Paranoid or Perceptive?

“In today’s political landscape, it is more apparent than ever that factual knowledge, or “truth,” is subjective (Mejia et al., 2018; Banet-Weiser & Higgins, 2023); it is largely shaped by those in power and their concomitant dominant epistemic practices (Haraway, 1988; Collins, 2000). While there is a clear danger involved in completely disposing of the notion of objective facts —of abandoning any attempt at certain shared understandings of reality— those facts that we accept and believe as truth have always been shaped by the standpoints of wealthy, cishet, Christian, white, men (Collins, 2000). As argued by Donna Haraway’s “Situated Knowledges” (1988), all knowledge is socially constructed —even scientific knowledge. In short, epistemologies are inseparable from ontologies. Though certain subjectivities, which have created certain ways of understanding the world, have been privileged by Western (masculinist, racist, cis-heteronormative, Christian) epistemologies, “[h]istory is a story Western culture buffs tell each other; science is a contestable text and a powerfield; the content is the form. Period” (Haraway, 1988, p. 577).”

Chapter 1 Subverting the Western Episteme: Alternative Knowledges & Black Cultural Production