Knowing Our Way to Freedom: The Epistemology of Racial Hierarchy

Abstract

This dissertation compares the epistemological dimensions of structural racism in the American and French contexts. I engage the works of several prominent public intellectuals in order to explore the epistemological dimensions of structural racism. I use the work of James Baldwin to develop a framework that explores how a person’s position with a racial system shapes how one knows and does not know, as well as how one imagines freedom and justice. According to Baldwin, racial privilege comprises several components which function at the epistemological level. Three epistemological features I focus on are an asymmetry of knowledge, between the privileged and disadvantaged, the tendency to conceptualize and discuss racial issues in sociological rather than in human terms, and the refusal to take Black subjectivity seriously. I then use this framework to engage with the writings of Albert Camus’s The Stranger and The Plague, as well as Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and Wretched of the Earth. I compare these three authors with the goal of exploring how their very different locations within racial structures inform how they know and choose not to know within their writings.