Collins and Ahmed the Racialization of Experience

Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Epistemology

1. Some fundamental distinctions are needed in assessing black feminist epistemology

a. Epistemology: [] an overarching theory of knowledge. It investigates the standards
used to assess knowledge or why we believe what we believe to be true. (252)
b. Paradigms: interpretive frameworks used to explain phenomena.
i. For example, intersectionalitythe notion that the experience of oppression is
determined by multiple sourcesis a paradigm.
c. Methodology: the broad principles of how to conduct research and how interpretive
paradigms are to be applied (252).
d. Social epistemology: points to the ways in which power relations shape who is
believed and why.
i. For Collins, there are multiple, competing epistemologies out theremultiple
standards of evidence determining what is true, what or who a credible source
of knowledge is, as well as principles for how to interpret evidence. Her insight
is that certain epistemologies come to be validated over others, and she thinks
that this validation occurs based on who is in power.
e. Knowledge validation processes: In order for an assertion to count as knowledge, it
must cohere with certain norms that have been established. (These norms can concern
the manner in which something is articulated, the method through which a conclusion
was arrived at, the content of what is articulated, etc.).
i. Dominant group validation processes: The processes through which a dominant
group ensures that their interpretation of realitythe hierarchy they posit
between themselves and subordinate groupsremains in place. Anything that
calls into question such dominance will be invalid.
1. Experts, who have been empowered by the dominant group, evaluate
the validity of knowledge.
2. The larger population, which oftentimes requires the expert community
to validate knowledge that coheres with their beliefs.
a. Question: can the University insulate itself, grant itself a certain
autonomy from the populous? Is there a virtue to bubbles?
ii. Subordinate group validation processes: The processes through which a
subordinate group develops an interpretation of reality that (i) allows it to
understand the dominant groups interpretation; (ii) how to subvert that
interpretation; (iii) how to survive in the world that the dominant group has
constructed.
2. Most of this chapter consists of Collins reconstruction the knowledge validation processes that
are characteristic of black female life in the United States. Her claim is that there is embedded in
black womens experience is a theory of knowledge and truth that calls into question the theory
of knowledge and truth prevalent among white people. Much of the chapter is about the
conflict that black women face in the university: the conflict between the knowledge validation
processes that were familiar to them growing up and the know validation processes that are
dominant within academic discourse.
a. Positivism is the epistemology dominant in the social sciences. It aims to create
scientific descriptions of reality by producing objective generalizations (255). In other
words, positivism attempts to abstract everything that is subjectively contingent about
the researcher, in order to observe the object of study from a neutral standpoint. The
positivist thinks that its possible to reach an Archimedean point, an angle of vision that
isnt inflected by the interests and values of the researcher.
i. Subject-object dualism: a distancing of the research from her or his object of
study (255) that comes about by defining the researcher as a subject with full
human subjectivity and by objectifying the object of study
ii. The no emo principle: a proposition cannot be justified because it coheres with
my lives experience.
iii. Value neutrality: a proposition cannot be justified on the grounds that it coheres
with my values.
iv. Adversarial debate: in order for something to be true it needs to survive rational
assault.
b. What Collins suggests in these pages is that all 4 features of the knowledge validation
process characteristic of positivismthe dominant epistemology in the social sciences
make a cruel demand on black women: Such criteria ask African-American women to
objectify ourselves, devalue our emotional life, displace our motivation for furthering
knowledge about Black women, and confront in an adversarial relationship those with
more social, economic, and professional power (256).
c. By contrast, Collins thinks that one can identify an alternative epistemology with its own
standards of validity embedded in the community of black women.
i. Lived experience Implicit in black womens knowledge claims is a distinction
between abstract knowledge and wisdom. What characterizes wisdom is that it
is a form of knowledge that coheres with ones lived experience: For most
African American women those individuals who have lived through the
experiences about which they claim to be experts are more believable and
credible than tho]se who have merely read or thought about such experiences
(257).
1. This implies a critique of subject-object dualism. For ones epistemic
authority here is increased by ones connection to the object.
ii. The use of dialogue in assessing knowledge claims The claims to knowledge
made by black women are not subject to eviscerating critique. However, they do
need to be tested by the group as a whole.
iii. An ethic of caring Personal expressiveness, emotion, and empathy are criteria
in evaluating the validity of knowledge claims.
1. For example, call-and-response in Church.
iv. An ethic of personal accountability According to this criterion, in order to be
genuinely valid, ones claim to knowledge needs to be backed up by a sense of
ownership or responsibility for the claim.
1. In assessing the knowledge claims of others, this implies that a
knowledge of their background and bio are salient (see 265)
 d. Three audiences that black feminist thinkers need to answer to
i. The community Namely, black women attempting to cultivate a black feminist
standpoint are in some sense required to test the validity of their claims against
the lived experience of the oppressed community that they belong to.
ii. The community of black women scholars As more black women enter
academia, there is an imperative to dialogue with this group. The trouble is that
one has to deny the epistemology of black feminist thought in order to be legit
in the academic community.
iii. The dominant group in charge of institutions of higher learning
e. Overall, Collinss essay implies a move from epistemological universalism to
epistemological pluralism
i. Epistemological universalism: the notion that there are a single set of standards
or criteria that statements need to adhere to in order to account for knowledge.
ii. Epistemological pluralisms: the idea that there are only partial and mutable
criteria for evaluating knowledgethat the criteria we use to validate
knowledge claims is a product of histories that are shared and changing.
iii. See bottom of 270.

Ahemd, A Phenomenology of Whiteness

Introductory

1. A point of entry In this paper, Ahmed is attempting to make a contribution to the project of
anti-racism by thinking about a specific experience that racism has produced. Namely, she wants
to analyze what it means to inhabit a white world as a non-white body.
2. Her method Ahmeds method is phenomenology. She wants to examine how the experience
of a non-white body is inflected, determined, and constrained by moving in white spaces, i.e.
spaces where bodies that are coded as white have certain privileges that non-white bodies dont
have. (Whiteness could be described as an ongoing and unfinished history, which orientates
bodies in specific directions, affecting how they take up space (150). Her ultimate hope is to
interrogate what whiteness is, what a white space is, and how whiteness functions.
3. As she points out, however, its very difficult to develop a phenomenology of whiteness
(phenomenology: a description of phenomena, or appearances) given the fact that whiteness is
a category of experience that disappears as a category through experience (150). In other
words, the chief characteristic of whiteness in general and white spaces in particular is that they
arent marked as such.

Orientations

4. In order to understand this particular case of embodied experiencebeing a non-white body in

a white spaceAhmed begins by examining what it means to take up space in general (i.e. prior
to considering what it would mean to take up space in a racialized setting).
a. Her first observation, via Husserl, is that bodily experience is characterized by
orientation: we are always directed, from a specific location or standpoint, toward
some objects and not othersand were directed first and foremost to things with
which we are involved. What you come into contact with is shaped by what you do
(152). This is what establishes a sense of familiarity with the world: if youre a
 philosopher doing philosophy the most salient aspects of your environment will be the
writing table.

Whiteness as Orientation

5. Ahmeds basic point is that when you are a non-white body in a white world, its impossible to
be as seamlessly enmeshed with and familiar with that world: your experience of that world is
inflected by an awareness of how you are being viewed.
a. Fanons smokes. He feels a desire to smoke, that desire generates a corporeal schema
(an outline or a plan) that orients him to his environment (if Im going to smoke I know
that the matches are in the drawer, and Ill have to lean back slightly, etc., etc.). The
point is that a certain self-consciousness about the possibility of moving attends him.
6. Whiteness is an orientation that puts certain things within reach. By objects we would include
not just physical objects, but also styles, capacities, aspirations, techniques, habits (154).

Habits Worlds

7. In this section, Ahmed wants to explore how public spaces take on the very qualities of the
bodies that inhabit them: how public spaces become racialized.
a. The key quote is on page 156, in which Merleau-Ponty describes how when he is leaning
on his desk with his hands, the hands become the sole objects of his attention and the
rest of the body trails behind them like the tail of a commet, becoming unnoticed.
b. Much in the same way, that the habitual body, or the body that goes unnoticed, trails
behind an action, Ahmed wants to say that whiteness functions in a similar fashion.
i. White bodies are habitual insofar as the trail behind actions: they do not get
stressed in their encounters with objects or others, as their whiteness goes
unnoticed. Whiteness would be what lags behind; white bodies do not have to
face their whiteness; they are not orientated towards it, and this not is what
allows whiteness to cohere, as that which bodies are orientated around. When
bodies lag behind, then they extend their reach (156).
ii. So the thought here seems to be that white bodies are those bodies that have
the privilege to move and extend themselves without self-consciousness.