Structural Gaslighting

Structural gaslighting is a hallmark of white feminist methodology. This is not the type of gaslighting popularized in the 1944 Ingrid Bergman movie Gaslight, when one person knowingly, intentionally, and consistently undermines the perceptions of another with the goals of making them appear “crazy” to others, feel like they are losing their mind, and genuinely doubt their own grasp on reality. That more widely known type of gaslighting is certainly pervasive, deeply harmful, and a hallmark of emotionally abusive relationships—romantic, familial, and otherwise. Structural gaslighting, on the other hand, is less widely recognized than the traditional conception of gaslighting despite being significantly more pervasive and causing harm beyond the scale of individual psychology.

Structural gaslighting describes any conceptual work that functions to obscure the nonaccidental connections between structures of oppression and the patterns of harm that they produce and license. Individuals engage in structural gaslighting when they invoke epistemologies and ideologies of domination that actively disappear and obscure the actual causes, mechanisms, and effects of oppression. Structural oppressions are maintained in part through systems of justification that locate the causes of pervasive inequalities in flaws of the oppressed groups themselves while obscuring the social systems and mechanisms of power that uphold them.Footnote ¹ Angelique Davis and Rose Ernst identify the practice of normalizing white supremacy by pathologizing resistance to it as a form of racial gaslighting (Davis and Ernst Reference Davis and Ernst2019). Structural gaslighting, of which racial gaslighting is a type, is one of the ways oppressors maintain hegemonic ideologies and sabotage conceptual resources that might accurately theorize the nature of the oppression and promote resistance. Structural gaslighting is thus deeply interwoven with intersecting structures of oppression and the willful ignorance that is required to maintain them.

In this article, I analyze some features of the pervasive practice of structural gaslighting as it is employed within white feminist epistemology. I look to Miranda Fricker's discussion of hermeneutical injustice as a paradigm example of white feminist structural gaslighting (Fricker Reference Fricker2007). I argue that Fricker's use of a single-axis lens of gender-based oppression to analyze both experiences of sexual harassment and the conceptual landscapes that surround them obscures the nonaccidental relationships between the production of sexual harassment and the structures of oppression and colonization that support it. I illustrate this by discussing some of the ways that historical and contemporary structures of racism enable both the sexual harassment of women of color in US contexts and facilitate the covering myths that help to erase and obscure its systematicity. In particular, I look at the ongoing structural vulnerabilities that began under slavery that continue to make Black women susceptible to sexual harassment today, and I analyze some of the hermeneutical tools that work to obscure this reality. Given that women of color have been theorizing sexual harassment for as long as they have been experiencing it, by ignoring the conceptual knowledge produced by women of color about the phenomenon of sexual harassment and the norms, practices, and systems that license it, Fricker fails to treat women of color as knowledge creators. Since Fricker's omissions and evasions both depend on the ideologies of and function to uphold colonialism and white supremacy, they are emblematic of the structural gaslighting that white feminism traffics in.

One way that structural gaslighting upholds oppression is by denying that marginalized people's experiences are informed, influenced, or partially constituted by structures of oppression and settler colonialism. This includes experiences of cultural genocide, sexual violence, racism, sexism, ableism, transmisogyny and transphobia, misogynoir, homophobia, heterosexism, and classism. Conceptually severing individual instances and broader patterns of discrimination, violence, and oppression from the larger structures that produce them is a linchpin of structural gaslighting. Individuals, institutions, political systems, and social groups engage in structural gaslighting, regardless of whether they intend to do so, when they invoke oppressive ideologies, disappear or obscure the actual causes and mechanisms of oppression, and conceptually sever acts of oppression from the structures that produce them.

Structural gaslighting is not identified in terms of any specific intention or goal of the perpetrator but by the function of its operation. Indeed, structural gaslighting is often perpetrated by people who are “well-intentioned” or who identify as “allies” (McKinnon Reference McKinnon, Pohlhaus, Kidd and Medina2017).Footnote ² Gaile Pohlhaus recognizes the relative insignificance of intention when she defines her version of epistemic gaslighting in terms of its effective function rather than in terms of any individual agent's intentional attitudes (Pohlhaus Reference Pohlhaus2017).Footnote ³ Just as specific intentions are not required for an individual to engage in active or willful ignorance, neither are they required for an agent to be a perpetrator of gaslighting. Indeed, a conception of structural gaslighting appears to be operating in the background of various accounts of willful or active ignorance.Footnote ⁴ Charles Mills's account of white ignorance (Mills Reference Mills, Sullivan and Tuana2007), adapted from Marilyn Frye's work (Frye Reference Frye1983), describes an epistemological system that requires structural gaslighting to carry out functions. White supremacy brings with it a set of standards of cognition that encompass an agreement by dominant agents to misinterpret the world.Footnote ⁵ Systemic misunderstanding about the intertwined structures of white supremacy and settler colonialism takes a great deal of work to uphold and maintain. This is the work of structural gaslighting. Structural gaslighting can thus be characterized by the fact that it both draws its power from and simultaneously reinforces structural oppression in an unending positive feedback loop.

Elena Ruíz further conceives of gaslighting as something that occurs not only at structural scales but at a prestructural one as well (Ruíz Reference Ruíz2012; Reference Ruíz2014; Reference Ruíz2020). In “Theorizing Multiple Oppressions through Colonial History,” Ruíz shows how European colonization disrupted precolonial ways of knowing in what is now identified as Latin America and tracks how colonial lineages create public policies, institutions, and political structures that reify and solidify settler epistemologies as the only legitimate form of knowledge (Ruíz Reference Ruíz2012). Colonialism's foreclosure of Amerindian linguistic communities’ ability to collectively engage in interpretive processes of culture—and to be heard and understood as coherent—is thus not only essential to understanding the multiplicity of social oppressions and their intersections in contemporary Latin American contexts; it is also a form of prestructural gaslighting. Colonial violence is built into the very foundation of the contemporary hermeneutic frameworks that structure human experience in settler societies. One outcome of this is that the concept of violence in settler epistemologies nonaccidentally excludes violence done to land, waterways, artifacts, and other loci of meaningful social relations and webs of knowledge within Indigenous epistemologies—what Ruíz calls hermeneutic violence (Ruíz Reference Ruíz and Byrd2019a; Reference Ruíz, Pitts, Ortega and Medina2019b).Footnote ⁶ Notably, the gaslighting Ruíz describes is not just a result of the structural automation of colonial epistemologies and institutions. Rather, as a central feature of the genocides that made and continue to make settler institutions possible, this gaslighting was a precondition for the existence of self-propagating systems of colonial epistemology. Thus, the gaslighting at the heart of colonial genocides—and their corresponding epistemicides—is prestructural, rather than merely structural.Footnote ⁷

The colonial meta-epistemological framework that Ruíz identifies is just what is needed in order to make sense of white feminist methodologies and epistemology. Ruíz notes, for instance (Ruíz Reference Ruíz2020), that Anglo-analytic accounts of epistemic injustice, such as Fricker's, depend for their intelligibility on a colonial epistemic framework that is capable of recognizing only certain subjects as knowers (Fricker Reference Fricker2007). Because of this kind of dependence, white feminism remains what Ruíz terms “a lifeline of colonialism” (Ruíz Reference Ruíz and Byrd2019a, 232). White feminism takes only a single-axis approach to gender-based oppression, ignoring the intersections of sexist oppression with racism, classism, ableism, cissexism, transphobia, heterosexism, homophobia, and national context.Footnote ⁸ White feminism ignores both the existence of interlocking structures of oppression and how those structures of oppression are situated within and dependent on persisting structures of neocolonialism and settler colonial violence. White feminism is not universal feminism, though it takes itself to be. As Cate Young points out, white feminism paints itself as one-size-fits-all feminism when it in fact fits very few (Young Reference Young2014). White feminism does not present itself as feminism that applies only to particularly situated women, namely those who are white, nondisabled, class-privileged, straight, cisgender citizens of “Western” colonial and settler colonial nation-states. Because white feminism fails to situate itself as applicable only in certain contexts and instead masquerades as universal, the underlying message of white feminism is that if it does not fit your lived experience, there must be something wrong with your experience, your interpretation of your experience, or your understanding of reality. This willful misrepresentation of the lack of fit between white feminism and the socio-political realities it fails to reflect exemplifies the structural gaslighting at its core.

Feminist philosophy has a serious white feminism problem. This problem manifests in myriad ways, uncritically and unabashedly. Fricker's book is a representative case study of this problem. In what follows, I discuss the various ways in which Fricker's account of hermeneutical injustice engages in structural gaslighting. These include Fricker's use of a whitewashed, single-axis framework to theorize gender-based oppression, her narrative that a conceptual understanding of sexual harassment did not exist before a consciousness-raising group in the Cornell Human Affairs Program gave it a name, and her failure to recognize the historical legacies of women of color who have produced resistant epistemologies of sexual harassment and who are primarily responsible for public knowledge of this phenomenon. I argue that Fricker's whitewashing of the central roles that Black women and women of color have played in the legacy of epistemic resistance to sexual harassment in the US is a form of structural gaslighting that fails to treat women of color as knowers, and that this is a reflection of the colonial meta-epistemological commitments of white feminism.

“Epistemic Bad Luck” Or Structured Misinterpretation?

Fricker's book is widely hailed as a pathbreaking work of feminist epistemology that has paved the way for work at the intersection of epistemology and ethics. It has been extensively cited as offering a new framework for thinking about injustice and power dynamics within practices of knowledge production and distribution. It is also, in many ways, a perfect example of philosophy's white feminism problem. Fricker's work takes a single-axis approach to gender-based oppression and ignores women of color's contributions to the area she is writing in, effectively deeming the 1970s the moment when workplace sexual harassment in the United States was first understood for what it was (Fricker Reference Fricker2007, 162–63). Not only does she fail to think intersectionally about gender-based oppression but she fails to think structurally—even in a limited, single-axis way—about oppression more generally.

Many of the methods and claims in Fricker's work function to produce gaslighting due to her outright denial of the role that oppression plays in producing structured misinterpretation and interpretive harm.Footnote ⁹ Fricker casts as “epistemic bad luck” cases that she inaccurately construes as one-off instances of hermeneutical marginalization, but that actually have structural causes rooted in systems of domination. In her discussion of hermeneutical injustice, for instance, she considers a fictional case of Joe, a straight, white man who reports to the police that he is being stalked by another white man. When the police fail to take Joe's concerns seriously, Fricker describes the injustice Joe suffers as “thoroughly ‘incidental’ rather than systemic’” (Fricker Reference Fricker2007, 158; Reference Fricker, Peels and Blaauw2016, 8). She fails to recognize the role that rape culture and norms of toxic masculinity under cis-heteropatriarchy play in producing the interpretive harm that Joe experiences. Feminist theorists have long emphasized that, although straight men are not oppressed by patriarchy, they are nonetheless systemically harmed by it in a number of ways. One is the widespread myth that men cannot be the victims of sexual violence, stalking, or domestic abuse, either by women or nonbinary people or by other men. These myths prevent Joe's reports of stalking from being audible and comprehensible to the police. Fricker's claim that straight men whose experiences of stalking are disbelieved by law enforcement suffer from incidental rather than systematic hermeneutical marginalization obscures the nonaccidental relationships that these harmful myths bear to the structures of oppression that produce them and to the experiences they obfuscate. This is an instance of structural gaslighting that harms male victims of sexual violence. This is not a small demographic harm, as it conceptually undermines attempts to stem the global trafficking of male minors and male youth of color by concealing the forces responsible for both widespread first-responder and provider biases against male victims, as well as the lack of advocacy and funding resources available to them (Cole Reference Cole2018).

Fricker's explicit denial that structural factors play a role in obscuring knowledge about disability produces further structural gaslighting. Shelley Tremain critiques Fricker for claiming that the hermeneutical marginalization experienced by a person with an undiagnosed or poorly understood “medical condition affecting their social behavior” is not hermeneutical injustice but merely “a poignant case of circumstantial epistemic bad luck” (Fricker Reference Fricker2007, 152; see Tremain Reference Tremain, Kidd, Medina and Pohlhaus2016). Fricker's denial of the structural nature of this interpretive harm exemplifies a pervasive pattern within dominant ableist ideologies wherein disabled people's experiences of ableism are dismissed as individual aberrations rather than as systematic, nonaccidental, and reliably produced by structures of oppression. It further compounds the cumulative medical gaslighting that is widely experienced by disabled people by portraying medical gaslighting itself as a result of mere “epistemic bad luck” rather than as the predictable and enduring consequence of the medicalization of disability within a materially harmful and ableist system of medical meaning-making.

These are but a few of the myriad ways that Fricker's work exemplifies white feminist gaslighting by inaccurately and harmfully portraying structurally produced forms of hermeneutical marginalization as mere “epistemic bad luck.” Fricker enacts structural gaslighting through her outright denial that the oppressive patterns of experience are structurally produced. Next, I consider the structural gaslighting that follows from framing intersectional power dynamics as reducible to sexism and obscuring the histories of resistant epistemologies produced by women of color in Fricker's narrative of the conceptual history of sexual harassment.

Interpretive Flatlining: Single-Axis Frameworks As Structurally Prejudiced Resources

Not only does Fricker's work engage in structural gaslighting about the relationship of structures of oppression to one-off instances of injustice, it produces structural gaslighting through its refusal to engage or acknowledge hermeneutical resources produced by histories of epistemic resistance. As Kristie Dotson points out, injustice with respect to unfair credibility ascriptions, inadequate conceptual resources, and structurally biased epistemological systems has long been theorized and discussed in the work of women of color generally and of Black women specifically (Dotson Reference Dotson2012, Reference Dotson2014. See, for instance, Spillers Reference Spillers and S1984; Mohanty Reference Mohanty1988; Spivak Reference Spivak1999; and Ortega Reference Ortega2006). Fricker entirely ignores these intellectual legacies in her work, and this is especially apparent in her discussion of hermeneutical injustice.

Hermeneutical injustice, according to Fricker, occurs when there is a gap in the collective hermeneutical resources that leaves a marginalized group unable to understand or make sense of some aspect of their experience. Fricker illustrates the phenomenon by discussing Carmita Wood's experience, as recounted by Susan Brownmiller, of leaving a job due to sexual harassment before the concept of sexual harassment was widely known. As the story goes, Wood filed for unemployment after leaving a job at the Cornell Nuclear Physics Department because of recurring sexual harassment that took a toll on her mental and physical well-being. When Wood attempted to fill in the part of the unemployment application that asked the reason she left her job, none of the options on the form adequately captured the reason Wood left. Her only option was to say that she left for personal reasons. Fricker identifies the fact that she had no way to communicate the reason she left as an instance of hermeneutical injustice.

Fricker suggests that Wood had a large portion of her experience obscured from her understanding due to inadequate collective hermeneutical resources and that this fact is nonaccidental. Fricker writes: “What women like Carmita Wood had to contend with at work was no plain epistemic bad luck, for it was no accident that their experience had been falling down the hermeneutical cracks” (Fricker Reference Fricker2007, 153).

It is certainly clear that the epistemic injustice described was “no plain epistemic bad luck.” But there are two important questions to ask:

1. 1) Who are “women like Carmita Wood?”

2. 2) Why was it “no accident that their experience had been falling down the hermeneutical cracks?”

Further, how does the answer to the first question inform the answer to the second? Fricker purports to analyze the structural prejudice in the shared hermeneutical resources that prevent “women like Carmita Wood” from identifying and understanding their experiences of sexual harassment in the workplace (99).Footnote ¹⁰ Yet Fricker ignores the structural conditions that make certain groups of women, such as those who are Black, Brown, poor and working-class, Indigenous, disabled, and without documented legal status among those who are most vulnerable to sexual harassment. This results in a flattened and whitewashed analysis of the relevant “structural identity prejudice” at play (155). In analyzing how social structures produce hermeneutical injustice with respect to sexual harassment, Fricker focuses solely on how the gap in the shared hermeneutical resources harms “women” and ignores the intersection of sexism with racism, ableism, citizenship, and economic vulnerability under capitalism. Fricker writes, “Women's powerlessness meant that their social position was one of unequal hermeneutical participation, and something like this sort of inequality provides the crucial background condition for the epistemic injustice affecting Carmita Wood” (Fricker Reference Fricker2006, 98; Reference Fricker2007, 152).

Significantly, Fricker suggests that “something like” the unequal participation of women in producing hermeneutical resources is the crucial background condition for understanding the epistemic injustice experienced by victims of sexual harassment—not a critical background condition. Fricker's choice to focus on Wood's experience as representative of the interpretive harms surrounding sexual harassment exemplifies Vivian May's observation that feminist theory remains wedded to the use of “gender-first imaginaries” despite the countless critiques levied against these gender-universalizing paradigms by women of color theorists (May 2014).

Naming and Power

Not only does Fricker ignore the relevance of intersecting oppressions in creating the structural conditions that enable both workplace harassment and widespread misunderstanding of it, she ignores the legacies of understanding produced by Black women in the United States and by Brown and Indigenous women on both sides of the settler border. Long before white women activists such as Lin Farley led the meeting of the feminist consciousness-raising group to which Fricker attributes the origin of the concept of sexual harassment, Black women were speaking out about the coercive sexual practices of the men they worked for. Despite this, Fricker ignores the entirety of Black women's resistant knowledge of sexual harassment just as she ignores the role of white supremacy, ableism, capitalism, and settler colonialism in producing the structural conditions for sexual harassment and the conceptual resources for understanding it.

Fricker's methodology reveals a tacit commitment to the assumption that until a group of white women activists at Cornell University came up with the perfect phrase to describe the problem of sexual harassment, the phenomenon had gone not only unrecognized but untheorized. This mirrors Fricker's treatment of epistemic injustice as a concept that was philosophically untheorized and unexplored before her own engagement with it.Footnote ¹¹ In this section, I analyze some of the early resistant knowledge produced by US Black women about the relationship among power, authority, and sexual harassment in order to demonstrate how Fricker's methodological assumptions and practices obscure Black women's knowledge production and produce structural gaslighting through situated ignorance and erasure.

As long as Black women in the US have experienced sexual violence, they have engaged in interpretive practices of theorizing and resisting it. As Angela Davis emphasizes, “Throughout the history of this country, Black women have manifested a collective consciousness of their sexual victimization” (Davis Reference Davis1983, 183). Black women have been experiencing and theorizing sexual harassment at the hands of employers since long before white women entered the workforce in droves and became vulnerable to workplace harassment themselves. In his recorded work of Black American oral history, anthropologist John Gwaltney interviews Mabel Lincoln about her life experiences. Lincoln developed insight about the motivations for and practices of sexual coercion during her years of domestic work in white homes:

Lincoln's analysis suggests a recognition that the desire to control and dominate tends to play a more central role than the desire for sexual pleasure in the motivation of sexual abusers.Footnote ¹² Nancy White, also interviewed by Gwaltney, is similarly aware that white men's sexual harassment of Black women is an abuse of power that is facilitated by impunity:

A theme throughout much of the knowledge that White shares based on her experience of having “worked for money for more than sixty-four years” is that Black women often see the truth behind white men's oppressive actions in ways that white women choose not to. She describes white women as falling in line with what white men tell them so as not to jeopardize their standing within the power structure of white supremacy. Because white women wish to continue enjoying the benefits of their proximity to white male power, they know better “than to stand up in Old Cracker's face” and challenge his abuses of Black women. White is keenly aware of the situated and self-serving nature of white women's choices to refrain from challenging white male patriarchal power:Footnote ¹³

White identifies a common form of motivated ignorance among white women. Her analysis of white women's allegiance to the hierarchy of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, and their commitment to refrain from challenging white male power thus extends into the epistemic realm. White women have a vested interest in falling in line with the perceptual and evaluative expectations that their white male companions impose on them: “Some women, white women, can run their husbands lives for a while, but the most of them have to take low when the devil tells them to and they have to see what he tells them there is to see. If he tells them that they ain't seeing what they know they are seeing, then they have to just go on like it wasn't there!” (149).

As White points out, white women's social position as white men's romantic partners and dependents has made them less likely to accurately identify white male harassing behavior as an intentional expression of power and domination. White women often fail to conceive of sexual harassment as a form of oppression and are taken in by gaslighting euphemisms for it such as “harmless flirtation” in part because they are structurally invested in believing that white men are generally decent people who respect them as human beings. White women's confusion thus results from the vested interest they have in maintaining their active ignorance about white male patriarchal power in order to preserve their place in the white-supremacist, capitalist patriarchal hierarchy.Footnote ¹⁴ As White emphasizes, “When you come right down to it, white women just think they are free. Black women know they ain't free. Now, this is the most important difference between the two” (Gwaltney Reference Gwaltney1993, 147).

White's insights help to provide background for Fricker's assumption that Carmita Wood was confused by her sexual harassment and failed to understand it for what it was, as well as her assumption that Wood's harasser, Boyce McDaniel, may not have known or understood that his behavior was wrong. Wood's harasser had in fact tried to keep Wood from being hired in the first place and had waged a public campaign against her after his efforts failed. This suggests that McDaniel's sexual harassment and assault of Wood were acts of retaliation specifically intended to put her in her place. This context casts doubt on Fricker's characterization of Wood's abuser as possibly not understanding the significance of his actions due to the purported hermeneutical lacuna in the collective conceptual resources.Footnote ¹⁵

That Fricker makes the largely baseless claim that Wood did not truly understand the campaign of harassment that was being waged against her is further evidence of the insufficiency of Fricker's methodology and conceptual starting point. She writes, “It harmed Carmita Wood a great deal that she could not make adequate sense of it to herself, let alone to others” (Fricker Reference Fricker2006, 103). She uses an ableist metaphor to construct Wood as suffering from a “cognitive disablement,” which leaves her “deeply troubled, confused, and isolated” (Fricker Reference Fricker2007, 151).Footnote ¹⁶ Fricker makes these claims about Wood's mental states without referring to any first-person accounts of Wood discussing her experience. Rather than either interpreting Wood's experience and beliefs on the basis of her own testimony or refraining from speculating about her inner states altogether, Fricker relies on projections that Brownmiller makes regarding Wood's beliefs, emotions, and general psychological states.

Although sometimes those who experience sexual harassment are unable to make sense of their own experience, Fricker should not presume this is what happened to Wood, especially as she fails to consider Wood's viewpoint as expressed in her own words. Dotson notes that people who are epistemically oppressed often have no difficulty readily articulating their experiences. “However, those articulations generally fail to gain appropriate uptake according to the biased hermeneutical resources utilized by the perceiver” (Dotson Reference Dotson2012, 32).Footnote ¹⁷ In Wood's case, it seems that she understood perfectly well what was happening to her but was prevented from conveying it meaningfully to those in positions of power, in part due to their willful ignorance.Footnote ¹⁸

The possibility that a victim of sexual harassment and assault might be able to understand the meaning of her abuser's violations, despite the lack of widespread knowledge of the concept “sexual harassment,” would likely have seemed more plausible to Fricker if she had considered the long history of Black women's theorization of and resistance to sexual violence. Fricker's assumption that Carmita Wood could not understand her own experience of sexual harassment and assault results from an inadequate methodology that centers the experiences of relatively privileged white women, while ignoring the extensive conceptual work generated by Black women and women of color about sexual harassment. Fricker's centering of white women's experiences and conceptual practices leads to a theoretical framework that cannot adequately capture the phenomenon, even in the very limited cases that she actually considers.

Fricker's methodological oversights must be considered in light of what Dotson identifies as the ideational labor and aspirational costs of liberatory conceptual projects. For Dotson, ideational labor refers to “historical formations of ideas, concepts, and hermeneutic horizons that afford one conceptual and epistemic resources to direct and redirect attention” (Dotson Reference Dotson2019). There is a collective responsibility to understand that any successful written project was made possible in part by the ideational labor of those who came before us. Readers must also attend to these facts lest we too become culpable for the erasure and epistemic appropriation of the ideational labor that produced the spaces of conceptual possibility we now inhabit.

Structural Vulnerabilities

By positioning Wood's experience as a paradigmatic case of sexual harassment in the workplace and analyzing it within a single-axis framework, Fricker whitewashes the picture of workplace harassment so that it may be universally relatable to “all” women.Footnote ¹⁹ Fricker's whitewashing functions as structural gaslighting, as her erasure of the roles of racism and settler colonialism in facilitating and producing workplace harassment upholds the myth that they are irrelevant to understanding both women of color's and Indigenous women's experiences of sexual harassment and the epistemic oppressions they face when seeking rectification. Her disregard for the role these factors play in producing workplace sexual harassment is not harmless, as it obscures the relationship between settler white supremacy and the nonaccidental construction of the “hermeneutical lacuna” surrounding conceptual resources about sexual harassment. That settler colonialism and white supremacy depend for their persistence on the very form of active disappearing that Fricker's work generates reveals that a central function of white feminist gaslighting is upholding white supremacist settler colonial domination.

It is not the result of accident or oversight that migrant farmworker women working in the US without documented legal status are among those most vulnerable to sexual harassment, assault, and rape in the workplace. In a 2010 study, eighty percent of women farmworkers in California's Central Valley had experienced sexual harassment on the job (Waugh Reference Waugh2010). A report by Human Rights Watch reflects the pervasive and systemic nature of the sexual abuse that women farmworkers are subjected to: “Sexual violence and sexual harassment experienced by farmworkers is common enough that some farmworker women see these abuses as an unavoidable condition of agricultural work” (Human Rights Watch 2012).

The structure of the farm hierarchy leaves foremen free to perpetrate abuse, and they often view the prospect of committing sexual violence against farmworker women as a perk of the job. They employ various strategies and methods to facilitate sexual violence, such as separating mothers from their daughters so that they have unhindered access to the children. The vast majority of supervisory positions are held by men (Waugh Reference Waugh2010). Many perpetrators hold directly supervisory roles over the women they harass, giving them consistent reason to be near the women they harass under the guise of checking their work. The harassment often continues over a long period of time, lasting for months or even years.

Workers who push back against or file formal complaints about the abuse routinely experience retaliation in the form of heightened abuse, reduced work schedules, or being fired. Multiple family members often work on the same farm, so retaliation is often directed at the victim's family members as well (Human Rights Watch 2012, 5). Extreme poverty and lack of other work possibilities often mean that staying in an abusive job is a matter of survival for farmworkers and their families. Farmworkers may also live in housing supplied by their employer, which means that losing their jobs would result in being unhoused.

Indigenous women and girls are especially vulnerable to sexual and gender-based violence while working in the fields because of the cumulative, nonaccidental structural vulnerabilities created and maintained by settler colonialism. For instance, since many Indigenous women do not speak English or Spanish, they are often unable to understand the content of trainings on workers’ rights. California law, for instance, requires only that trainings be conducted in both English and Spanish, thus ignoring the needs of Indigenous workers who often speak only Zapotec, Mixtec, Triqui, or Nahuatl, for instance. Indigenous women who have been harassed or attacked are often unable to communicate it to government or law enforcement agencies that recognize the legitimacy only of settler languages. They also frequently distrust governmental and law enforcement agencies not only because of their consistently violent experiences with settler institutions, but because the existence of settler institutions is predicated on the entangled violences against their lands and bodies. The state-sponsored sexual violence that Indigenous migrant farmworkers face in the fields cannot even begin to be fully understood within the single-axis lens with which Fricker tries to analyze the “hermeneutical lacuna” surrounding “women's” experiences of sexual harassment in the workplace. The cumulative and nonaccidental structural vulnerabilities created by ongoing processes of settler colonial violence and dispossession are essential to understanding not just the political and economic foreclosures that Indigenous women farmworkers face in settler societies but the epistemic ones as well.

Ruíz's decolonial account of structural violence provides a needed conceptual framework, as it contains the recognition that structural violence is never accidental (Ruíz Reference Ruízunpublished). Rather, the forms of violence that are perpetrated by settler administrative systems and their organizing logics inherently depend on what Ruíz refers to as settler epistemic economies—collections of hermeneutical resources specifically engineered to promote, uphold, and entrench colonial epistemic frameworks and forms of domination as the only possible epistemological systems and governance structures while violently foreclosing on alternative epistemologies. Her account not only helps to reveal the colonizing function of the “omission” of on-the-job labor-rights training offered in Indigenous languages. It also shows why Fricker's concept of hermeneutical injustice is rendered dead on arrival as an interpretive resource that might be able to shed light on the epistemic brick walls that Indigenous women farmworkers collide with when attempting to speak and be heard about the pervasive, nonaccidental sexual harassment they experience while working on stolen lands under a settler colonial capitalist governance structure.

Just as the reasons that Indigenous women farmworkers are subject to pervasive sexual harassment while working in agricultural economies north of the settler US–Mexico border are nonaccidental, specific histories and structural conditions have also made Black women in the settler colonial United States nonaccidentally vulnerable to sexual violence by those on whom their lives and livelihoods have depended. As Nancy White's and Mabel Lincoln's insights show, US Black women's social locations within white supremacist capitalist patriarchy are also essential to understanding both their experiences of sexual harassment by abusive employers and colleagues and their resistant practices of theorization in the face of racist sexual oppression.

Historical structures of oppression bear a nonaccidental relationship to contemporary conditions of vulnerability to workplace sexual harassment. Under slavery, white enslavers systematically used sexual violence against enslaved Black women both as a form of control and domination and as a tool of wealth production. White enslavers not only treated Black women as property, they treated their bodies as units of capital capable of producing additional units of capital (Davis Reference Davis1983; King Reference King1988; Collins Reference Collins2000). This resulted in a social structure that was held in place as much by sexual violence as it was by other forms of physical punishment and psychological torture:

This violent domination of Black women's bodies created a lasting legacy of white and state-sponsored coercive control over Black women's fertility and reproduction (Roberts Reference Roberts1997). The controlling image of Black women as hypersexual, promiscuous, and sexually available was developed under slavery to justify white enslavers’ systematic use of rape as a mechanism of terror and subordination. It continues to govern (white) conceptions of Black female sexuality and is one of the many factors that both contributes to and obscures the high rates of sexual violence that Black women experience today.

After slavery was abolished, the work opportunities available to Black women remained limited primarily to those tasks that were assigned to them under slavery (Collins Reference Collins2000, 60–63). According to Angela Davis, the 1940 US census showed that 59.5 percent of employed Black women worked as domestic servants and only 10.4 percent worked in nondomestic service occupations (Davis Reference Davis1983, 175). Black women who worked in the homes of white families faced the constant threat of sexual harassment and sexual assault by their employers. White domestic employers treated Black women with an impunity they enjoyed as the result of the limited work available to the women. The professional standards to which white employers held Black domestic workers were often characterized by deference and obedience rather than by domestic skill.Footnote ²⁰ These relations of domination and subordination enforced the idea that Black women existed in white homes as objects of control subject to the whims of their white employers, and this created optimal conditions for workplace sexual harassment and assault to thrive.

Today, the service labor that has characterized much of the work delegated to Black women under white supremacist capitalist patriarchy has moved into the public sphere. Whereas most paid cooking and cleaning work used to take place in the private homes of white families, it is now performed as food-service and janitorial labor for public corporations (Collins Reference Collins2000, 69).Footnote ²¹ As the labor that Black women traditionally perform has moved out of the domestic sphere and into the open, so too has the workplace sexual harassment to which Black women are subjected. The mistreatment that Black women face from those they encounter in the workplace “resembles the interpersonal relations of domination reminiscent of domestic work” (62).

The precarity of Black women's paid labor further exacerbates their vulnerability to workplace abuses. Black women are overrepresented in low-paying and minimum-wage jobs, tipped positions, positions without benefits, and temporary positions with high rates of turnover. Not only is sexual harassment a stable feature of service-industry jobs, labor abuses such as wage theft are also rampant in this sector (Greenhouse Reference Greenhouse2009; Bobo Reference Bobo2010; Wohl Reference Wohl2014). These factors all contribute to the state of affairs in the contemporary United States in which Black women have little wealth, especially in later life, and significantly less wealth than white women (Chang Reference Chang2010; Brown Reference Brown2012). These economic factors together create circumstances under which Black women are less able to leave jobs in which they are subject to sexual abuse, which in turn makes Black women more susceptible to becoming targets for sexual abusers in the workplace.

Controlling Images and Dominating Mythologies

The effects of structural oppression and colonization cannot be understood without their justifying ideological dimensions and the epistemic functions they fulfill. No understanding of the “dominating mythologies” that both produce and obscure male sexual violence against Black women can be accomplished without an intersectional analysis that attends to the role of racism in sexual harassment (Spillers Reference Spillers and S1984, 158). Just as the realities of sexual harassment in the workplace are importantly different for women of color and white women, so too are the hermeneutical resources used to justify it. Controlling images of white women's sexuality under white supremacist patriarchy differ, for instance, from those governing Black women's sexuality. White women are portrayed as fragile and in need of protection, in ways that are often linked to their presumed chastity, virtue, and innocence. Black women, on the other hand, have tended to be portrayed as promiscuous, sexually insatiable, and animalistic in their sexuality (Roberts Reference Roberts1997; Collins Reference Collins2000; Reference Collins2005). These symbolic productions all take place within a conceptual landscape that produces structural gaslighting by withholding ascriptions of sexual agency from Black women. As Spillers writes, “In the universe of unreality and exaggeration, the black female is, if anything, a creature of sex, but sexuality touches her nowhere” (Spillers Reference Spillers and S1984, 115).

The images of masculinization and deviant hypersexuality that have characterized representations of Black womanhood under white supremacist capitalist patriarchy have provided a foil against which white women's femininity and fragile womanhood have been constructed (Carby Reference Carby1982). In the 1800s, Sarah Baartman's body became a site of projection for the colonial fantasy that would eventually employ theories of scientific racism to delineate the borderline between the “abnormal African” woman and “normal European” woman.Footnote ²² As Carby notes, “Our continuing struggle with History began with its ‘discovery’ of us” (Carby Reference Carby1982, 110). Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman born in what is now South Africa, was brought to England and later France where she was displayed in a loincloth to prurient European audiences who marveled at the size and shape of her breasts and buttocks. After her death, Georges Cuvier dissected her body and used it as a basis for his theories of scientific racism and sexual primitivism. Despite the fact that Baartman had never allowed audiences to see her naked, Paris's Musée de l'Homme displayed her jarred remains, including her skeleton, brain, and vulva to the public until 1974—a grotesque manifestation of white colonial society's sense of entitlement to and ownership of Black women's bodies.Footnote ²³

White entitlement to Black women's bodies is a central feature of the controlling image of the Jezebel, which continues to govern popular imaginaries of Black female sexuality today. Kimberlé Crenshaw identifies some of the measurable effects of the widely held misogynoiristic notion that Black women and girls are hypersexual: “As recently as 1989, jurors acquitted a defendant of the rape of a 12-year-old African American stating that ‘a girl that age from that neighborhood probably wasn't a virgin anyway’” (Crenshaw Reference Crenshaw1994, 3).Footnote ²⁴ Part of the structural gaslighting function of the controlling image as hermeneutical resource is to produce high rates of sexual violence against Black women while simultaneously obscuring its pervasiveness and foreclosing the possibility of redress for it.

As a powerful tool in what Spillers identifies as the “universe of symbol-making” regarding Black women's sexuality (Spillers Reference Spillers and S1984, 167), the Jezebel image also governs the treatment of Black women by both white women and white men. Tressie McMillan Cottom describes an experience in a bar in North Carolina where she told her date that one of the drunk white couples there would be offering her free liquor and attempting to feel her breasts “within the hour.” She explained her “long, storied, documented history of being accosted by drunk white men and women in atmospheres just like these” (Cottom Reference Cottom2013).Footnote ²⁵ Eventually, a white woman “bumps and grinds” up to their table, buys them a fishbowl, and tells Cottom that her boyfriend would love to see them dance together. Cottom directly relates her experiences to controlling images that portray Black women, especially those with larger bodies, as always interested in and available for sex. She writes, “Fat nonnormative black female bodies are kith and kin with historical caricatures of black women as work sites, production units, subjects of victimless sexual crimes, and embodied deviance” (Cottom Reference Cottom2013). As Cottom's experience and her analysis of it show, the Jezebel controlling image remains central to the logic of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy that facilitates white entitlement to access and control Black women's bodies.

The pervasive and pernicious nature of this controlling image is by no means limited to the conservative American South; it also dominates the white liberal cultural imaginary. In 2016, white American author Stephen O'Connor published a novel called Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings, which explores the “romance” between Jefferson, a white male enslaver “founding father” and Hemings, a Black girl child whom Jefferson enslaved and repeatedly raped. In a book review published by NPR, Jean Zimmerman describes the work as “the agonizing crashing together of love and slavery.” Zimmerman uncritically quotes O'Connor's own assessment of the relationship as “somewhere along the spectrum between love and Stockholm syndrome.” She writes:

It is deeply indicative of the ideology that attempts to locate pathological carnal desire in the bodies of Black women and girls that Zimmerman finds herself able to ask the question of whether an enslaved girl child can consent to sex with her adult male enslaver.

The answer, of course, is no. Hemings did not have “the freedom to say no rather than yes,” as her very survival depended on her not saying no. The possibility of saying “no” without punishment is a necessary condition on consent's being freely given, on saying “yes” having any meaning at all. This was not a possibility for Hemings, who was owned as property by an enslaver who created a political system specifically to be able to enslave, rape, torture, and kill human beings like her with impunity. Nonetheless, O'Connor finds this subject matter to be fitting material for a romantic narrative, and Zimmerman is happy to enter his fantasy world with him. It is difficult to understand how these imaginative feats and conceptual contortions could be possible for them unless they both, on some level, conceive of Black women and girls as unrapeable. To see the possibility of freely given consent in the context of chattel slavery—a scenario in which there so clearly is none—is to see Black women and girls as incapable of being victims of sexual violence. This example reveals how effective the violent ideology of the Jezebel remains today.

The influence of assumptions about Black women's sexuality, promiscuity, and fertility continues to contribute to widespread harm, abuse, and violence. The legacy of slavery continues to shape US Black women's contemporary experiences of sexual harassment in the workplace. Historical patterns of sexual coercion and white (especially male) sexual entitlement to Black women's bodies continue to construct the conceptual landscape that allows for unconstrained sexual violence against Black women. A white feminist approach to the hermeneutics of sexual harassment contributes to the “structure of unreality” that Black women face in the shared conceptual landscapes of white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy, a vacuum that is filled by controlling images. This is not, as Spillers notes, a harmless omission. She writes, “The rift translates into unthinkable acts, unspeakable practices” (Spillers Reference Spillers and S1984, 156). White feminist epistemology is complicit in sexual violence against Black women insofar as it works to maintain conceptual systems that continue to obscure such violence.

Fricker's framing of the structural conditions that produce hermeneutical injustice surrounding sexual harassment in terms of “women's powerlessness” is a devastatingly inadequate conceptual framework for the problem at hand. Fricker's misuse of conceptual resources obscures the role that white supremacist capitalist patriarchy plays in producing and protecting practices of sexual harassment against Black women specifically and women of color more generally. Lest epistemic harms be mistaken for disembodied ones, the “unthinkable acts” to which Spillers refers, the ones that are facilitated by the epistemic rift that Fricker is complicit in maintaining, are acts that take place in the material world and that are borne upon the bodies of human beings. Taking an intersectional approach to mapping the conceptual landscape of sexual harassment in the workplace instead of a white feminist one is thus not merely a methodological imperative, it is an ethical one.

Women of Color's Resistance to Sexual Harassment

Women of color in the US have historically been at the forefront of resistance to sexual harassment through both litigation and labor organization. Epistemic resistance to oppression cannot be considered independently from activism and organized resistance. The work of Black, Brown, and Indigenous women labor organizers like Floria Pinkney, Lucy Parsons, Maria Moreno, Dolores Huerta, and Luisa Moreno has been essential to publicly revealing the ways that the systems of gender domination that produce sexual harassment are inextricably bound up with systems of racism, colonialism, and capitalist labor exploitation. Women of color have long recognized that the ability to be free from sexual assault in the workplace cannot be disentangled from systemic barriers to fair wages, labor protections, housing, education, food access, health care, and immigration. Catherine Albisa, co-founder and Executive Director of the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative explains, “While counterintuitive, you can't end gender-based violence by working directly on gender-based violence. You can only end gender-based violence by working on structural issues that enable it, and those also shape the wider array of abuses affecting the whole community” (Chang Reference Chang2018).

This insight remains at the core of the Fair Food Program, one of the most productive and effective large-scale efforts to reduce workplace sexual harassment in the United States today. Started in the early 2000s by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, the program works by securing agreements from major companies such as Walmart, McDonald's, and Yum! Brand Foods to purchase produce only from farms that have signed onto a strict code of conduct, drafted by farmworkers, requiring a variety of fairer labor practices including zero tolerance for sexual assault (Fair Food 2017). This work is structurally reshaping the landscape of agricultural work in the United States, and it is made possible by the conceptual and epistemic resistance work done by migrant farmworker women to reveal the ways that sexual harassment is predictably facilitated by interlocking systems of power, control, and domination.

Women of color's diverse positionalities are nonaccidentally related to the strategies of epistemic resistance they have created. As Patricia Hill Collins notes, for instance, since Black women in the US have experienced continued political exclusion, ideological marginalization, and economic vulnerability, these factors and others give rise to “distinctive angles of vision” on their experiences and the structures that produce them (Collins Reference Collins2000, 15). It is thus not surprising that Black women plaintiffs were among the first to conceive of sexual harassment as illegal sex discrimination.Footnote ²⁶ Pamela Price, one of the student plaintiffs in the first case to establish that sexual harassment was sex discrimination and thus illegal under Title IX, recognized the role that racist and sexist ideology about Black women played in her harasser's actions. After experiencing sexual harassment from a white male professor at Yale University who retaliated against her when she refused his requests for sex, Price saw that historically developed, controlling images of Black women's sexuality played a central role in the harassment she experienced. Noting that her harasser invoked racist tropes in his sexually humiliating comments toward her, Price characterized her experience of harassment as an instance of “racist sexual discrimination” and argued that her professor retaliated against her as punishment for failing to live up to “a historical conception of the relationship between my racial heritage and my sexuality” (Baker Reference Baker2007, 61). Price's ability to clearly conceive of how her professor had violated and harmed her was integral to her pursuit of legal action that led to the establishment of one of the most important precedents for university students, namely that those who experienced sexual harassment in educational institutions could sue the school under Title IX for monetary damages.

Sexual harassment law is similarly indebted to trailblazing Black women plaintiffs like Diane Williams, Paulette Barnes, Mechelle Vinson, Sandra Bundy, and Anita Hill.Footnote ²⁷ These women's efforts to publicly resist their experiences of sexual harassment through the courts (and televised Senate hearings) not only brought the problem into public awareness but radically changed the legal and conceptual landscape surrounding sexual harassment, which was previously characterized as an individualized, private, and personal transgression and therefore not governed by laws regulating employment discrimination. These women worked to create new epistemological frameworks in the legal sphere, and the innovation they produced cannot be severed from their distinctive angles of vision.

Fricker's failure to situate her analysis of the epistemic activism by Cornell feminists within this history is one instance of the larger pattern of white feminist indifference to women of color's experiences of harassment and their practices of resistance to it. Focusing solely on the epistemic resistance work produced by the white women in the Cornell Human Affairs Program is whitewashing. Fricker engages in this whitewashing by failing to address the central role that Black women played in litigating some of the first and most important cases of sexual harassment in the US and by ignoring the knowledge that women of color labor activists created surrounding the interlocking nature of systems that produced the conditions for capitalist exploitation and extractivism to thrive alongside the violation of women's bodies. Attending to these women's resistance efforts should have been essential to Fricker's project since their efforts were characterized in significant part by their methods of epistemic resistance. Fricker's failure to recognize the conceptual work produced by women of color who understood sexual harassment in the workplace to be a form of coercion and discrimination is a failure to consider their agency and resistance in the face of oppression. By failing to situate the work of the Cornell consciousness-raising group within the broader context of women of color's resistance to sexual harassment, and by ignoring women of color's conceptual contributions to this history of resistant interpretive practices, Fricker demonstrates a more general failure to conceive of women of color as knowledge creators.

Situated White Feminist Ignorance as Willful Ignorance

Dotson identifies contributory injustice as a third-order form of epistemic injustice (Dotson Reference Dotson2012)—one that Fricker not only fails to account for but engages in herself (Fricker Reference Fricker2007). Contributory injustice occurs when the hermeneutical resources necessary for marginalized knowers to understand their experience are available, but there are structural biases against their use. Someone commits contributory injustice when their situated ignorance in the form of willful hermeneutical ignorance causes them to use the wrong set of hermeneutical resources, harming a knower's epistemic agency in the process. Like willful hermeneutical injustice, contributory injustice is both structural and agential. It is structural because the biases that cause certain sets of hermeneutical resources to be seen as coherent and intelligible are both a result and continued cause of structural domination. It is agential because the epistemic harm is caused by an agent's situated ignorance in the form of willful hermeneutical ignorance.

By employing a single-axis framework of sexist oppression to analyze sexual harassment in the workplace and by ignoring the historical legacies of women of color's epistemic resistance to it, Fricker uses structurally prejudiced hermeneutical resources at every turn in her analysis of hermeneutical injustice. Fricker's use of these resources can be reliably predicted from her social location, and thus follows from her situated ignorance.Footnote ²⁸

Fricker's ignorance is not only situated and reliable, it is also willful. Fricker chooses not to acknowledge, for instance, the part of the world in which Black women's experiences of sexism are racialized and the racism Black women face is gendered. Fricker willfully refuses to acknowledge the ways that race- and class-based oppression intersect with sexism and misogyny to produce especially harmful outcomes for working-class women of color.Footnote ²⁹ When she engages with issues of anti-Black racism, she focuses solely on examples that primarily affect Black men.Footnote ³⁰ She does not explicitly discuss experiences of racism faced by Black women or non-Black women of color. When she does discuss forms of discrimination that Black women do face, such as sexual harassment in the workplace, she leaves racism entirely out of her analysis of the structural forces that produce it.

Further evidence for the claim that Fricker's ignorance is not merely situated but also willful is that many white women who have written about sexual harassment have actually acknowledged the epistemic significance of the fact that so many of the early plaintiffs in sexual harassment cases were Black women and women of color. Catherine Mackinnon, for instance, who helped write Mechelle Vinson's appellate brief for the Supreme Court, connects Black women's marginalization with their pathbreaking efforts to resist harassment (Mackinnon Reference Mackinnon1979).Footnote ³¹ That Mackinnon recognizes that the multiple jeopardies that Black women face in US society create the possibility of distinctive angles of vision on the interlocking systems of oppression they exist within suggests that occupying a social position that gives rise to situated ignorance is not sufficient for maintaining it.

Further, Fricker actually engages with the work of white women feminist theorists who recognize and discuss the structural importance of racism and other dimensions of oppression when it comes to understanding sexual harassment. In Brownmiller's memoir, on which Fricker relies heavily, Brownmiller connects the intersectional oppression of women of color to their positions on the front lines of resistance (Brownmiller Reference Brownmiller1999). She recognizes that the number of high-profile sexual harassment litigants who were Black women was nonaccidental. Brownmiller connects the social realities of women of color and queer women to their epistemic positions that enabled them to clearly identify sexual harassment as harmful and wrong despite widespread interpretive efforts to paint it as complimentary or trivial.Footnote ³² Brownmiller recognizes not only that differences in social location are relevant to experiences of sexual harassment but that such differences are relevant to the creation of knowledge about these experiences and their relationship to structural domination.

Perhaps the most significant evidence that Fricker's ignorance is willful is the fact that Brownmiller's discussion of this topic appears in the very same chapter from which Fricker draws her discussion of Carmita Wood's experience. Though Brownmiller discusses the nonaccidental nature of Black women's epistemic insights regarding sexual harassment in the very work that Fricker cites, Fricker chooses not to acknowledge racist or capitalist oppression in her explanation of “the background conditions that were conducive to the relevant hermeneutical lacuna” surrounding sexual harassment (Fricker Reference Fricker2007, 152). That this section appears between two of the passages that Fricker quotes in her own work suggests that Fricker was likely aware of the racial and economic dimensions of sexual harassment cases in the United States but nonetheless chose not to include them in her work. Thus, in her discussion of why it was “no accident” that the experiences of “women like Carmita Wood” “had been falling down the hermeneutical cracks” (153), it was also no accident that Fricker let important aspects of other women's sexual harassment experiences slip through the hermeneutical cracks of an interpretive framework that she herself designed. This reveals the legacy of structural gaslighting in white feminist epistemology.

Beyond “Strategic Forgetting”

Feminist epistemology that aims to be liberatory must work to create practices of critical and collective self-reflection. White feminist philosophy's shortage of such practices is evident in its persistent reliance on what Kyla Wazana Tompkins calls “strategic forgetting”—a white feminist methodology that is especially apparent in Fricker's work:

Such strategic forgetting is a primary mechanism of structural gaslighting, but its effects reach well beyond those who pay the price with their own felt knowledge. In many ways, Fricker's work has set the terms of the debate in contemporary feminist epistemology. The conceptual landscape that she has constructed—along with its glaring structural absences, erasures, and disappearances—is now construed as the common ground. It forms the epistemic field upon which fair play is imagined to take place. The question then becomes: what to do about the sad state of this field? It is unquestionable that white feminist theory has been built on a foundation of simultaneously ignoring and stealing the theoretical work of women of color and Native feminist theorists. But it does not follow that mere “inclusion” and “recognition” of these perspectives within existing settler colonial, white feminist frameworks offers a solution (Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill Reference Arvin, Tuck and Morrill2013).Footnote ³³ As Tompkins emphasizes, a radical reframe is needed to adequately address the issue of perspectives that have “gone missing” in white feminist theoretical frameworks:

The epistemic exclusions at the heart of white feminist philosophy facilitate paradigms that can no longer be allowed to persist. There are a multitude of diverse theoretical frameworks and epistemologies upon whose active disappearing the conceptual foundations of white feminist philosophical schemas are predicated. If something like epistemic justice is a goal of feminist epistemology, then feminist philosophy must work to dismantle and replace epistemic institutions built on conceptual foundations of white supremacy and colonialism. This requires much more than just plugging up the “hermeneutical lacunae” that remain within existing epistemologies of domination. It requires an exercise of courage and accountability that cannot coexist with the instinct to preserve white innocence and blamelessness that drives so much of white feminist discourse. Whether white women working in feminist theory are willing rise to this challenge remains to be seen.