Co-Sponsored by Race, Gender, & Feminist Philosophy and Minorities and Philosophy

Abstract: Patterns of racial violence have a systemic social dimension that requires going beyond the individual responsibilities of perpetrators of such violence and demanding accountability and responsiveness from the communities and institutions within which those patterns unfold. This talk will analyze different kinds of complicity with racial violence and will defend a view of shared responsibility that goes beyond the bystander model. Working toward community responses that are both reparative and preventive, I argue for a kind of political mobilization and resistance against racial violence that I term epistemic activism, which consists in contestatory practices that disrupt complicity with damaging social imaginaries and with the distortions in social perception that hide patterns of racial violence and perpetuate the vulnerabilities of racial minorities. Epistemic activism will be discussed by analyzing photo activism and the activist practices of organizations such as the NAACP and of social movements such as Black Lives Matter.