the left don't believe in debates or discourse, they're all about shutting down conversation and censorship because debates and facts are just weapons "the privileged" use to maintain their power over the "oppressed". radical shitlibs call it "privilege-sustaining pushback".
Tracking Privilege-Preserving Epistemic Pushback in Feminist and Critical Race Philosophy Classes
Classrooms are unlevel knowing fields, contested terrains where knowledge and ignorance are produced and circulate with equal vigor, and where members of domina
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Abstract
Classrooms are unlevel knowing fields, contested terrains where knowledge and ignorance are produced and circulate with equal vigor, and where members of dominant groups are accustomed to having an epistemic home-terrain advantage. My project focuses on one form of resistance that regularly surfaces in discussions with social-justice content.
Privilege-preserving epistemic pushback is a variety of willful ignorance that many members of dominant groups engage in when asked to consider both the lived and structural injustices that members of marginalized groups experience daily. I argue that this dominant form of resistance is neither an expression of skepticism nor a critical-thinking practice. I suggest that standard philosophical engagements with these expressions of resistance are incapable of tracking the harms of privilege-preserving epistemic pushback. I recommend treating this pushback as a “shadow text,” that is, as a text that runs alongside the readings in ways that offer no epistemic friction. I offer this as one critical philosophical practice for making students mindful of the ways they contribute to the circulation of ignorance and epistemic violence during the course of their discussions.
This entry in 'Translations from the Wokish' is an explanation of the term "Privilege-Preserving Epistemic Pushback."
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Social Justice Usage
Source: Bailey, Alison. “Tracking Privilege-Preserving Epistemic Pushback in Feminist and Critical Race Philosophy Classes,”
Hypatia 32(4): 876–892, p. 879, bold added.
Epistemic home terrains must be constantly and vigilantly guarded and defended. Broadly speaking, privilege-preserving epistemic pushback is a form of worldview protection: a willful resistance to knowing that occurs predictably in discussions that threaten a social group’s epistemic home terrain. Defending that terrain is one way for dominant groups to resist “new material that deeply unsettles the paradigms through which they make sense of the world. When ideologies like the myth of meritocracy or their sense of who they are as a person, are deeply unsettled, students will often fall back on various defense mechanisms to try to maintain order” (Case and Cole 2013, in Berila 2016, 95).
In practice, privilege-preserving epistemic pushback is a family of cognitive, affective, nonverbal, and discursive tactics that are used habitually to avoid engaging ideas that threaten us. This resistance, as José Medina argues, offers a form of “cognitive self-protection” (Medina 2013, 5). When our sense of self, group identity, core beliefs, and privileged place in the social order is challenged, we adopt defensive postures to resist what we perceive to be destabilizing. Protecting our epistemic terrain requires that we put up barriers made of opinions and prejudices, which are fortified by anger, shame, guilt, indifference, arrogance, jealously, pride, and sometimes silence. These feelings sit in our bodies: our hearts beat faster, our muscles tighten, we scowl, and our minds chatter. Sometimes we shut down completely.
…
Source: Bailey, Alison. “Tracking Privilege-Preserving Epistemic Pushback in Feminist and Critical Race Philosophy Classes,”
Hypatia 32(4): 876–892, p. 881.
New Discourses Commentary
Social Justice doesn’t allow itself to be contradicted or even disagreed with. In order to ensure that it is never possible for Theory to be wrong, it has filled itself with concepts like privilege-preserving epistemic pushback to cast any potential disagreement in a cynical light, as though it is the product of some kind of specialized ignorance (like various kinds of
false consciousness or
internalized dominance), inability to tolerate being wrong, or a kind of privilege-rooted depravity, in which
privilege intrinsically begets a want to maintain, legitimize, justify, and even increase one’s privilege (see also,
active ignorance,
pernicious ignorance,
willful ignorance,
shadow text,
racial contract,
white ignorance,
colortalk, and
white fragility).
As a species in this menagerie of mind-reading defeater-defeaters,
privilege-preserving epistemic pushback claims that when people in dominant groups have their privileged status revealed to them or challenged or are asked to consider the perspectives,
lived experiences,
ways of knowing, or
knowledge(s) of
marginalized or
oppressed groups (see also,
epistemic injustice and
epistemic oppression),
they react in ways—not necessarily intentionally—that seek to preserve their privilege, largely by attempting to willfully avoid engagement with the material (see also,
epistemic friction,
racial stress, and
racial stamina).
This should allow them to avoid confronting their privilege and thus maintain their privileged comfort (see also,
white comfort and
antiracism). It is also explicitly theorized to do a type of “
epistemic violence” to members of oppressed groups.
The purpose of the concept, like the others in the genus, is to always have ready to hand a variety of concepts that can be deployed to shut down any opposition to Theory. Because motivations and intentions are not provable—or more importantly, disprovable—opposition to the Theory of Social Justice can easily be cast as the result of selfish motives rather than the kind of response one might give after clearly understanding the concept at hand. This can even happen without the person realizing it (see also,
implicit bias) as a result of having “internalized” dominance or merely having become comfortable in it.
Because of concepts like privilege-preserving epistemic pushback, it can be effectively impossible to argue against, disagree with, or ignore Social Justice moralizing without being accused of suffering some cognitive or moral deficiency that prevents one from being honest about having understood it. That is, within Social Justice, understanding the concepts imply accepting them (thus, failing to accept them implies failure to understand them properly). This seems unlikely to be an accurate understanding of a real concept within ostensibly serious academic philosophy, but it is standard within the
critical methods that follow from what was ultimately a forced marriage of
Marxian analysis and Freudian psychoanalysis (see also,
critical theory).
Ultimately, this concept and ones like it are predictable results of a Theoretical construct that view the world entirely in terms of
systemic power dynamics that aren’t perfectly “
just,” especially when power is understood in
postmodern (specifically,
Foucauldian) terms. Under such a view, it is impossible for dominant groups to fully understand the effects of marginalization, oppression, or even their own privilege (see also,
positionality and
standpoint epistemology), and so it is extremely likely that any explanation of these offered to them would result in a failure to understand. Because this view of power contains the axiom that power always seeks to justify itself, concepts like privilege-preserving epistemic pushback are a natural consequence of the broken Theory underneath them.
