THE global system that we all inhabit has undergone numerous social, political, and economic transformations.
In the aftermath of World War 2, for example, the decolonising process that took place in the Third World had given the indigenous peoples in Africa and Asia a reason to celebrate. This was primarily due to the fact that social, political, and economic racism and sexism that were
very much visible during the colonial era had finally come to an end.
However, much to the chagrin of the indigenous people, epistemic racism is still very much alive. Most people are not aware of the fact that epistemic racism is the most pernicious form of racism. Epistemic racism is the foundational form of an older version of racism in that the inferiority of non-Western people as below human is defined based on their closeness to animality and the latter is defined on the basis of inferior intelligence and the lack of rationality.
Epistemic racism operates through the privileging of essentialist politics of Western male elites. Put in another way, the hegemonic tradition of thought in Western philosophy and social theory almost never includes non-Western philosophers and social scientists. In this tradition, the West is considered to be the only one with access to universality, rationality, and truth.
Epistemic racism considers non-Western knowledge to be inferior to Western knowledge. Since epistemic racism is entangled with epistemic sexism, Western-centric social science is a form of epistemic racism that privileges Western male knowledge as the superior knowledge in the world today.
The epistemic privilege of the West was consecrated and normalised through the Spanish Catholic monarchy destruction of Al-Andalus and the European colonial expansion of the late 15th century. Euro-centric provincialism has it that reliable knowledge can be generated only through the Greco-Roman tradition, passing through the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and Western sciences. Western knowledge became the universal normalised knowledge. In this way, all other traditions of thought were deemed inferior, characterised in the 16th century as barbaric, in the 19th century as primitive, in the 20th century as underdeveloped and in the 21st century as anti-democratic.
To better understand how epistemic racism has shaped the world today, it is important that we understand how its foundation had contributed to social hierarchy. We should start by making a clear distinction between racism and prejudice.
Prejudice, in a nutshell, is a prejudgment about another person based on the social groups to which that person belongs. Prejudice is unavoidable. Racism, on the other hand, is a form of oppression and its potency lies in the fact that it is backed by legal authority and institutional control.
The system of racism begins with ideology, and this is where epistemic racism rears its ugly head. The ideological process that is wholly informed by Euro-centric provincialism dehumanises non-Western people and is then reinforced across Western society through “credible” intermediary institutions of knowledge such as schools and textbooks, and also through the socialisation process. Political speeches, movies, holiday celebrations, and certain words or phrases will constantly reinforce the inferiority of certain social groups.
The racial ideology in the United States, for instance, rationalises racial hierarchies as the outcome of a natural order. While most people are taken in by the preamble to the constitution of the United States, which proclaims that all men are created equal with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, few are aware that it was written by a slave owner, Thomas Jefferson, and that all of the 13 colonies at that point in time had made allowance for slavery.
One can also argue that the 13th Amendment to the American Constitution had ended legal slavery but the truth of the matter is that blackness is still associated with inferiority while white is almost always associated with supremacy. The uniqueness of American slavery lies in its foundation whereby race was used as a basis that created a defined, recognisable group of people and placed them outside society.
Slavery in America is inexorably tied to White dominance. The enslaved status of blacks in America is illustrated in the development of American attitudes towards slavery, freedom, and race. While the United States prides itself on being the bastion of freedom and equality, the maltreatment of the African American community and other minorities has called into question the ideology that underpins the foundation of American culture.
Race played a pivotal role in how the framers of the Confederate States had conceptualised a society in which African slavery would form the cornerstone of the country they would create after winning the civil war. There is no doubt that the African American community had made significant social and economic gains since the end of slavery but the social stigma that is associated with blackness is still alive and kicking in the land of the free.
The writer is director of the Centre for Policy Research and International Studies, Universiti Sains Malaysia