Editor’s Note: I am sharing the chapter on epistemic injustice from my book, A Gadfly Report. Epistemic justice/injustice is an important lens by which to understand the need for new language in Article II of the Unitarian Universalist Association Bylaws. About ten o’clock on a spring evening in 1993, two young Black men were waiting at a bus stop in a London suburb. Six white teenagers gathered on the other side of the street and began to shout at them.
The two Black men were confused at first. Then one of them, Duwayne Brooks, realized that the shouts were angry threats. So he began to run. The white youths charged across the street and caught the other Black man, Stephen Lawrence. Before Brooks’s horrified eyes, they repeatedly stabbed Lawrence with knives. Lawrence broke away, they both tried to flee, but Lawrence collapsed after a block or two and bled out on the sidewalk.
Police quickly arrived. The London police had a standing protocol for how they were to lend aid to violent crime victims, support them, and draw out information about the crime. In this case, though, the officers instantly assumed that this had been a gang fight. Rather than victims, they assumed that Brooks and Lawrence had been willing participants in the violence. In other words, in the minds of the police, the severely traumatized Brooks, and also Lawrence, who was pronounced dead at the scene, were equally responsible for the fatal violence against them. While the police were debating whether to arrest Brooks, the white youths got away.
Witnesses quickly came forward to explain what had actually happened: a deadly attack on two peaceful citizens for no reason other than that they were Black. It was later learned that the white youths had attacked other Black people. Two decades would pass, though, before two of the white gang members would finally be found guilty of murder.
The whole mess was so badly botched that Parliament called for an inquiry. The resulting report found that officers had failed in their first responsibility, which was to provide aid to the victims. The officers also ignored eyewitness accounts while the perpetrators made their escape. Particularly egregious: the officers refused to even listen to Brooks’s distraught attempts to tell them what had actually transpired. Multiple witnesses, then, knew what had happened and where the suspects had gone. But the officers ignored that information until much later.
These were all violations of standing policies. The reason, the report found, was that the London police service was shot through with entrenched structural racism.1
This sort of thing happens all too often, of course, on both sides of the Atlantic. Black citizens in the United States often complain that they are treated differently by police, by other agencies, and even by the medical establishment. Scientific research has borne these complaints out, as I document elsewhere.
Feminist philosopher Miranda Fricker terms the botched Stephen Lawrence murder response a classic case of what she calls “epistemic injustice.” Her 2007 book, Epistemic Injustice: Power & the Ethics of Knowing, provides foundational understanding of how structural prejudice works.
As previously stated, epistemology is the study of knowledge: how we learn, what we learn, and all too often, as Fricker’s work explains, what we think we know that just isn’t true—but which keeps us from inputting necessary information.
As explained in the previous chapter, on reason, the brain uses shortcuts to process sensory input. Because this happens below the level of consciousness, we too easily find ourselves acting on culturally dictated assumptions rather than facts. In the case of the Stephen Lawrence murder, police assumptions—that there had been a mutually violent gang clash—prevented them from listening to the real explanation. In other words, what police thought they already knew prevented them from assessing the real facts about the crime.
In a 2015 lecture on “Epistemic Inequality,” Fricker cites this as a textbook case of what she calls testimonial epistemic injustice.2 Because of what London police thought they already knew about the behavior of young Black men, they ignored Brooks’s testimony—while his friend, Stephen Lawrence, bled out on the sidewalk.
We see this in human affairs all the time. People regularly devalue the work or opinion of someone because of who that person is. Because that decision is made unconsciously, it is difficult to catch. But statistics do bear out, for example, that when Black or female students raise their hands in class, teachers are less likely to call on them than on white male students. By the same token, when they answer questions in class, their answers are less likely to be accepted than the same answers from white male students.3
The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice explains to us
that:
“Epistemic Injustice, as both a phenomenon and a topic of study, obviously connects to and interpenetrates with major social and intellectual movements, such as feminism, hermeneutics, critical race theory, disability studies, and decolonializing, queer, and trans epistemologies. . . . [Epistemic injustice is] a pervasive feature of our social and professional lives.”4
Thus, the study of epistemic injustice perfectly captures the intersectionality of justice work. This is true of the United States generally, as well as within the Unitarian Universalist Association in particular. It is, then, an essential lens by which to examine tensions and reactions to UUA work in diversity, equity, and inclusion.
For starters, it provides us with a key dynamic of structural racism in relationship with other forms of structural oppression. It explains, for example, why a white male Unitarian Universalist Association official—who was a minister—would automatically view job applications from females, non-ministers, and people of color less favorably than an application from a fellow white male minister. Testimonial epistemic injustice. It would not be a matter of ill intent: Fricker’s book, Epistemic Injustice, goes into great detail on the limits of such culpability. But subconsciously discounting information from marginalized sources is precisely what testimonial epistemic injustice is.
Fricker also describes a different kind of epistemic injustice: what she calls hermeneutical epistemic injustice.5 My Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary defines hermeneutics as “the science of interpretation.”6 Ironically, given that Fricker is a philosopher rather than a theologian, the term, hermeneutics, is commonly associated with interpretation of Biblical texts. But she is almost Unitarian Universalist in applying this rather religious word to the interpretation of lived experience.
Her point is that, if there is no mutually understood language by which to describe and understand an experience, even the people who have the experience may struggle to explain it, or possibly fully understand it themselves. Let alone get justice from those who do not share their situation.
Her first example is sexual harassment of women.7 If a woman in the 1950’s suffered sexual harassment, she would certainly be able to describe the specific acts that had taken place. But there was not a mutually agreed-upon context by which to account for a pattern of such acts, perpetrated upon many women, practically as a condition of education or employment.8 Or that the strong emotional reactions among those subjected to such treatment was, in fact, natural and appropriate. Or that the conduct itself was inappropriate, and by rights ought to be illegal.
In my own experience, my mother was orphaned at age five and came of age during the Great Depression. As a young adult, she supported herself as a dancer and waitress. Referring back to those days, there were definitely men she learned to keep away from. But there was no global understanding that the men who tried to grope her or demean her with sexualized remarks had no right to do so. Or that, by right, they should be risking their own employment if they did.9 That only came with the rising understanding of the personhood and rights of women in the 1960’s and after.
Crucial in the nature of mid-twentieth-century sexual harassment, is that it was not simply an individual injustice. Virtually all women were subject to some form of sexual harassment, yet lacked adequate language or context by which to express or even fully contextualize their experience. Thus, as Fricker puts it, they were at a “collective, cognitive disadvantage.” They certainly would know in their guts that something was deeply wrong. But there was no mutually agreed-upon language by which to deal with it. This, she emphasizes, is the nature of hermeneutical injustice.
Different groups can be hermeneutically disadvantaged for all sorts of reasons, as the changing social world frequently generates new sorts of experience of which our understanding may dawn only gradually.10
This is, I think, a crucial observation. Since the nature of human knowledge is, itself, continually growing and expanding, our understanding of injustice must constantly grow and change with it. Yet given human nature, many people view change itself with suspicion. Thus, we should not be surprised—or overly discomfited—that there is constant debate, at the growing edges of our understanding, of what injustice even is.
By the same token, there was no understanding of institutional racism before the mid-1970s. Institutional racism was not widely understood until after the turn of the twenty-first century. As far as that goes, many people today still deny the existence of institutional racism. This includes opponents of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts within the Unitarian Universalist Association, who deny the existence of institutional racism in the UUA—despite the testimony of hundreds of marginalized voices.
It would be unsurprising, then, that in 1993, London police would not understand how much their own institutional racism was blocking effective investigation of the Stephen Lawrence murder. That would only come with Parliament’s inquiry later. Even Duwayne Brooks had difficulty describing what was happening. He could only express his frustration, anguish, and trauma, both due to the murder, but also due to harsh police treatment of him, a victim.
Fricker writes that the more marginalized an identity group is, the more they are likely to suffer from hermeneutical injustice:
“Relations of unequal power can skew shared hermeneutical resources so that the powerful tend to have appropriate understandings of their experiences ready to draw on as they make sense of their social experiences—whereas the powerless are more likely to find themselves having some social experiences through a glass darkly[, so to speak], with at best ill-fitting meanings to draw on in the effort to render them intelligible.”11
Without society-wide understanding, then, a gay person in the 1930’s would themselves be likely to accept the straight world’s assessment of their homosexuality—as pathological. The emotional damage from such self-condemnation should be obvious to a twenty-first-century reader.
Or a young woman in the 1950s would find others—and possibly herself—interpreting her date rape through the patriarchal view that she had somehow “teased” the young man. She herself would therefore be seen as responsible for the crime against her. Again, the emotional damage had to be doubly debilitating.
Hermeneutical injustice, then, is also important to us as Unitarian Universalists. Increased awareness of social inequalities and power dynamics is essential to the development of what Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would call, The Beloved Community. If we deny marginalized identities the right to a language by which to comprehensively express their own experience, we perpetuate the injustices against them.
This also calls for another marker. We will return to the complexities of hermeneutical/testimonial injustice when we more fully discuss Christina Rivera. Rivera was the credentialed religious education director whose frustrated blog post—on being passed over for the Southern Region lead position—precipitated the 2017 awakening within the Unitarian Universalist Association. This controversy becomes doubly crystalline when viewed through the lens of epistemic injustice.
We can also return to French philosopher Rene Descartes’s “proof” of the existence of God. He claimed that “everyone knows” a cause has to be greater than its effect. Therefore the earth’s existence had to be caused by something greater than the earth, namely God. We can now see how this becomes what Fricker might term an epistemic fallacy. What “everyone knows” can all too easily be lacking. Or just, plain wrong, as it was in this instance.
Fricker’s study of epistemic injustice also explains why a person of marginalized identity typically knows more about the dominant culture—even as members of the dominant culture know little or nothing about the marginalized person’s experience. It is conceivable that the marginalized person may understand the dominant culture’s experience more than even their own, as in the aforementioned cases of a gay person in the 1930s or a woman date-raped in the 1950s. Due to hermeneutical injustice, the language itself may be lacking, to fully describe—or even fully understand—the injustice they are experiencing. Meanwhile, due to testimonial epistemic injustice, they may be unable to fully contribute to the broader culture, no matter their innate abilities and inclinations.
This can also explain, in part, the occasional tendency of some marginalized individuals to side with their oppressors. It may not necessarily be a “sell-out,” so much as inadequate tools with which to comprehend and confront their own oppression.
Again we do not question what we (incorrectly) think we know—because the assumption itself is all too often below the level of conscious thought. Thus, again, classical (one might call them Cartesian) concepts of reason are inaccurate and irrelevant. Meanwhile, this unquestioned false knowledge influences behavior on multiple levels. Left undisturbed, it subconsciously dictates the ways we treat one another.
In her lecture, Fritter juxtaposes “cultural domination” versus the “power to contest.”12 The example she uses is a woman working in a large office. If the office boss has the power to “sack [terminate] her at will,” “his” treatment of her will be different than if he does not have that power. Crucially, it will make a difference even if they have a good relationship and the boss would never actually “sack” her. That difference is in the “level of domination” the boss has. The employee has greater “power to contest” wrongs at multiple levels.
Another example Fricker uses is the passage of laws in the United Kingdom making marital rape a crime. Even in marriages where the husband would never dream of doing such a thing, the level of domination was materially affected.13
Therefore, she declares, “Contesting has to be propped up by certain sorts of institutional methods. . . . When contesters contest, they need to be heard without prejudice, and they need to be understood.”14 The right to contest unfair treatment, she tells us, should rank on the list of inalienable human rights.
Referring once more to the Unitarian Universalist Association’s 2017 Southern Region lead hiring fiasco—had “the power to contest” been universal and accepted within the UUA, the controversy would arguably not have exploded in the first place. But the only people paying attention to the uneven playing field up to that point were those adversely affected by it.
Epistemic justice is, Fricker informs us, a social capability. It requires an acknowledgment of community. We must recognize the currents of our community in order to recognize:
“the difficulties, the pressures which are against people and groups against whom prejudice tends to operate, as regards their actual ability to contribute to the [community’s] pool of concepts, meanings, ideas, beliefs, knowledge—from their own experience, from their own point of view. That is a social epistemic function,[italics mine] rather than an individualistic one.”15
Epistemic capability, then, the healing of testimonial and hermeneutical epistemic injustice, is a social process. That makes it, I suggest, a responsibility of liberal religious community.
Philosophers use big words, of course. But that should not hide from us the foundational nature of the concept Fricker describes. Epistemic injustice is a comprehensive lens on just and unjust relationships of all kinds. Without even realizing it, we assume something about someone—that just isn’t true. We assume it—think we know it—because that is the silent message society has sent us throughout our lives. And the assumed knowledge, itself, prevents us from understanding marginalized experience, no matter how earnest the attempt to explain it. Testimonial epistemic injustice is no more than that. Testimonial epistemic justice, then, can come down to one word: “Listen!”16
By the same token, we may be unable to grapple with an all-too-real injustice against someone, because society has not yet developed language by which to understand that injustice. Human knowing is very much a matter of developing language by which to know. That is what hermeneutical epistemic injustice is. The words we use to describe these injustices are complicated, but the issues are basic.
We need to take seriously the relationship between epistemic injustice and a culture of domination. For people who look and love the same way I do (that is, straight, white, and male), it is convenient to keep right on making erroneous (but advantageous for me) assumptions about marginalized members of my community. I don’t have to risk my own discomfort or loss of hierarchy.
But such comfort-hoarding is ethically irresponsible. Once we understand what is really happening, we cannot ethically justify it—or continue it.
Taking this a step further, what about words that contribute to the false knowledge in testimonial epistemic injustice, the inadequate understandings of hermeneutical injustice, and the cultural domination they perpetuate? I suggest that those very words also need to be named—and in fact, have been named.
In his book, How Propaganda Works, Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley observes that broad and equal distribution of knowledge is essential for a healthy democracy.17 To the extent that propaganda and biased political discourse impede the distribution of knowledge, such violation constitutes what he calls “epistemic harm.”18 (Fricker applies a slightly different term, “epistemic wrong.”)19 Stanley further notes that “certain kinds of epistemic harm have their source in prejudice [italics his] rather than (for example) lack of resources.”20
This agrees with Fricker, whom he cites. Testimonial justice and injustice are not subject to distributive justice and injustice. “The inherent worth and dignity of every person” should be universally recognized. Thus, refusal to grant equal respect and credibility to a person of marginalized identity, once we understand the concept, is unethical.21
This provides a solid foundation to explore the language by which inequality and injustice are sustained. The socially privileged can live in confidence that their life experiences will consistently be heeded and understood. That is not the case with marginalized identities. The very nature of marginalization dictates that their lives are less “knowable” than the lives of the culturally dominant.
We need to keep these concepts in mind through Part III of this book, as we study the various writings produced by Unitarian Universalism’s Gadfly fringe. Those writings are chock-full of epistemic injustices, inflicted upon the most vulnerable among us.
As ethical, religious people, Unitarian Universalists are called to listen to the accounts of all our siblings. Justice and respect should never be optional. Any time our prejudice or less-than-fully-informed opinions become more important than the person in front of us, we are missing the ethical, religious mark. As poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou famously noted, “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: In subsequent chapters, A Gadfly Report examines, in detail, the relationship between epistemic justice and current controversies in the Unitarian Universalist Association. Suffice to say that the revision to Article II in our Bylaws parallels–although it does not directly utilize–advancing knowledge, around the dynamics and language of marginalization, that gave rise to a philosophy of epistemic injustice. More briefly put, our Bylaws need this revision to better reflect our advancing knowledge of the dynamics of injustice. Again, I explain this in greater detail in my book.
1 Macpherson, Sir William of Cluny: The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, Presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State for the Home Department by Command of Her Majesty, February, 1999, found online at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7c2af540f0b645ba3c7202/4262.pdf
2 Fricker, Miranda: “Epistemic Equality” Social Equality UCT YouTube Channel, September 10, 2014, beginning at time mark 13:28, found online at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8zoN6GghXk. (Miranda Fricker vid.) “1 Miranda Fricker – Epistemic Equality?”
3 Fricker, IBID. time mark 19:21.
4 Kidd, Ian James, Medina, Jose, and Pohlhaus, Gaile Jr.: “Introduction,” The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, London and New York, Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2017, pg. 1.
5 Fricker, Miranda: Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007, pgs. 147ff.
6 Websters’ New Unabridged Dictionary, New York, Barnes & Noble Press, 2003 edition, “hermeneutics.”
7 Fricker, “Epistemic Equality” lecture, IBID., time stamp 10:14.
8 Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, IBID., pgs. 140-150.
9 In supporting gay rights, my mother noted that in her theater experience, “At least the homosexual men weren’t always mauling you.”
10 Fricker, Epistemic Injustice IBID., pg. 151.
11 Fricker, Epistemic Injustice IBID., Pg. 148.
12 Fricker, “Epistemic Equality” lecture, time stamp 32:00.
13 Fricker, “Epistemic Equality” lecture, time stamp 29:30.
14 Fricker, “Epistemic Equality” lecture, time stamp 33:40.
15 Fricker, “Epistemic Equality” lecture, time stamp 39:15.
16 Worthy of note is that the cover photo of The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice shows only a person’s hand with the word, “Listen,” marked on the palm.
17 Stanley, Jason: How Propaganda Works, Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 2015, pg. 12.
18 Stanley, IBID., pg. XVIII.
19 Fricker, Epistemic Injustice IBID., pg. 21.
20 Stanley, IBID.
21 Fricker draws a distinction between what she calls “distributive injustice” and testimonial injustice. Such goods and services as wealth and health care, for example, are subject to economic and social currents. A wealthy person with good health care is not unethical simply because of those advantages. (Though there is a moral call to acknowledge them and work for equality.) Such advantages/disadvantages are, to some degree, beyond the total control of even the most privileged. Testimonial injustice, however, is not subject to the same societal currents. Everyone deserves respect and a reasonable level of respect and credibility (the inherent dignity and worthiness of each person?) There is, by rights, an unlimited supply. And refusal to grant that respect and credibility, once one is aware of the dynamics, is simply unethical. (Fricker, Epistemic Injustice IBID., pgs. 19-20.)
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