The Question of Resilience
Imagine a white woman who has critically interrogated the construction of Black criminalityFootnote 1 and its harmful perpetuation in the media and beyond. She understands the way this stereotype has been used to marginalize and oppress Black people. She knows that she is more likely to be attacked by a white man than a Black man, and yet she still reflexively clutches her purse when a Black man passes her on the street.Footnote 2 Or consider that this same woman has studied the oversexualization of Black women, learning how it has promoted their rape and forced sterilization, as well as harmful perceptions of Black motherhood (Roberts Reference Roberts1997).Footnote 3 She has also encountered evidence showing women of color are more likely than white women to be sexually assaulted. Despite her rational demystification of the racist stereotype of Black promiscuity,Footnote 4 she found herself less upset and vocally active when multiple allegations against R. Kelly came into the public spotlight and #MeToo shifted its focus from white women to women of color.Footnote 5
This article explores why harmful epistemic practices and resources remain influential even after they have been critically interrogated or rationally demystified.Footnote 6 To begin formulating an answer to this question, I explore the affective dimension of resilient epistemological systems. Specifically, I argue that responsible epistemic practice requires affective engagement with nondominant experiences.Footnote 7 The argument proceeds in three stages. To begin, I outline Kristie Dotson's account of “epistemological resilience,” the phenomenon whereby an “epistemological system” remains stable despite counterevidence or attempts to alter it. Then, I show how Dotson's framework can be expanded to illuminate the role of affect in maintaining resilience. To do so, I develop an account of “affective numbness,”Footnote 8 a multifaceted mechanism through which epistemological resilience is maintained. As I argue, affective numbness can promote epistemological resilience in at least two ways. First, it can reinforce harmful stereotypes even after these stereotypes have been rationally demystified.Footnote 9 To illustrate, I examine the stereotype of Black criminality as it relates to false confessions (Lackey Reference Lackey and McCain2018). Second, affective numbness can encourage “epistemic appropriation” (Davis Reference Davis2018). I demonstrate this claim by examining the appropriation of “intersectionality” and #MeToo by white culture.Footnote 10 Finally, I conclude that resisting harmful resilience requires “affective resistance,” or efforts that specifically target numbness via different kinds of affective engagement. I consider Kantian “disinterestedness” as a candidate.
I. The Problem of “Noticing”
In “Conceptualizing Epistemic Oppression,” Dotson offers an account of epistemic oppression, or the “persistent epistemic exclusion that hinders one's contribution to knowledge production” within an epistemological system (Dotson Reference Dotson2014, 1).Footnote 11 Drawing on an order-of-change heuristic in organizational literature, Dotson posits three forms of epistemic oppression distinguished by the difficulties encountered when addressing each. According to the picture, first- and second-order epistemic exclusions are exemplified by Miranda Fricker's heavily theorized notions of testimonial and hermeneutical injustices; they are caused by the inefficiency and insufficiency of epistemic resources respectively (Fricker's Reference Fricker2007).Footnote 12 Dotson says these exclusions can be addressed while leaving intact systemic values or governing rules, aiming to alter only how these values or rules are achieved or followed.Footnote 13 In contrast, addressing third-order epistemic exclusion requires altering the “rules of the game” because it is caused by the inadequacy of epistemic resources and the preservation of those same resources.Footnote 14 These different orders of exclusion are not mutually exclusive, but they face different kinds of challenges.Footnote 15 The central obstacle for the third-order case is “epistemic resilience,”Footnote 16 or the phenomenon whereby an epistemological system remains stable despite counterevidence or attempts to alter it.
As Dotson notes, epistemic resilience is not always bad because we need epistemological systems to be relatively stable insofar as we rely on them to make sense of our world. But when such resilience “upholds and preserves” (Dotson Reference Dotson2014, 32) inadequate resources that harm some knowers by thwarting their contribution to knowledge-production, we should resist it. In these cases, “one's epistemic resources and the epistemological system within which those resources prevail [are] wholly [my emphasis] inadequate” for the task of resistance. Rather, one must proceed from “outside” the set of resources since the inadequacy is so thoroughgoing (129).Footnote 17
Characteristic of third-order epistemic exclusion, then, is the skill needed to go outside of one's epistemic resources to contend with resilience. Dotson says this is a distinctively epistemic skill because “going outside” just means being able to put one's resources into question (for the sake of modifying their underlying structure).Footnote 18 Now the central worry concerning third-order resistance emerges: how can one put into question epistemic norms that provide the very conditions for such an interrogation in the first place? One is epistemically dependent upon what one hopes to change; and, as Audre Lorde famously argued, “the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house” (Lorde Reference Lorde1984/2007). Countering harmful resilience seems impossible, or at least very challenging to conceptualize practically.Footnote 19 Given our deep reliance upon the inadequate epistemic resources that preserve governing rules, the central obstacle for resisting third-order harm is “noticing” the inadequacy of these resources in the first place.Footnote 20 Insofar as my interest here lies in better understanding and resisting racism and sexism, my own analysis examines an epistemological system of “white supremacy patriarchy,” or those epistemic resources and de facto epistemic norms that are inadequate because they assume and preserve white supremacy and patriarchy.Footnote 21
Let's look at an example. Suppose a white woman is purchasing a light peach-colored bra labeled “nude.” For our discussion, it is important to point out that it will be difficult for her to notice that “nude” is an inadequate concept because it causes no dissonance with her experience. This is precisely because the epistemological system is structured in favor of white subjectivity; its resilience depends upon a governing rule of white neutrality that is concealed by common usages of concepts like “nude,” usages that harmfully reinforce and preserve such problematic assumptions. In what follows, I show it is often affective failures that prevent us from noticing the inadequacy of exclusionary dominant resources. Resisting resilience will therefore require contending with affect, and specifically with something I call “affective numbness.”
II. Affective Numbness
Although much theorizing has been done regarding epistemic lacunas and how they thwart suitable collective understanding, less has been done regarding the “affective gaps” that do so.Footnote 22 In this section, I turn to the affective dimension of our knowing practices. In doing so, I align myself with many feminist epistemologists (Anzaldua Reference Anzaldúa1987/2007; Jaggar Reference Jaggar1989; Lorde Reference Lorde, Abelove, Barale and Halperin1993; Alcoff Reference Alcoff1999; Collins Reference Collins2000; Shotwell Reference Shotwell2011; Pohlhaus Reference Pohlhaus2012; Dotson Reference Dotson2012; Medina Reference Medina2019 and others) who want to theorize knowledge, or the “epistemic” more broadly, as it connects to emotion, skill, social situation, and embodiment.Footnote 23 On these pictures, we need to consider more than traditional cognitive epistemic resourcesFootnote 24 to make sense of our knowing practices; “affective,” “imaginative,” and other resources also have epistemic salience.
Within epistemologies of ignorance, “epistemic resources” will also include those resources that promote knowledge-attribution, even if they fail to promote knowledge-possession because of problematic and inadequate standards for what counts as “knowledge” (see note 11). In particular, my analysis highlights those resources assumed to be knowledge-producing when they are in fact ignorance-(re-)producing due to racism and sexism. Affective numbness is one of these resources. It refers to the phenomenon whereby one fails to emotionally or “affectively” engage with nondominant experiences, rendering one emotionally unavailable to or unreachable by those experiences. Although some might think being impartial or neutral requires a kind of affective numbness, I show how such an approach can fail on epistemic grounds, reproducing ignorance as a result. However, I'm not assuming affective numbness is always bad, or that any noncognitive epistemic resource is always good or bad. Sometimes an epistemic resource may be valuable for knowledge-possession in one case, while inhibiting for knowledge-possession in another, and affective epistemic resources may be especially vulnerable to playing this dual function.
For example, being affectively numbed is sometimes an important strategy for preserving a corrective viewpoint: if an abusive husband is crying and begging his wife not to leave him, becoming affectively numbed toward his pain might be a necessary survival strategy for his wife to keep the reality of his abuse to the forefront. Or, we can imagine a group-based strategy of people of color intentionally numbing themselves to “white guilt” and “white tears” in order to focus on the urgent work of resistance that such guilt and tears might distract from.Footnote 25 In contrast to these cases, I am concerned with situations in which nondominant experiences that would pose frictionFootnote 26 and correctives to dominant epistemic norms are rendered irrelevant to judgment due (at least in part) to affective numbness (which is both itself a dominant epistemic norm, but also embedded in other dominant epistemic norms like stereotyping and exclusionary conceptual framings). Such numbness makes “noticing” corrective alternatives, and also “noticing” the inadequacy of our dominant norms, especially difficult. In other words, I'm interested in those cases of affective numbness that perpetuate the status quo in racist and sexist epistemologies of ignorance. The upshot of my analysis is that countering racism and sexism requires taking seriously the epistemic role of affect (or lack thereof) in promoting knowledge and ignorance.Footnote 27
But what exactly does affective numbness consist in? I will briefly outline six characteristics that are further developed by the subsequent examples. First, the object of affective numbness is some nondominant experience, or any experience that counters the governing norms of white supremacy and patriarchy (norms often structured by white subjectivity, male subjectivity, and especially white-male subjectivity).Footnote 28 Although race and gender-identity markers mean some will have their experiences become objects of affective numbness more often than others’, even the most privileged can have nondominant experiences become the object of harmful numbness at times. Consider a young, wealthy, cis, white boy, Michael, who is crying. His father exclaims “Dry it up, boys don't cry!” In this case, it is not that his father is affectively numbed toward his son, full stop. He finds himself emotionally engaged in Michael's life more generally, celebrating his successes, and caring deeply about how his son is doing in sports, dating, school, and so on. Yet, when it comes to loss and sadness, his father fails to exhibit affective engagement with his son's experience. If “Boys don't cry” is a governing rule of patriarchal systems, then boys expressing grief will be considered a “nondominant experience” on my view, and it will be important that my account of affective numbness can capture it when thinking about how numbness promotes resilience. If I were to focus on the nondominant identity of subjects, rather than on subjects’ nondominant experiences, these kinds of cases would be elided.
Second, affective numbness is self-reflexive, that is, affective numbness can occur toward one's own nondominant experiences, as well as toward those of others. Work in trauma studies has shown that traumatic experience brings with it an onslaught of emotional content that often precludes comprehensibility. Traumatic experiences, in a very real way, cannot be made sense of. Such violence is unconceivable, unbelievable even (see Scarry Reference Scarry1987; Cvetkovich Reference Cvetkovich2003; Van der Kolk Reference Van der Kolk2014; Acosta López Reference López and del Rosario2019). Unable to conceptualize what has happened (or continues to happen), many trauma victims develop numbness toward memories of assault, abuse, experiences of bias, and so on, as well as implement strategies of numbness to avoid the possibility of being destructively emotionally overwhelmed in the future. I want my account of affective numbness to be able to capture these kinds of cases, too. Because traumatic experiences hold potential for transforming and combating the resilience of oppressive norms by illuminating their harm, combating the numbness that prevents these stories from coming to the surface is crucial.
Third, affective numbness can occur when one has an experience that is either too distinct from, or too similar to, some nondominant experience. A wealthy white woman's lack of experience with gang violence, or abundance of experience with diet culture, could result in affective numbness toward others’ (or her own) salient experiences. Fourth, affective numbness can result from too little or too much exposure to a nondominant experience, such as the underexposure, in mainstream media, of Black women's vulnerability to sexual harassment, or the overexposure of Black men being murdered by the police. Fifth, affective numbness can be indicated by unresponsiveness, or exhibiting a lack of curiosity toward some nondominant experience. For example, when person after person walks by someone on the street outside of the grocery who is requesting financial help, never thinking about this person again, we have an instance of collective affective numbing toward a nondominant experience of poverty.Footnote 29 Sixth, numbness is often (and peculiarly) constituted by affective investment, namely, an affective investment in dominant experience (which occludes and renders unnoticeable nondominant interpretations). When our passerby is numbed to the person outside the store, she is simultaneously affectively invested in her own hurry, judgment, or sense of being bothered. In cases of negative stereotyping, we see this dominant affective investment work to interpret nondominant experiences through affective lenses like white paranoia, fear, or helplessness. I sometimes refer to this phenomenon as the “dominant interpretive affect” of affective numbness, and this will have special importance in the analysis that follows.
The Persistence of Stereotypes
In this section, I consider affective numbness as it relates to false confessions and the harmful stereotype that “Black and brown men are criminals.”Footnote 30 My claim is that this stereotype, in order to be operative, requires affective numbness toward Black and brown men as persons, interpreting them rather as objects of fear and paranoia.Footnote 31 This numbness hinders the proper consideration of alternative epistemic resources stemming from Black and brown subjectivity, resources that could illuminate the stereotype's inadequacy.Footnote 32 Please note the analysis contains triggering content concerning racial violence, sexual violence, and discrimination.
In “False Confessions and Testimonial Injustice,” Jennifer Lackey puts forward a view of “agential testimonial injustice” that can occur in two ways, either through obtaining testimony in ways that subvert or deny epistemic agency (by coercion, manipulation, or deception, for example), or through believing someone only when they are stripped of epistemic agency. She specifically looks at men of color who confess to crimes they did not commit. In order to appropriately consider the stakes, let's look at one of the many examples Lackey uses:
Sarah Appleby and Saul Kassin discuss the case of Juan Rivera, who was convicted of the rape and murder of an eleven-year-old girl in Waukegan, Illinois on the basis of his confession, even after DNA testing of semen at the scene excluded him. “The state's theory of why DNA belonging to someone other than the defendant was found in the victim was that the young girl had prior consensual sex with an unknown male, after which time Rivera raped her, failed to ejaculate, and then killed her” [Appleby and Kassin Reference Sarah C. and Kassin2016, 127]. The fact that Rivera was convicted of the child's murder shows that the state's outrageous theory was regarded as more credible than the possibility that he confessed to a crime he didn't commit. In other words, a single confession trumped evidence that would otherwise be taken to be decisively exculpatory. (Lackey Reference Lackey2020, 52–53)
Importantly, the evidence in favor of Rivera's innocence was not only DNA. He was young, a former student in a special-education program, and had been under interrogation by detectives for four days, for the duration of which he denied any knowledge of the crime. But when the detectives became accusatory, he eventually broke down and nodded when asked if he had raped and killed the girl.Footnote 33 He continued to recant this testimony in the months that followed. Crucially, then, Rivera is considered a “truth-teller” insofar as his (false) testimony is being taken by jurors as sufficient evidence for conviction. But since this testimony was only obtained coercively under conditions that subverted agency, he's only considered a truth-teller to the extent he has no agency.
Someone might object that Rivera was believed not because he was stripped of agency, but because he was confirming what the jurors had expected or wanted to hear. If he had said of his own free will that he was guilty, then they would have also believed him. But this is precisely the point: namely, Rivera is only believed when he confirms a false stereotype; it is the false stereotype that becomes epistemically salient in the formulation of a judgment, no matter what Rivera says or doesn't say. In other words, when Rivera confirmed the stereotype through his false confession, it was not he who was believed, but the stereotype that was assumed. The fact that he was coerced and manipulated is irrelevant to the jurors’ judgment (despite our knowledge about the negative epistemic effects of torture [O'Mara Reference O'Mara2015]). Black and brown criminality thus builds into its very operation a lack of epistemic agency attributed to men of color by providing a default interpretation of these men as monstrous objects of white paranoia and fear, rather than as persons with epistemically salient experiences.Footnote 34
This objectification just is, crucially, a numbness toward men of color as subjects with their own needs for protection, their own desires, goals, and experiences, and their own needs for charitable (or evidentiary appropriate) interpretation.Footnote 35 Such numbness is perpetuated through an excessive representation in dominant culture of men of color as monstrous, which contains its own affective content (or, the “dominant interpretive affect” of affective numbness). It's not that jurors were numb, full stop, when examining the evidence; rather, their interpretive lens carried destructive (and distracting) affective content because the perception that Black and brown men are threats to public safety is embedded with paranoia and fear, and this paranoia and fear prevent affective engagement with Rivera's point of view.Footnote 36
Or, jurors feel Rivera to be dangerous.Footnote 37 And how can Rivera be both vulnerable and dangerous? To preserve their way of knowing, jurors become unresponsive to Rivera's corrective testimony because being affected by Rivera's vulnerability to a hostile, racist justice system would be to reject the stereotype and its accompanying paranoia and fear (or to notice the inadequacy of the racist interpretive lens). In other words, affective attunement to Rivera would have required a confrontation with (or noticing of) white supremacy. Returning to Dotson's framework, it would have required a third-order change. But enacting such change would have required more than intellectual or “rational” engagement; the jurors were not at a loss for evidence that should have been sufficient to exculpate Rivera. Given that stereotypes often operate under the threshold of consciousness, the conclusion that we must also target affect to resist harmful resilience should not be too surprising.
Sadly, Rivera's case is not the exception but the norm for how false testimonies by men of color receive uptake in our legal system.Footnote 38 This is especially problematic because the stereotype is preserved and more deeply reinforced (the very mechanism Dotson attributes as the cause of harmful resilience) through greater numbers of false convictions. As with Rivera's case, often the stakes could not be higher, and failing to feel the urgency of this work requires its own form of numbness.
Epistemic Appropriation
In this section, I consider a second way by which affective numbness works to promote harmful resilience, namely by promoting the epistemic appropriation of resistant epistemic resources. Specifically, I consider how intersectionality has been epistemically appropriated by white feminism and white culture more broadly. I do not want to suggest there is a universal experience of discrimination or sexual assault by women of color, but I do want to suggest that such experiences are often caricatured within white supremacy patriarchy such that they fail to be considered as experiences that contain all of the complexities dominant experiences are afforded. Please note the analysis contains triggering content concerning sexual violence and racial discrimination.
According to Emmalon Davis, “epistemic appropriation” occurs when 1. epistemic resources generated in the margins are “are overtly detached from the marginalized knowers responsible for their production” and so the role of marginalized contributors to knowledge-production is obfuscated, that is, “epistemic detachment,” and 2. “when epistemic resources developed within, but detached from, the margins are utilized in dominant discourses in ways that disproportionately benefit the powerful. That is to say, the benefits associated with the epistemic contributions of the marginalized are misdirected toward the comparatively privileged,” that is, “epistemic misdirection” (Davis Reference Davis2018, 703). To show that intersectionality has been epistemically appropriated, let's first consider what intersectionality as a concept was intended to illuminate.Footnote 39
In what is sometimes referred to as the founding text of “intersectionality,” “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics,” Kimberlé Crenshaw examines the legal invisibility of Black women (Crenshaw Reference Crenshaw1989).Footnote 40 The erasure of Black women's experience in antidiscrimination law, Crenshaw argues, is perpetuated by a single-axis framework that treats race and gender as mutually exclusive categories. In one case she considers, DeGraffenreid v. General Motors, five Black women charged General Motors (GM) with perpetuating past discrimination against Black women through their seniority system, which, in a seniority-based layoff, fired all Black women hired after 1970. This particularly disadvantaged Black women because GM did not hire Black women prior to 1964. GM argued they had hired women prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, albeit white women. Therefore, sex discrimination was not relevant. The race discrimination claim was also dismissed through the court's recommendation that it be consolidated with another case alleging race-discrimination against GM by Black men (who were hired for very different kinds of jobs than Black women). The court reasoned that the plaintiffs must state a cause of action “for race discrimination, sex discrimination, or alternatively either, but not a combination of both” (Crenshaw Reference Crenshaw1989, 141). Crenshaw summarizes the import of such a ruling: “under this view, Black women are protected only to the extent that their experiences coincide with those of either of the two groups. Where their experiences are distinct, Black women can expect little protection . . .” (139).
Equipped with analyses of cases like these, Crenshaw puts forward the concept of “intersectionality” to make legible experiences of multiple discrimination, and to thereby illuminate the inadequacy of dominant, single-axis conceptions.Footnote 41 Unfortunately, this aim has sometimes been limited and even undermined by how the concept has traveled, or by its “buzzword” status.Footnote 42 According to a more recent interview with Crenshaw on the podcast Another Round, she says the term is often “used in ways that undermine the point” (Crenshaw Reference Crenshaw2017, 24:08). As Kathy Davis notes, one reason the concept “buzzes” is because the crossroads metaphor associated with intersectionalityFootnote 43 is broadly applicable (Davis Reference Davis2008). One byproduct of intersectional theory has thus resulted in the idea that “everyone is intersectional” (Ehrenreich Reference Ehrenreich2002–2003). But if anyone can lay claim to being intersectional, the queer, poor, white girl from Chicago, or the first-generation, white, disabled man from Poland, and so on, then we have a case of epistemic detachment in which resources generated by marginalized knowers in order to illuminate differential harm are being detached from those knowers. As Nancy Ehrenreich notes, this is “dangerously depoliticizing, for the logical implication of a notion that everyone is oppressed is that no one is” (Ehrenreich Reference Ehrenreich2002–2003, 271).Footnote 44
It might not be the case that generalizing the applicability of intersectionality necessitates the assumption that “everyone is intersectional”; rather, such a generalization might be guided by a desire to look at the multiplicity of ways oppression and privilege intersect and inflect each other. However, the fact that the inadequate legal framework being critiquedFootnote 45 by Crenshaw is left unaltered while the article rises to canonical status highlights the depoliticization that can occur from unmooring the term from Black feminism. The intended purpose of showing nondominant subjects as differentially subjected to discrimination is elided due in part to the generalizing gesture.Footnote 46 Or, epistemic detachment has flattened “intersectionality” in a way that allows for legal and social structures to go largely unchanged.Footnote 47 This works generally to benefit dominant subjects who are advantaged by the resilience of racist and sexist structures, and so we also have a case of epistemic misdirection.Footnote 48
We can more directly locate epistemic misdirection through an accompanying intersectional analysis of the #MeToo movement. Tarana Burke, a Black activist from Harlem, created #MeToo in 2006 specifically for women of color who were victims of rape and sexual abuse.Footnote 49 Yet it was only when the idea was popularized by Alyssa Milano, an Italian-American actress who prompted women to use “#MeToo” as a hashtag on social media in order to share their stories of sexual assault, that the movement went viral. Where women of color were the victims, the movement had less popular appeal. This asymmetry is apparent when one compares the media coverage of and popular engagement in the case of Harvey Weinstein, on the one hand, and R. Kelly and Bill Cosby on the other. In “#MeToo and Intersectionality: An Examination of the #MeToo Movement through the R. Kelly Scandal,” Rebecca Leung and Robert Williams provide such a comparative analysis. They note that the allegations against prominent film producer Harvey Weinstein by white actressesFootnote 50 created a “Weinstein Effect” that was unparalleled in the case against R. Kelly. The “Weinstein Effect” was a ripple effect in which, following Weinstein's resignation, numerous other white men had their reputations tarnished because of similar allegations.Footnote 51 We did not see a similar “Kelly effect,” following the multitude of accusations against R. Kelly—which extended back decades—for the kidnapping, grooming, raping, and abusing of underage Black girls.
While the #MeToo movement gathered momentum through the mainstream media coverage of the Weinstein effect, the R. Kelly scandal, and its non-famous African American female victims struggled to draw the same mainstream media attention even though their stories came out 3 months earlier than the Weinstein scandal and featured several similar circumstances. Kelly escaped the Weinstein effect, remained on RCA Records’ music roster, continued to tour and perform concerts, and enjoyed airplay on radio stations around the nation. (Leung and Williams Reference Leung and Williams2019, 358)Footnote 52
Furthermore, in comparing the case of R. Kelly with that of Bill Cosby, who was publicly ostracized for his behavior, Leung and Williams note that the media primarily shared stories of white victims even though nearly a quarter of Cosby's victims were women of color. Especially problematic is that this focus on white women enabled Cosby's defense team to claim racism as a motivating factor of his trial, using the metaphor of lynching.Footnote 53 Leung and Williams note how this even further alienated some women of color from #MeToo, as failing to support Cosby could be seen as “dividing the race.”Footnote 54 We thus have a case in which the epistemic contribution of #MeToo was epistemically detached from the women of color who initially pioneered its revolutionary potential, and then epistemically misdirected to disproportionately benefit white women. Why does this happen?Footnote 55
Tarana Burke, when interviewed for the Lifetime documentary series Surviving R. Kelly, says Black women failed to get the media attention white women did with #MeToo because of the problematic and harmful idea that “black girls don't matter. They don't matter enough, and it's proven over and over again.” What does she mean Black girls don't matter? Well, if in the case of false stereotypes, one fails to register nondominant experiences outside of one's own (very different) dominant interpretation of that experience (of threat, for example), in the case of epistemic appropriation, one registers nondominant experiences only to the extent those experiences confirm, overlap, or resonate with dominant experiences. In both cases resistant experiences fail to be considered in their own right, as different experiences worthy of consideration in and of themselves. This is just what Crenshaw teaches us with DeGraffenreid, and this is just what Burke means when she says “Black girls don't matter.” There is an unresponsiveness toward Black women's experiences as Black women's experiences.
To think about how affective numbness fits into epistemic appropriation here, let's think about the experience “being sexually assaulted as a woman of color.” There are three elements to consider, namely, being a woman, being a woman of color, and being sexually assaulted. Given that all three elements would be considered nondominant experiences under white supremacy patriarchy, it's a good candidate for examining affective numbness. Additionally, I will consider potential numbness in relation to a white woman who has experienced sexual assault herself. She thus may be numb because of dissonance, resonance, or both dissonance and resonance with nonwhite experiences of sexual assault. Let's explore each of these options.
1. She could be numb to only those aspects of the experience she doesn't share, namely, the experience of being assaulted as a nonwhite woman. Such numbness might arise because of a false stereotype at play toward women of color. Black promiscuity in which Black women are oversexualized is one candidate (Roberts Reference Roberts1997).Footnote 56 Black promiscuity is perpetuated by an overrepresentation of women of color in the media as sexualized, and an underrepresentation of women of color's sexual vulnerability. Importantly, like Black criminality, this stereotype necessitates numbness because of the dominant interpretive affect embedded within it. In this case, Black promiscuity contains affective content of white disgust or blame that precludes affective engagement with (and thus appropriate consideration of) Black women's sexual vulnerability. Armed with the stereotype, white women see themselves as purer or more innocent with respect to sexual assault than Black women, who, through the stereotype, are interpreted as “asking for it.” In this case, such a white woman might be interested in #MeToo, either self-professedly or below the threshold of consciousness, only insofar as it applies to, and is applied by, white women.
2. This white woman who has experienced sexual assault could also be numb to only those aspects of sexual assault experienced by women of color that she shares, such as being assaulted and being a woman. Regarding her being assaulted, she may be numb because of the self-reflexivity of affective numbness. Before undergoing years of therapy, she may have been guilty of not taking women's testimony about their assaults seriously because of her own response to trauma. Because she had not accepted the horror of what had happened to her, she could not accept the horror of what was happening to others. Because she needed to “not make it a big deal” in order to move through daily life without emotional overload (Van der Kolk Reference Van der Kolk2014), numbness toward her own experience precluded proper responsiveness to other women's experiences. Additionally, in regard to her being a woman, she might be numb because of the dominant interpretive affect of skepticism that accompanies stereotypes against women that they are “irrational and uncredible,” and thus not to be believed when it comes to experiences of sexual assault. She may dismiss the movement altogether as a result, although she has no special stereotype against women of color (having done a ton of both cognitive and embodied antiracism work, let's say).
3. Finally, this woman could be numb to all three nondominant aspects of the experience under consideration (being a woman, being a woman of color, and being sexually assaulted). Notice this third possibility is likely for any person who has internalized the dominant stereotype against women mentioned above, in which case revisionary testimony will fail to be appropriately considered whether one possesses the racist stereotype or not. In this last case, she might again discredit #MeToo altogether.Footnote 57
But #MeToo wasn't discredited altogether. Rather, the movement was taken seriously insofar as it was applied by and for white women, illuminating the likelihood of a false stereotype at play. #MeToo benefited white women by resisting patriarchal norms that oppressed them but failed to resist white supremacy and the distinct aspects of patriarchy that affect women of color. In so doing, #MeToo was epistemically appropriated, contributing to the resilience of racist patriarchy by obfuscating, through numbness, the very experiences #MeToo was meant to highlight.Footnote 58
Recap
So, in order to appropriately consider nondominant experiences within systems of oppression, it is not enough to know the who, what, when, where, or even the how of these experiences. Oppression, through numbness and especially through its dominant interpretive affect, works to prohibit a clear conceptualization of the harm it enacts (Scarry Reference Scarry1987; Cvetkovich Reference Cvetkovich2003; Van der Kolk Reference Van der Kolk2014; Acosta López Reference López and del Rosario2019). Despite a comprehension of the facts in Rivera's case, or the information made explicit by the lawsuits considered by Crenshaw, the resistance potential of the resources generated by Rivera and Crenshaw was severely limited. Failing to affectively engage with Rivera led not only to an immoral judgment of him as guilty (despite sufficient exculpatory evidence in his favor), but to an irrational judgment. A more epistemically responsible practice regarding resistant knowledges will thus require something more than descriptive facts; it will require feeling, or affective engagement with nondominant experiences. When such crucial affective data is lacking, divergent experiences will be precluded from posing sufficient friction with dominant resources for the sake of illuminating their inadequacy. This prevents the epistemic transformation divergent experiences seek and necessitate if they are to be taken seriously as epistemic contributions.
III. Affective Resistance
In the preceding analysis I hope to have illuminated an epistemic responsibility for our affective engagement with others. The further question then arises: What does affective resistance look like? I do not intend to answer this question satisfactorily here, as it warrants a much richer discussion than I have time and space for. But, inasmuch as the problem is affective numbness, my general suggestion is that cultivating particular kinds of affective engagement with nondominant experiences whose exclusions structure dominant epistemic resources can combat numbness by enabling the inadequacy of those resources to be revealed.Footnote 59 This is because some ways of engaging affectively put false stereotypes and other inadequate governing epistemic norms asideFootnote 60 (or at least minimize their influence), fostering the kind of “epistemic distancing” (or “putting into question” of our epistemic resources) necessary for third-order change. Affective resistance is thus a mechanism for knowing in new and better, that is, less exclusionary, ways.
Affective resistance can take many forms, which will vary depending on one's social positioning, and on whether one is combating numbness toward one's own nondominant experiences, or toward those of others. Regarding the former, therapy and art-making that work to renew victims’ capacity for ways of feeling that have been cut off as self-defense responses to trauma might be two ways to resist affectively (see Van der Kolk Reference Van der Kolk2014). Regarding numbness toward both self and others, growing affective capacities like grief, empathy, rage, hope, and pleasure will be important avenues for affective resistance (and there is already much literature on the importance of some of these affects for social justice).Footnote 61 However, I have aimed to move beyond the mere idea that the emotions we feel are epistemically valuable, to an understanding that the emotions we do not feel are also epistemically valuable. In order to confront affective numbness and get to these other emotions, I hope to show in what follows that developing “disinterestedness” as an affective tool of engagement might be a good first candidate for affective resistance, especially for combating the dominant interpretive affect aspect of numbness that accompanies false stereotypes.Footnote 62
Disinterestedness, drawing loosely on the Kantian concept, refers to a form of affective engagement that is free of (self-)interest, or, on my less optimistic view, is a form of affective engagement that contains at least less (self-)interest than usual. My own use of the term approximates George Dickie's revisiting of the theme in aesthetics literature (Dickie Reference Dickie1964). According to Dickie, disinterestedness is really about attention, or about the ability to attend to an aesthetic object outside of distractions that often derive from one's own interests.Footnote 63 For example, my ability to attend to a piece of music disinterestedly requires that I am not just attending to it because I want to impress my girlfriend or put myself in a particular kind of mood. In these latter cases, I might miss something important for appropriate engagement because I am distracted from the music itself.
For our purposes, I extend this idea of disinterestedness to interpersonal engagements, the idea being that stereotypes and their underlying interests often distract us from properly considering people and their experiences for their own sake. This seems right. More specifically, dominant interpretive affects like paranoia or blame that accompany stereotypes of Black criminality and Black promiscuity distract us from revisionary resources (constitutively numbing us to such resources), even and especially when those these resources possess a host of epistemic and affective content that poses friction with the stereotype. If stereotypes are harmful epistemic resources that promote the resilience of epistemologies of ignorance, and specifically of “white supremacy patriarchy,” then they operate as something like “epistemic guards” that protect white male dominance, or the default (epistemic) interests of the group of white cis men. And they do so partially through their required numbness.Footnote 64
But if this is right, then disinterestedness might be just the kind of affective tool needed for combating the kind of numbness that accompanies false stereotypes. In the aesthetic case, one learns to puts aside distracting interests in order to engage with (according to Kant) the aesthetic experience of pleasure an artwork might provide (importantly, lacking or minimizing the role of interest in one's experience of events does not mean lacking or minimizing the role of affect such an experience affords). In the case of interpersonal engagement with nondominant experiences, one learns to reorient from distracting interests—interests that harmfully preserve systemic ignorance and motivate the operation of inadequate epistemic resources like false stereotypes—in order to engage with the affective and epistemic content nondominant experiences afford. Equipped with disinterestedness, then, all kinds of new epistemically salient information can make itself noticeable that otherwise is eclipsed.
One might think there is a danger of a tautology here: How does one suspend false stereotypes? One does so by suspending stereotypes, that is, being disinterested. However, this concern makes sense only if one conceives of disinterestedness as a state one is either in or not in, full stop. I am suggesting, on the other hand, that disinterestedness is or can be cultivated. One can thus be disinterested to a more or less degree. Disinterestedness is more like a practice of attention than a state, allaying the concern of circularity.
In the case of Rivera, disinterested engagement could have made it possible for the jurors to engage with Rivera's vulnerability toward the aim of falsifying the dominant narrative of brown criminality. By not permitting the motivating interests of the stereotype to totalize the juror's interpretation (thereby permitting the stereotype to be put aside or at least minimized), the hope is that jurors would have been able to suspend interpretation until they had appropriately considered the content of Rivera's testimony. After such consideration of evidence, the stereotype could have been critically interrogated in light of testimony that confirmed or falsified it. Without disinterested engagement, such critical engagement was unlikely to occur. In fact, this is what happened: the stereotype totalized the jurors’ interpretation, thereby confirming itself and rendering any counterevidence epistemically irrelevant (after all, stereotypes often are just predetermined interpretations of Black and brown men's actions as criminal). Armed with affective skills of disinterestedness, then, epistemically obstructive distractions can be put aside or minimized, enabling a more appropriate, all-things-considered assessment or judgment of what's at hand.
Of course, it's not easy to engage disinterestedly even when conceived as a practice of attention. Rivera's jury undoubtedly made a pledge to judge, to the best of their abilities, without self-interest, yet stereotypes determined the irrational outcome. White feminists often intend to listen to women of color without appropriating their insights, yet fail. Yet there might be contexts particularly fruitful for cultivating disinterested (or less interested) engagement. Given that Kant cashes out disinterestedness in terms of how we respond to beauty, this might suggest the art world could be a productive space for developing these capacities.Footnote 65 Insofar as practices of mindfulness and breathing have proven to reduce feelings of threat and blame (dominant interpretive affects that can promote numbness), these practices might also be fertile ground for developing affective resistance through disinterestedness.
Central to all these practices is that they are primarily affective in nature. They may engage rational capacities (putting aside that interests are partially cognitive), but they de-emphasize such capacities in order to make way for deeper and novel noticings. Participants are overtly asked to refocus, transitioning from a starting point of “what they think they know,” or their governing epistemic norms, to sensory experiences that are occluded when such epistemic norms are in the driver's seat of experiencing self and others. In this space, emotional and affective life becomes richer. We might notice tones of voice, gestures of hands and body comportment, facial expressions that betray inner feelings, and other sensory data that provide an entryway into others’ emotional experiences more deeply. Insofar as these emotional experiences are epistemically salient, such access will be necessary for appropriate judgment. Although there is more work to do in order to show that skills of disinterestedness developed in less threatening contexts, such as the art world or a meditation class, can find application in more interest-heavy political realms like the courtroom and academia,Footnote 66 I hope to have at least convinced readers that disinterestedness might provide a candidate for affective resistance when it comes to our engagements with nondominant experiences (both of self and others), and to have gestured toward what this might look like.Footnote 67
Affects like grief, empathy, hope, and pleasure will absolutely be other forms affective resistance can take, as mentioned. My argument thus importantly builds upon Alison Jaggar's claim that certain “outlaw emotions,” like, for example, white people feeling outrage and grief at the mistreatment of Blacks (making them “race traitors”), are epistemically vital (Jaggar Reference Jaggar1989). But insofar as affective numbness sometimes blocks the possibility of privileged subjects perceiving nondominant others as agents at all, disinterestedness might be an important first skill to cultivate, especially when it comes to negative stereotyping. Only once we are able to engage with revisionary knowledges on their own terms can we then learn to appropriately deal with what is in front of us, or noticed. As a juror, I first need to notice or consider the content of Rivera's testimony on its own terms before being able to grieve or empathize as a result of this testimony, although these may be further affective capacities necessary for combating numbness altogether. This seems likely, illustrating that affective numbness is multifaceted and demands many strategies of affective resistance in order to contend with it. For now, I do not claim that affective resistance efforts will be sufficient for resisting numbness and harmful epistemic resilience, but they can certainly help.
Acknowledgments
I am particularly grateful to José Medina, Rachel Zuckert, Emmalon Davis, and my anonymous reviewers at Hypatia, who read multiple drafts of this article, tirelessly providing me with comments and direction. Thank you also to Jennifer Nash, Charles Mills, Allen Wood, Penelope Deutscher, Jennifer Lackey, Sanford Goldberg, Carmen De Schryver, Whitney Lilly, Staci Slattery, Craig Harvey, James Soto, Cohort One of Northwestern's Prison Education Program, and various members of the Northwestern Philosophy Department for helpful comments and discussions. Earlier drafts of this article were presented and workshopped at Brown University, UCLA, The Central American Philosophical Association Annual Meeting, Purdue University, the University of Oregon, Villanova University, and St. John Fisher College. I am grateful to all these audiences and workshop participants for their insightful comments and questions.
Taylor Rogers received her PhD in Philosophy from Northwestern University in August 2021, with a certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies. She is currently an Instructor of Philosophy at Loyola University in Chicago. Taylor's scholarship lies at the intersection of social epistemology, political aesthetics, and critical race and gender theory. Her dissertation, Knowing How to Feel, argues that combating emotional numbness through art and storytelling is central for resisting gendered and racialized ignorance. Email trogers11@luc.edu
