What Lies Beneath

Abstract

Our ability to dismantle white supremacy is compromised by the fact that we do not fully appreciate what, precisely, white supremacy is. In this chapter, I suggest understanding white supremacy as an epistemological system—an epistemic frame that serves as the foundation for how we understand and interact with the world. The difficulty in dismantling an epistemological system lies in its resilience—a system’s capacity to resist change to its underlying structure while, at the same time, offering the appearance of large-scale reform. Using white supremacy as a case study, here I explore what features enable this resilience. An analysis of white supremacy that presents it as more than a tool of social and political oppression, but as an epistemic system that makes this oppression possible, allows us to better understand, and eventually overthrow, such systems.

Compliance concerns in sustainable finance: an analysis of peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platforms and sustainability

“…The financial system is considered sustainable if it accelerates and financially supports the transition of society and the economy toward sustainability (Maltais, and Nykvist, 2020; European Commission, 2022; Park, 2018). In 2021, the sustainable finance market rapidly surpassed $1tn, marking a high point in the meteoric rise of a subsector that did not exist a decade ago (Toole, 2021).…”

An Epistemic Lens on Algorithmic Fairness

“…We argue that this epistemic lens can help us understand representational harms because many such harms concern the ways in which prejudice influences the assumptions people make about others on the basis of their social identity. This prejudice manifests not only in harms related to resources and opportunities, but also in the way we build our epistemic frameworks through which we make sense of the world [27,34,61,65].…”

“…When prejudicial systems influence the ways we interpret the world and find meaning, this is a case of epistemic injustice because it is an injustice done to us in our capacity as knowers [32]. We argue that many representational harms are instances of epistemic injustice [32,53] and that this framing helps to explain why these types of harms are particularly resilient and difficult to address [27,65]. Further, we argue that identifying the root causes of algorithmic harms is essential to ensuring that changes to sociotechnical systems address problems at their source rather than merely shift them to new domains.…”

“…Prejudicial discrimination on the basis of social identities is both a problem of distributive injustice (relating to allocative harms) and a problem of epistemic injustice (relating to representational harms). While prejudicial discrimination underlies both, epistemic injustice [32,53] captures more precisely how prejudice influences the ways we view and the assumptions we make about people on the basis of their social identity [27,61,65].…”

“…While hermeneutical injustices can often be identified as gaps within the dominant epistemic systems, epistemic oppression is particularly resilient because it shows the inadequacy of the epistemic system itself [27]. For example, white supremacy is not only a social and political system, but also an epistemic system that is remarkably resilient because it alters the way people understand the world and thus enables white supremacist beliefs to persist in spite of significant social efforts to reform and eradicate racist institutions [65]. Understanding white supremacy as an oppressive epistemic system can thus show why political reform continually fails to eradicate it and also point to a way forward.…”