Epistemological and other injustices

People of color struggle within academia and in the streets for recognition, freedoms, and life itself. I write this paper in response to a real incident in my department that left me in real doubt about how scholarship, research, and the academy affect that state of affairs. I begin by trying to understand how the ways psychologists understand difference might be epistemologically unjust. Critical Social and Personality Psychology offers a clear indictment of the wrongs done by psychology to the representation of people of color and perhaps more harmfully, the remedies to their clearly disadvantaged situations. When people come together across identities to work against these distortions and harms, conflicts still arise within the alliance. That is the focus of this paper. Pragmatism proves a resource in these circumstances. It adds to Critical Social and Personality Psychology by understanding identity as not only relational but also mutable and multiple. Pragmatism emphasizes the truth claims of broad inclusion and epistemological justice as well as the moral claims. Pragmatists treat these two as inevitably intertwined. This paper explores how pragmatists of color and women address key issues of the behavior, social practices, modes of thought, and challenges of inequalities they/we face. These thinkers have observed that being dominated produces both the epistemological strengths of “double consciousness” and brute vulnerability in the struggle over material and conceptual ownership of the geographies of bodies, public spaces, homes, communities, and even nations and continents. The implications for pragmatist ways of knowing and acting are then considered.