by doing basic reasoning, the reason you shouldn't took a touch, a black woman's hair is like, you shouldn't touch anyone's body without their permission. This goes for pregnant women too. And so being able to delineate between those cases to know when it's reasonable to ask for guidance and instruction and when it's not. I think a lot of people of color just feel overburdened because sometimes
35:34
we're getting questions that aren't really in good faith, and that's when it starts to feel frustrating. David: Yeah, and it seems like one way to capture this thing that we're talking about is at what point is it reasonable to ask somebody to step up to the plate and do an additional kind of work, which is the work of education and consciousness racing. But the inverse of that question is when do we ask somebody, especially a
35:59
person in a position of privilege, to take a step back and defer authority to somebody in a different social position? Because if we take the insights of standpoint epistemology seriously as we should, and we agree that some people just have more knowledge than others by virtue of their marginalization, then again, we need to figure out what to do with this. Do those in a position of privilege on your view, always have to defer
36:27
to those who are marginalized or only sometimes and under what circumstances? Briana: David, this is such a hard question. And it's funny I, just co-authored with a grad student at UBC a paper on this topic that should be forthcoming in a Blackwell companion volume. But our answer is no. We agree with Femi Taiwo's position on this, that deference is not what standpoint epistemology is ultimately arguing for. Especially because you can't just, say I have a crowd, a mixed group of people here.
37:04
I can't just pick out the black person and say, oh, they're gonna know about racism. For all of the reasons aforementioned because just in virtue of being black doesn't mean that your consciousness has been raised, that you're aware of the complex operations of white supremacist patriarchy as a system.
37:23
But that doesn't mean all is lost. I do think you can identify. Very often who has achieved a standpoint. So for instance, the Combahee River Collective, that's clearly an achieved black womanist lesbian standpoint, and they have lots of really great insights to offer. I think what's important to keep in mind is like pure deference. We don't advocate for. So pure deference, just like whatever you believe, I assume you're the expert,
37:50
so I'm gonna adopt your belief because I assume that in principle it will not be possible for me to come to that claim.
37:57
What we advocate for is something like impure deference. So this recommendation that like with effort I could get to where you are, but it will take me a lot of work to get there. Whereas you might be on the path already because you have experiences in virtue of being a marginalized person. So here's what this means. I think in practical terms, if I had a student who has an accommodation, for instance, and I want to design my syllabus and my class so that
38:23
it's suitable to students with accommodations, I'm not gonna ask a student who doesn't have accommodations. I'm not gonna ask professors who have never worked with students with accommodations, but I'm not gonna just pick a student who has accommodations either. I'm gonna go to an office that handles that, who's actually really worked to develop policies that are suitable for those students. Policies that have been informed by years of conversations with those students.
38:46
And the same goes for things like race or dealing with incarceration. One of my biggest frustrations, I don't know if your audience will know this, but I taught high school for two years with Teach for America. I run this outreach program called Corrupt the Youth. We bring philosophy to schools, and one of my biggest frustrations that I learned from teaching and working in high schools is that the people making policies for schools, the people making decisions for teachers, Have never been
39:14
in classrooms, they have never taught. It blows my mind. So they have no real idea of what it's like to show up at six o'clock every morning to have your students stumble in tired and hungry and semi dressed, to be honest. And then to have to teach them until 2:30 and then to send them home so early in the day that their parents aren't home. If you wanna know how to fix teaching, you should meet with teachers. And so what standpoint theory says is know your limits, recognize them, and try
39:43
to seek out the groups of people who are most likely to have thought about this. So it's really like it ends up being a group emphasis, not an individual. Because no one person can know at all. Like even as a woman of color, I can't know what it's like to be a woman of color for every woman of color, but you can find a group of us. Like that's very possible. Ellie: Yeah. Briana: We're there, we exist. Ellie: And in addition to that group emphasis, I think what you're also
40:09
getting at is this idea that, we all have different identities that we're embodying at different moments of our lives. And to approach you and ask you a question about racism, qua professor of philosophy who specializes in race is very different. From going up to you as a person who's like eating at a restaurant, minding your own business, talking about a TV show, and ask a question about race. And so I think there's also, there's so much context that I think needs to be considered here as well.
40:39
And I think that's one thing I sometimes think goes unacknowledged and some of the discussions that we have about intersectionality, because I think like one of the main insights of intersectionality, of course, is that it's always a fraught effort to identify shared traits across a given group, right? Not all women are gonna have the same experience. Not all black people are gonna have the same experience. When you treat black experience as such, or women's experience as such.
41:07
What you end up often doing is reproducing the masculinity and the whiteness like of our society in general that kind of is just in the water to go back to the David Foster Wallace reference. But I think there's also something really important about being able to identify those group traits in part because that then allows us to not only identify structural issues, but also not ask individuals who are complex nexuses. know if that's the plural. David: I don't know what the plural is.
41:40
Ellie: I know, right?
41:42
Briana: We're gonna make nexuses a thing.
41:45
Ellie: Yeah. Of different traits to always speak from their own individual position as well. I've been reading Jennifer Nash's recent book, black Feminism Reimagined this summer, and she talks a lot about the way that intersectionality as a term has been deployed in such a way that it like puts black women on the defensive of just don't forget intersectionality came from us, but then who that us is like, an open question once you get into individuals with complex different features.
42:13
Briana: I mean, Honestly, like one of the reasons I think I was drawn to standpoint theory and that I have enjoyed working on it is that to me it reflects what I think schooling could be instead of what it is. You both know this, like when you come into philosophy and you're like starting with the Presocratics, it's like all these attempts to taxonomy the world. And that totally makes sense. I want your audience to really close their eyes here and think about what it must
42:40
have been like living in the world without all of the information that we have now. Can you imagine how scary the Northern Lights must have been to people? Or like how terrifying it must have been when locusts woke up once every 40 years and there was a plague. So like the need to classify the world, I completely get, but when you classify, you have to eliminate important differences 'cause you're going for big picture groupings, but that doesn't serve us anymore. And yet we remain.
43:09
So deeply committed to it. And I think part of the reason is that we're so afraid that once those categories collapse, so we have to really start thinking about all the ways that we're different. We realize how much work it actually takes to be a full person and then to be a full person who's kind to another full person, to recognize all their complexity and contradictions, frankly. And so what I really like about this project is that standpoint theory is for everyone.
43:37
It's for the powerful too, actually. There are definitely things that happen at Davos that the people know that I don't know about how the world works. It's like I can speculate about what it might be like to take over a CEO of some big company, but the reality is that business is really complex, right? And governance is really complex. And so there are things that I don't know that those people know that I would need to become familiar with.
44:02
All we're asking in turn is that we be given that same level of like acknowledgement and respect. I'm complex. My world is complex, and the things that are happening in it and to me, are things that we all need to know because at some level, We're all experiencing what it means to be fearful of climate change. We're all experiencing what it means to be fearful of like water running out. We're all experiencing what it means to be fearful of like shootings happening in our place of work.
44:30
There's a lot more that we have in common and we share, and people tend to criticize standpoint epistemology for amplifying differences, but that's not it at all. Standpoint epistemology is saying Your differences are beautiful and a beautiful good world works. When we acknowledge those differences, not when we try to deny and disappear them.
44:48
David: Yeah, I really like this way in which we're talking about difference versus sameness, because in your work you also introduce a term that I think is related to this discussion, which is the concept of an epistemic peer. Of course, every individual is a plethora of trades combined into one full fledged self. But as we move through the world, we also run into particular selves that by virtue of their experiences, just get what we want to say by virtue of our experiences. I'll make.
45:19
Latin queer jokes in certain contexts, but not in others. I'll talk about immigration in certain ways in front of some people, but not others, and I think your concept of an epistemic peer was really useful for me to think about the social field and identify those epistemic agents who have similar or comparable knowledge to me by virtue of the position that they either have or have achieved. And so I just want you to say a little bit more about this term because I think
45:49
it's very useful for naming maybe the grounds for that coming together in a world in which we are also different. Briana: I'm so glad you asked this question because it allows me to give you a little bit of a story behind this paper. Frustratingly this paper, even though it's just coming out. I started writing it in 2017 when I was in grad school at UT Austin, and I wanted to write it because I was frustrated that some of my white male friends, like
46:19
friends, would sometimes think that they were as well positioned as me to comment on the Southern experience, so not race or gender, but the Southern experience. So here's what happened: I predicted very early that Trump was going to win. Very early because I grew up in the Florida panhandle. I think that it's a pretty good litmus for who's gonna win. What people in the panhandle are filling those my people. It's where I'm from. And I was like, they're not gonna vote for Clinton. My sweet baby.
46:47
They're not gonna vote for, they're definitely not gonna vote for Bernie Sanders. Trump is gonna take this and just like the utter disdain with which that prediction was treated as like you can't know, you Southerners like why? Why would you have special insight? Because I was like, I'm gonna write this paper to tell you exactly why. And so just to give a little bit of background, the concept of an epistemic peer comes from more formal epistemology and as a basic idea,
47:14
you can think about it like this. You go to a restaurant, you're not gonna use a calculator to figure out your bill and tip you and your friend you're eating with. You decide to divide the bill, and you each come up with different numbers. The question is, which of you should defer? To which other and the idea is whoever's most likely to get it right, so whoever has a historical background of being good with math, having gotten it right in the past, that's the person that you should defer to.
47:40
If you're all things considered pretty equal, then well, you just need to start over because you know someone got it wrong and it's gonna be hard to figure out who. So it's meant to help us figure out like, when should I defer to someone or when should I like, take, way more heavily their testimony. And what I wanted to show is that in certain cases, A pretty good claim could be made, not that you should defer necessarily, but that you
48:04
should recognize that you're not as well positioned to speak to a certain question as someone else might be. And so in my estimation, my colleagues at UT who were pretty privileged who went to boarding schools, they were not as well positioned as me and my estimation to assess what the South was likely to do in the 2016 election. And I wanted to be able to give some like epistemic defense of that assumption and so that was what was going on there. Does that answer your question, David?
48:36
David: Yeah I do. I mean, it's basically you telling everybody around you, you are not my peer,
48:43
Briana: at least when it comes to the South! David: I do love that origin story. But I think you're right that we often have to make those claims about, it's not necessarily a hierarchy, but it's a positioning relative to one another. Briana: Exactly. And, I might be epistemically privileged, right? With respect to what southerners are likely to do politically over someone who spends their life up north in a boarding school. But there are areas where I'm very, I have no idea what's going on.
49:15
If you wanna know how best to go about prison reform, yeah. I've worked in prisons. I know people who are released. I am not the person to ask. I know people who are much better positioned than me to speak to those questions. And again, it's about knowing what you know, knowing what you don't know and seeking out people you think might be better positioned. Ellie: That last thing you said about knowing what you know and knowing what you don't know is the literal.
49:42
Perfect segue to the last thing we wanna ask you about today, because I'm thinking about Socrates' famous claim that he is, he's the wisest person because he knows that he doesn't really know. Briana: Yes. I love that. Ellie: So that was like a terribly phrased version of Socrates claim. So apologies. It's been a while since I taught that. But in any case, you mentioned earlier that you have an organization called Corrupt the Youth, which is a nonprofit outreach program that
50:09
brings philosophy to high school students from underserved backgrounds through classes and summer camp. We love the name because this is a reference to the charge for which Socrates was sentenced to death, corrupting the youth. this is perhaps an amazing example of consciousness raising because I presume that corrupt corrupting the youth involves a form of consciousness raising. I'd love to hear about this organization and a little bit about how it connects to your research.
50:38
Briana: Yeah, I, this also dates back to my time as a grad student at UT Austin. That's when the program began, and really it was this bridge between my Teach for America experience and then my experience in grad school. Like I, I loved teaching high school. I just didn't love the pay and the crappy hours, so I still wanted to work with kids, but importantly I wanted to rectify a gap in my own experience. I wasn't exposed to philosophy until I started college, and I would've loved
51:08
to have access much earlier because it really did allow me to think about the things that I had been thinking about that I think most people think about, but don't ever have a space to really dive into and explore, and it seemed wrong to me that the people who could benefit most from that sort of critical stance are the least likely to have access to philosophy as a subject of study. And so the thought was, we'll bring in grad students from these universities.
51:37
We'll take them to a local high school and we'll let them teach some classes, gives the high school teacher a nice little break. Maybe they can learn some philosophy too. Importantly for me, as someone who went to a, an underserved school, I wanted grad students and professors who are usually from privileged backgrounds to get a sense of what it's really like in Title I schools. It's very easy to dis dismiss teachers to dismiss students, but what's happened over
52:04
and over again with the chapters that we operate is that these grad students go in and they're blown away by how bright and insightful and engaged our students are. They just think in these amazing ways that I think most kids think in. But again, school beats out of them. And so we wanna corrupt the youth to be the space where kids are allowed to say what they think, even if it's offensive, where we engage with them sincerely so that they know that the things that they say matter in the
52:31
world, that there are people who care about the things that they have to say. I think that in itself is corrupting, like telling a kid, I care about what you say and what you're gonna do in the world. That's huge. But yeah, it does do a little bit of consciousness raising. 'cause we have so many students who will say I didn't know that my voice mattered or that people were actually listening to me and now I realize that I can do these things.
52:54
Or they'll get really into subjects that like, like this last year we had a kid who got really into space, like the philosophy of space. And I'm just like, but why though? I don't get that at all. But like they just have these great interests and I want them to be able to explore them. And so like there, there were those like selfish interests. Like I want people to understand what it's like to come from this kind of background. I want people to know how smart these kids are.
53:17
I want these kids to recognize how smart they are and that they matter. But it's also the case that when we work with kids, so many of them feel, and I wonder, Ellie and David, if you feel this through your college students, so many of them feel really despairing lately. Like they don't know what's going on in the world or how to change it. And so just giving them a space where they can talk about what they're feeling and
53:40
then provide some sort of philosophical background that they can use to make sense of those feelings and thoughts, I think has been super helpful for them. And the goal is, corrupt the youth, but the goal is as much as possible, help create students who are gonna go out into the world and be active and engaged citizens. I don't care what their politics end up being, I care that they can question their own beliefs. I care that they can question their own values and interests.
54:05
That's a really important, and I think very underdeveloped skill in the American populace. And so in that sense, yeah, it does feel like Socrates corrupting the youth. Ellie: Yeah. Briana: I really don't wanna be sentenced to death, but... David: no hemlock in this. Briana: Yeah, no hemlock, but we have found other ways. I'm always a little on edge. David: Here at Overthink we do sentence you to a life of state provided
54:31
banquets, which is the punishment that Socrates said he deserved for his crime. Briana: Yeah, I'd accept that actually.
54:40
The state part, not so much, but the food. Ellie: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much for your time Briana, Briana: Thank y'all. This has been so fun.
54:52
Segment: If you're looking for a podcast similar to Overthink that dives deep into life's big questions, check out our friends at Closer to Truth. Closer to Truth is a long running television series hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn that features candid conversations with the best minds in science and philosophy. You can explore their thousands of interviews by subscribing to their podcast, registering for every membership on their website or exploring their YouTube channel.
55:16
Get access to over 5,000 discussions with experts like David Chalmers, Sabine Hausenfelder, and Roger Penrose on topics like Free Will, life After Death, Questions of Consciousness, and much, much more. Sign up today at closertotruth.com and give them a listen wherever you get your podcasts.
55:40
Ellie: That was such an awesome interview. I love speaking to Briana. Her perspectives are always so enlightening. David: Uh, Yeah, no, I really like the way that she talks about standpoint epistemology, and one thing that stood out for me was her claim that a standpoint is not something that one has as if it's just a property of a person simply by virtue of existing with certain racial or gendered features to one's life. But rather a standpoint is something that one achieves.
56:10
And this stood out for me because this is the way in which a number of black feminist thinkers from the eighties and nineties think about standpoint, epistemology often emphasizing that what differentiates a standpoint from just a perspective, which everybody has, right? Everybody has their own perspective on the world by virtue of having their own consciousness and their own body. But what differentiates a standpoint from a mere perspective is political
56:38
awareness, and in some cases even political engagement, such that you cannot claim to have a standpoint unless you have done the necessary work for developing the theory and maybe even the activism associated with it. Ellie: And I think that seems like a sort of nebulous claim in certain ways. This idea of what is the necessary work and what are the norms that we are subscribing to when we undertake that necessary work. But I also think it's something that this is not gonna make
57:13
it less nebulous, something. You know it when you see it, or you know it when you feel it. And I'm thinking about the experiences of teaching some of this material in classes and feeling like it really gets into students' bones in a way that other topics don't necessarily, right? Like topics that are less socially, personally, and politically relevant. When you undertake a course in feminist theory, it often does feel like, oh
57:40
wow, I'm realizing the world works in a way that I didn't necessarily expect. There's something illuminating about it, and I think it's interesting that she's bringing back this idea of consciousness raising, which is what we're talking about, because it has gotten a bad rap in feminist theory lately, but I think is perhaps due for a comeback. Arguably it's what the Me Too movement was all about. It's what Black Lives Matter is all about, right?
58:04
A lot of the social movements that have gotten quite a bit of uptake recently hinge precisely on this idea of raising awareness and developing new kinds of knowledge that are, as you mentioned, David, related to political engagement. If not, themselves politically engaged already. David: Yes. And I think you're right that it's something that you, how did you put it? You understand it when you see it or how did you say it? Ellie: You know it when you see it or feel it David: Thank you. Yes.
58:30
Ellie: I feel like feel it is better than see it. David: So you know it when you feel it, although I'm not sure you feel other people's positions necessarily. That sounds a little weird. Ellie: feel the consciousness raising. David: You feel the consciousness raced already once it's already there. But I do think there are some telltale signs of somebody having achieved a standpoint, and two that stand out for me would be one, if somebody is able to
58:54
contextualize their own position within a larger social matrix, such that instead of simply saying, this is my worldview, they are able to articulate this is my worldview and this is why it makes sense that it is my worldview given the position that I occupy in the social field. And another telltale sign for me is if somebody is able to articulate, to some degree, it doesn't have to be necessarily an academic account or a scholarly account, but give an account of the formation.
59:26
Of their own standpoint, how it is that they came to have the worldview, that they have, the interpretation of the world that they have by virtue of their experiences. Those could be experiences of early childhood. Those could be experiences already in the education system. Those could be experiences as adults, but it would mean that somebody has done the work of trying to piece together in a causal narrative, their lived experiences and connecting those experiences to the way in which they
59:57
currently interpret the world around them. Ellie: That's a really helpful point, David, 'cause I think that helps clarify the difference between consciousness raising and becoming a conspiracy theorist.
1:00:09
David: Yes. We do not want to conflate the two. Qanon, not a standpoint.
1:00:17
Segment: We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Consider supporting us on Patreon for exclusive access to bonus content live q and as and more. And thanks to those of you who already do. To reach out to us and find episode info, go to overthink podcast.com and connect with us on Twitter and Instagram at Overthink Pod. We'd like to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan, our production assistant,
1:00:45
Emilio Esquivel Marquez and Samuel PK Smith for the original music. And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.
Here to help you learn
Sign in to keep a private conversation with your course tutor.
Ask me anything about the material…
Sign in to chat