Penn Arts & Sciences Logo

Colloquium: Kristie Dotson

Friday, December 1, 2017 - 3:00pm

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.

Paper Title

Accumulating Epistemic Power and the “Problematic Victim” Argument Against the Significance of Black Death