“Anti-blackness, Racial Passing, and the Human as Ethical Being”

This talk reads Adrian Piper’s performance piece, Food for the Spirit, and interrogates the relationship between the logics of race/gender passing and the artist’s reading of a Kantian ethics of knowing. Such an act depends upon an intricate relationship between a priori or pure transcendent ideas or concepts, such as the concept of “personhood,” and the knower’s perception/intuition of the world. In Food for the Spirit, Piper simultaneously presents herself as the object to be known and a person capable of knowing. She does so by presenting herself naked, in front of a mirror, reading the Critique of Pure Reason as an instruction manual. Harvey argues that Piper’s presentation interrupts the process of knowing in the moment that the observer (she or we) notes her blackness. The black woman as figure, standing in for the universal “person” in the afterlife of slavery, appears as intangible, and the images blur and fade. Harvey, thus, asks after the conditions of possibility of knowing and the possibilities of a practice of knowing that does not insist on black objectivity as the unstable other.

“You Aren’t Really Black, You Aren’t Really White: Racial Denials and Epistemic Injustice in the Black-White Multiracial Community”

Autobiographies of multiracial people often describe racial denials. A racial denial occurs when a person’s assertion of their racial identity, e.g. “I am Black,” is challenged or called into doubt. While monoracial individuals can generally assert their race without being challenged (e.g. “I am Black” or “I am White”), a multiracial person may be met with the rejoinder, “You aren’t really Black” or “You aren’t really White.” 

How should we understand racial denials? Utilizing Miranda Fricker’s feminist work on epistemic injustice, this essay argues that some racial denials arise because our existing racial vocabulary has gaps, and these gaps exist—at least in part—because of the marginalization of multiracial people. In addition, this essay sketches a number of general implications for accounts of epistemic injustice, ultimately broadening our understanding of its historical pathways and the ways that thinkers can be treated unjustly. 

Ultimately, this essay’s aim is threefold. First, it aims to understand the nature of racial denials. Second, it demonstrates that attending to the lives and experiences of multiracial people can yield important insights into the nature of epistemic injustice. Third, by focusing on an issue which matters to multiracial people, this essay aims to—in a limited way—redress the marginalization of multiracial lives within philosophical theory.

‘I say therefore I am’: Trans Identities and Testimonial Injustice

In this talk, we address arguments by trans exclusionary feminists (TEFs) against gender self-identification and find that they embody both testimonial and hermeneutical forms of epistemic injustice. We also respond to the alleged circularity problem of self-identification raised by Katharine Jenkins, and examine Talia Mae Bettcher’s claim that the epistemic nature of first-person authority renders it unreliable (and that FPA should consequently be understood as a strictly ethical phenomenon.)

“Gramáticas de lo inaudito: towards a Decolonial Approach to Memory after Trauma”

My paper will offer a brief recount of the work on historical and liberatory memory that has led me to approach what I call “traumatic forms of violence,” including those connected to coloniality, from a philosophical perspective, and towards a decolonial revision of our conceptions of history and memory. My main claim, in dialogue with the literature on epistemic injustice and epistemic violence, and particularly with what Miranda Fricker describes as “hermeneutical injustice,” is that there are forms of violence that, in their abominable originality, demand the production of their own grammars and frameworks of meaning in order to become truly audible and thus historically legible and politically recognizable.