An Epistemology of Solidarity: Coalition in the Face of Ignorance

Abstract

Privileged ignorance about the structures of domination consists not merely in the absence of knowledge, but in the positive production of false information, of encouragement to look away and to actively not-know. I argue that for a person subject to privileged ignorance, attempting to remedy this ignorance by seeking more knowledge brings its own challenges: We have good reason to think that the cognitive distortions that produce privileged ignorance continue to affect a person’s knowledge production even when she becomes aware that they exist. Instead, the epistemically and morally responsible behavior for people privileged with respect to a system of oppression is to interrogate the purpose and provenance of their ignorance and to practice critical trust in the experts (i.e., those who are oppressed under that system). Learning to trust wisely is good for liberatory politics because it demands that we cultivate relationships of trustworthiness. It is also better for knowledge production than pursuing epistemic autonomy, which either vastly constricts what we can know or causes us to overestimate our epistemic abilities in ways that reinforce the cognitive distortions of privilege. Evaluating what we think we know in terms of narrative significance—Whose story does this advance? Which characters are undeveloped? What future narratives does this enable, and which does it foreclose?— in addition to truth-value can offer a solution to paralyzing skepticism and can spur coalitional political action in the face of uncertainty.