Black Feminist Epistemology or Bust: Challenging White Masculinist Thought-Models in Scientific Inquiry
This brief look at the origin and diffusion of the dominant epistemological grounding in the social sciences offers a discourse predicated upon White masculinist sensibilities and ways of understanding reality. Consequently, in this thought-model there is a marginalization of Black women’s participation and the contributions any person of color has made to scientific knowledge. Scientific knowledge is infused with racist ideologies, as Hume and Locke were not the only proslavery/racist philosophers of science. Women are positioned as needing to be controlled and contained as they are metaphorically represented as nature. Moreover, any other epistemological orientation is completely silenced within this tradition. All of these aspects are proof of select voices in knowledge creation. In addition, it suggests that a particular type of scientific inquiry and knowledge making is validated by a community of members who all have the same standpoint. This offers members an unprecedented form and amount of power.
Bloor’s (1991) discussion of scientific discourse notes a “Machiavellian” tendency that speaks to the Foucaultian concept of knowledge as power (p. 27). In his estimation, scientific practices are dominated by what he calls “epistemocrates” – individuals whose specialized knowledge base allows them to hide their agenda while organizing reality according to their own “normative model” (p. 27). Watkins (1999) believes this normative knowledge base “is a means of controlling how [Black women and others] think about themselves and their future possibilities as well as how they locate themselves in the world throughout time” (p. 22). This domination relies upon the ability to organize reality and is contingent upon what ideas prevail at any given moment in time. Power is eminent in that any normative model has the ability to control how and what we think (Herrick, 2001, p. 249).