Cohen Hall, Room 402
Abstract: In her, December 3rd, 2014, Salon piece, “White American’s Scary Delusion: Why Its Sense of Black Humanity is So Skewed,” Brittney Cooper labels the stupefaction many people have in the face of today’s Black rage an “epistemology problem.” It is a problem, she explains, of people utilizing inadequate frameworks for understanding “reasonable” responses to relentless state sanctioned violence against Black people. In this paper, I lend support to Cooper’s claim by outlining the accumulation of epistemic power that appears to result in a kind of oblivion concerning realities for Black people and police conduct. Ultimately, I claim that some accumulations of epistemic power can lead to resilient oblivion, i.e. impaired schedules of salience.