Black Feminist Epistemology or Bust: Challenging White Masculinist Thought-Models in Scientific Inquiry
Additionally the thought-model that emerges from this masculinist discourse may be engrained with racist and sexist beliefs. John Locke (15th century) and David Hume (16th century), both were central British philosophers of science. Their legacies are still vital within scientific realism (Pavitt, 2001, p 21-24). However, they were both racist. Locke was a shareholder in one of the most prosperous slave shipping companies in England (Thomas, p. 201). He even provided a paragraph in the then newly formed state of Carolina’s constitution that stated “slavery as an institution [should] be accepted” (Thomas, 1997, p. 208-209). Hume’s racism served as the foundation to “proslavery arguments and antiblack education propaganda” (West, 1999, p. 83). In the essay Of National Characters, he wrote, “ . . . negroes . . . [were] naturally inferior to whites [with] . . . no ingenious manufactures amongst them, no arts, no sciences . . .” (West, 1999, p. 83). These views were not isolated and had (still has) an effect on how philosophers envisioned and make sense of science. Lastly, Bacon “laid the ideological groundwork” for scientific inquiry in the seventeenth century (Noble, 1999, p. 57). In discussing science and nature he used terms such as “raping,” “ravaging,” and going into the “womb” of nature “to rip away her secrets” (Gherke, 2002). Bacon’s view of nature as ‘she’ or ‘her’ was extremely oppressive to women. This has, additionally, influenced the very foundation upon which scientific inquiry is based.