Episode 061: Briana Toole on Identity and Knowledge

You're listening to the Unmeat Podcast with Maisha Jerry. Welcome to the place where philosophy and real-world issues collide. Hello and welcome to the Unmeat Podcast. This is the place where I have the opportunity to talk with diverse philosophers about the social and political issues of our day. Today, I chat with Brianna Tool. Brianna is an assistant professor of philosophy at Clare Momma Kenneth College. Her research interests are in social epistemology and feminist philosophy. She has written a standpoint in epistemology, the epistemic roots of white supremacy and public philosophy. She is also the founder/director of Corrupt the Youth and In-School Philosophy program. In this episode, we talk about identity and knowledge, objectivity, being woke, pre-college programming, and so much more. Hello Brianna, welcome to the Unmeat Podcast. How are you today? I am doing well. How are you Maisha? I'm good. I'm good. I'm good. Brianna, how did you get interested in philosophy? It's sort of a long story, but it begins with being definitively not interested in philosophy. I wanted to go to law school. Really, really wanted to be a lawyer, was told my entire life that I was an arguer that I would argue with a brick wall and so law just seemed like the natural field for me. So I went off to Florida State University to do my bachelor's degree with plans to study political science. I was an honors student and as part of the honors college, they would have speakers from around the college come to speak to us about majors and pathways that were open to us. Someone came from the law school and mentioned that the majors that performed the best on the LSAT are English, history, and philosophy. That's a seven point. They got you. Yeah, well, I was like, I've already had English and history, you know, like I know what that is. So why not check out this philosophy stuff. And so I signed up for two classes in the spring of my freshman year, critical reasoning and thinking and intro to political philosophy. And intro to political philosophy was the first time that I had come across discussions about the good and the right and relationships between analysis of values and power and it just seemed to me like something that I needed to keep studying, especially if I wanted to go to law school. And really just the more classes I took, the more it became clear that I was really, really excited to do philosophy and talk philosophy and think philosophy, not as interested in arguing with people just for the sake of arguing, which is what I thought law would be if only 18 year old and known that's also what philosophy is. So how did you how did you realize that you would be doing the kind of research work that you're focused on. So so did you take a class in an epistemologic courses and undergrading like, I'm going to grad school. This is going to focus on. Did you get, did you get addicted to it when you were in graduate school? Yeah, so the interesting thing for me is I was very committed to ethics. I had this class ethical theory with David McNaughton and I just loved him. I continued to take classes with him at the end of my junior year. He was like, you know, you should write a thesis for your honors degree and that was the first time someone had really encouraged me to pursue research independently. And so I, you know, decided to write a thesis looking at Kant and Hume's moral theories and arguing that Hume was a fool. We should come back to this at some point. Yeah, we should. My frenemy, my nemesis. I know that there is something definitely wrong with everything he says, but the moment I try to identify the flaw, I just it alludes me. It can't be done. So yes, I wrote my honors thesis on ethics really committed to continuing to pursue that track in grad school. I thought I was going to research out in place. Can I really didn't like my epistemology class and undergrad. It was a great class. The professor was wonderful, but I just thought like who cares if this is a fake barn or not. I don't see why this is important or something I should care about. And so truthfully, I only made the switch to epistemology. Once I got to UT Austin for my PhD and there was this class being taught by the person who would go on to become my dissertation advisor, Sonando Ramaja. It was co-taught with Miriam Schoenfield and the class was from meta ethics to meta epistemology. Let me just interrupt. We just a little bit, Brianna, for those who are wondering for those who never went to graduate school, so they may be wondering what the hell is epistemology. If we can just explain that that would just help as we progress throughout our conversation. Oh, yes, of course. People cache epistemology out in various ways that I think the simplest formulation is that epistemology is the study of knowledge. It's the study of how we know and what we know and how we can know that something is true. And epistemology ends up touching on lots of really cool issues that I think grip us all. And in particular, the one that stuck out at me in this class was thinking about disagreement. What you ought to do when you encounter disagreement with someone that you think is roughly as smart as you, roughly as confident with respect to the evidence and yet they come to a different conclusion. And it was like this light bulb went off in my head and I thought this is actually the question that has consumed me entire life. I was raised in this really tiny town in the Florida panhandle on the border of Georgia and Alabama. And just dealt with pervasive racism my entire life. But and this is, you know, going to be a weird thing for me to say, treat it terribly by people and then simultaneously treated well by them in some circumstances. And so I was like, I need to understand why people can like act one way, but believe another, why they can have disagreements with each other when they agree with the evidence is I just really needed to understand a lot of the conflicts and issues that I had witnessed growing up. And epistemology just seemed to me the best at addressing that are at least helping me to understand those issues. So let's get into some epistemology. So there's a view. And so this is my submission of the view. I'm pretty sure I'm doing a horrible job of this summation. So there's a view that asserts that our social identity and not just the books we read or the arguments we hear, a social identity can help us acquire knowledge. It's typically referred to as standpoint epistemology standpoint epistemology. You want to say that there are several versions of this particular view. What are these versions and is my summation even correct. I would tweak a little. I don't know that I'm humble enough. I'm humble enough of the tweak. Yeah, I was like looking at the question I was like, huh, I don't know that social epistemology helps with knowledge, but I will say that I think it shapes what knowledge we arrive at in certain ways. So I still have identity shapes it shapes it. Yes. So for instance, as sex of your social identity will shape what concepts you even have available as a mixed-raced light skinned woman. I need the concept of colorism because I have a lot of light skin privilege and I need to be able to acknowledge that when I'm teaching students who are darker skin, for instance, but that's not a concept that everyone's equipped with. And it's because I have the concept of colorism that I see, for instance, issues where black models and actresses have been whitewashed either on the cover of magazines or on the shows that they're in. So having that concept is a reflection of the fact that I need that concept to describe some asset of my experience. But then having that concept subsequently shapes what I notice and how I interpret what I notice out in the world. And so I wouldn't say that social identity helps us get knowledge, but it certainly enables the acquisition of some knowledge that other people might not have access to. And if their social identity precludes them from noticing the things that I notice or from needing the concepts that I need. So give me another example because I'm slow. Give me another example. Well, the most famous one in the literature is that of sexual harassment. This concept wasn't introduced until the 70s. There's some thought that before before the introduction of that terminology, women who were experiencing sexual harassment knew that something was off kilter about their experiences. But they couldn't really fully communicate that to others or express what was happening to them. So that sort of an old school example. I think a more common one that people should have a pretty good capacity to latch into is that of microaggressions. If you're a person of color, if you're a woman, if you're an immigrant, chances are you've experienced a microaggression. You've had someone dismiss your emotions by asserting that you're probably on your period. You have had someone ask you where you're really from. You've had someone mention that, wow, you're so articulate. And so if you're subject to those sorts of experiences repetitively over time, you're going to need a term to name and classify those experiences, which is how the concept of microaggression came to be. But if you're a person who's positioned with lots of power such that microaggressing against you is difficult, then you won't likely not need that term. first of all, and then second of all, you're likely to not notice those microaggressions when they occur towards others, and you might not even notice that you are pursuing or engaging in microaggressions yourself. Great, I love it. Now I understand. I understand. So how is standpoint epistemology as you have described in opposition to kind of what we will consider traditional epistemology? Okay, look, you clearly just want me to get on my soapbox. Because this is such a big issue for me. I'm like just starting another paper on this topic because I'm so interested in it. I'm going to go ahead and start off by saying, I think some standpoint epistemologist, some feminist epistemologist might not agree with my assessment here or they might pursue a different angle. But for me, I would say the big tension is over this idea about objectivity. Now let's be honest, objectivity sounds so nice, right? Like you want your teachers to be objective when they grade you. You want to know that your grade reflects the goodness or badness of the work and not your professors, particular perspective or attitude towards it, right? So objectivity on paper sounds fantastic. And traditional epistemology is sort of committed to this idea because it sounds really great. And so we might think of traditional epistemology in terms of like ideal epistemology. The idea that if a claim is going to count as knowledge and if it describes some assets of the world truly, then it's objective. It should be something that anyone could know irrespective of their social position, their age, their gender, so on. But what the standpoint epistemologist says is that, look, that's a great ideal. But we live in the real world and in the real world people have bodies. And in those bodies, we are treated different ways. We have to navigate the world differently because of our embodied experiences. And so it just is the case that very often there are some aspects of the world that I might notice because I'm a woman of color, but that a white man for instance might miss. And so then the tension between these two schools becomes clear when you think about the kind of disagreement that might lead to. Let's say that I say something as sexist and that white man disagrees. Our first thought might be to step back and say, well, who's being objective? But the issue is there might not be an objective point of view to approach that question with. Rather, the issue is that some asset of his identity might make it such that he can't see why something is sexist, whereas some asset of my identity helps me or aids me in understanding why some incident counts as being sexist. And so what standpoint epistemology tries to do is sort of reconceive what objectivity means and how it can be pursued. So here's the big tension I would say. Traditional epistemologist want to pursue objectivity and this leads them to be committed to certain other ideals like the idea that nowhere should be interchangeable. If my esha know something Briana should be able to know it. If Briana knows something, my esha should be able to know it. And then they also add this constraint to about evidence. If evidence is evidence at all, it has to be accessible to everybody. And this standpoint epistemologist wants to say that it's precisely because of aspects of our embodied experience that that ideal very often cannot be actualized in reality. And so if we want to get at what the truth is about the world, we shouldn't assume that one perspective is the objective perspective. Rather, we should acknowledge that because of our embodied perspectives, we all have certain blind spots. We all have certain limitations. And so to get it the truth, we have to work together across lines of difference and not make any assumptions like white men are objective and women are emotional and irrational. Sort of the claims that are embedded in a society like ours and virtue of some of our patriarchal commitments. Do you think this commitment to objectivity is the reason why standpoint epistemology has been at the margins of philosophical thinking or are there additional reasons for why it has has been? I think it's probably a big part of it. I think truthfully though, look traditional epistemologist operate with this idea. And Rebecca Cookelet does a great job in a paper she has on this topic saying precisely this that we've treated objectivity as if it's a politically neutral option. When in fact, the idea of objectivity is itself value latent. When you look back at our society, right, and we say, okay, we ought to be objective. What sorts of people do we tend to treat as being objective? And what sorts of people do we tend to treat as if they're not objective? As if they're they're too involved, they're too emotionally invested, right? And so what happens, I think, is that you praise this model of objectivity, but operating in the background is this idea that there are people who meet that ideal of objectivity. And they are the people who have nothing to gain from changing the system, which means you're going to have as the model of objectivity is the hallmark of objectivity, upper class, white men. And because we're operating with schemas and frameworks that cash women and people of color out as being irrational, emotional, sort of invested in nature, gratification oriented, those sorts of folks automatically become dismissed in their capacities as knowers because well, they're really invested in changing how things are so they can't possibly have an objective point of view. They're just too involved. What we miss with that sort of framing though is that, you know what, they're right. Women and people of color, it's absolutely true. I am hella invested in changing shit. I really am. But you know what, upper class white men are also equally invested in not changing things. And it's equally important that we pay attention to the fact that they have interest in maintaining the status quo. And that interest makes them just as subjective as my interest in changing the system makes me. But I think the other reason is most standpoint epistemologists are women. And so if you already think we need to prioritize models of knowledge that are objective. And then you have this entire field that's emerging that undermines that claim. And then it's also done by people that we already think are not objective. That provides dual reasons for confining standpoint epistemology to the margins. So what would you say to the objection that, you know, yes, Brianna, I hear you, you know, ones, ones social identity, one particular standing in society. Can allow people to see things that, you know, other people with different identities cannot see. But are there any limits? Are there any limits to standpoint epistemology? This is a great question that I don't know I have an immediate answer to. Oh, I mean, yes, there are limits. So many of us working in standpoint epistemology sort of confine our claims to the social domain or to those areas where the social would influence us somehow. So I'm not super committed to saying that social identity is going to have a dramatic impact in the field of theoretical physics, for instance. Okay. But it's Kristen Eppman who also works on standpoint epistemology notes. A lot of our research, you know, what we research is shaped by the questions we're interested in asking. That in itself reflects somebody's interest. And so acknowledging that our values shape what questions we care to ask, what interpretations we care to offer of the evidence that we get. In those ways, in those ways, lots of what we think or treat as objective data gathering or objective methods and filtering in whether they mean to or not some of these social biases. And so what standpoint epistemology wants us to acknowledge is that sure, epistemology is an ideal worth pursuing. Yeah. But just because it's an ideal worth pursuing, doesn't mean you should confuse what you're currently doing in your research program as being objective. So I want to kind of connect this to oppression, which we have been doing. How does standpoint epistemology help us understand the different forms of what you all call epistemic oppression? Yes. So let me just give a little gloss on what that concept even means because I think it's still fairly new. Christy Dotson introduced the idea of epistemic oppression in this paper she put out in 2012 called conceptualizing epistemic oppression. And she defines it as the unwarranted or unjust exclusion of certain people from the practices of knowledge production. And even that definition requires a little unpacking because you might think, okay, well, what's like a practice of knowledge production? When I sit in my office and work on a research paper and try to get it published, that's the process of knowledge production. So knowledge production happens in institutions like schools, for instance. And so there are some really obvious ways where we can see epistemic make a pressure happening. Prior to what, you know, the 1960s, it was really difficult for for people of color to get into academies and to and even when they were allowed into these institutions, it was difficult for them to get PhDs to get published, which means that they were not full participants in these practices of knowledge production that were commonly available to other more privileged people. So one of the things that I try to do with standpoint epistemology is show that this particular account helps us understand why epistemic oppression happens. And I think that's one of the virtues of standpoint epistemology over traditional epistemology that it can make sense of this phenomenon that traditional epistemology I think mostly cannot account for. So here's what I mean when I say I think standpoint epistemology helps make this clear. And I'll just return to that example that I gave earlier if I as a woman of color, I mean a PhD program with a white man and we are working with these assumptions that we need to be objective that if I'm going to make a claim that evidence needs to be available to everyone such that this man can come to the same conclusions that I can and then we're disagreeing about something whether it counts as sexism. On the basis of the ideals of objectivity, he can just rule out that I have knowledge at all about what I just experienced. And in that way he can epistemically oppress me. And so I want to say standpoint epistemology can help us make sense of why this is happening because it acknowledges that knowledge is acquired from a situated perspective. So I can say something like it might be that in virtue of his social positioning as a white man, he doesn't have the concepts I have or he doesn't have the interpreter framework or he just doesn't have the sort of history of these experiences that will lead him to attend to this in the same way that I do. So then I can offer an analysis of why I know something and he doesn't and why he's not knowing that leads him to say that I must not know either. What is what is your hope in it in some ways I kind of know the answer to this in my conversation. What is your hope as people read your work on this issue as people listen to our conversation? What is your hope for them? Okay, do you mind if I like in answering this question digress a little into the reason Adamie? Sure, go right ahead. Go right ahead. Dear listener, when the pandemic forced us all in sunlight last year, I did the only reasonable thing one could do. And I chose to start watching Gray's Anatomy because there are 16 seasons, you know, I thought for sure that will get me through however long this last. So anyways, spoiler alert for anyone who hasn't seen there are these two characters, Callie, who is a Latina Mel and then Erica, who is a white woman, and they end up dating for a brief spell. And it's their first time, it's each of their first times being with a woman. And so after their first night together, Erica wakes up and she tells Callie about this experience that she had as a child. She was like, you know, I didn't wear glasses. I never thought anything of it. And then my parents maybe get glasses. And I put them on for the first time. And I suddenly realized that all of those green splotches I was seeing everywhere were leaves. I had no idea that I was missing this whole world. And she says, you know, that's what being with you is like. You know, I never knew that I was missing this whole part of the world until I was with you. Oh wow. Yeah, I found it really profound. And I think that's really what I want to happen with my work. I felt like before philosophy, I was just so confused and sort of in the dark slightly. Like, there were things happening to me and around me and it left me very frustrated and angry. And I now know looking back a little depressed. And I think there really is something I use this quote all the time because I love it so much. But there is power in as Bell Hook says, being able to name something, to be able to put a name to an experience because it provides this depth to it that there could not be before. And I think we all have a right to understand our own experiences. But some of us are just fundamentally prevented from that in virtue of the sorts of environments that were educated and raised in. And that was certainly true for me. It has certainly been true from any of the students that I work with. And so what I want to happen is for them to feel like they've got glasses, you know, they're not just seeing green smudges anymore. They're seeing the beauty and delicacy and intricacy of leaves. I'm trying to imagine what it would be. Now, I know as an ethicist and a social political philosopher, living in this current moment, thinking about this current moment is I have a mixture of emotions and attitudes in regards. But I'm also thinking about this moment and I've been thinking about, you know, how I would be feeling what I would be thinking if I was a social epistemologist. Now, we live in a moment, error of fake news, an error of some of the examples you were talking about, you know, I was thinking about white privilege and happy we even deny that privilege exists. So there's denial of certain kinds of things in existence. And I wonder how frustrating and/or how motivating our current moment is for you in regards to things that you've been thinking about for several years. Yeah, it's full disclosure. I am not an overly emotional person, and I'm not saying that because I think poorly of emotions. I think it's just like a function of having been brought up in the South, which I think is very committed to a sort of masculineized culture, but I also teach feminism for men. And I had my class Tuesday and I was rereading the material I assigned, which for that day happened to be Audrey Lorde, two pieces from sister outsider. So the first was, I think her most famous piece, The Master's Tools, will never dismantle The Master's House. And the other was sexism and American disease and blackface. Yeah, I just, yeah, I just, I thought that's the most of this last week. Yeah. Isn't it wonderful? Wonderful. But like it's the weirdest experience I've ever had because I've only seen it on TV, but I was like reading and then I noticed that there were like wet spots on the page. I was like, what the hell? I realized I was crying. But it was just like, it's, you know, she wrote this work in 1979. It's really deeply frustrating to be teaching and talking about and experiencing the same shit that she was dealing with in 1979. So it's hard not to fill a decent sort of frustration to like, commence myself that like, I mean, is what I'm writing even going to make a difference? Does it matter? And then there are other times when I think, wow, I just, I have so much to draw on because really truly we are a shit show at the moment. So there is a lot available to discuss. But here it is where I think teaching really keeps me motivated because even now I get messages from former students who are like, you know, I was really depressed about, you know, so and so. But then I remember some of the things you taught me and it helped me understand why some people are not able to understand the protest. And it helps me have better conversations with my coworkers. And I think one of the things that's happening to me as I get older is that I'm getting a bit more practical and realistic about my aims. And I as one person going to be able to like radically change our system. No, no, no, probably not. But can I arm people with tools that will help them to navigate the world more easily and more effectively so that we can collectively work together to overthrow and dismantle some of these systems? Yeah, I think that's, I think that's achievable. I think that's an accomplishable goal. I feel sad by the current moment, but encourage that I definitely see some of my students getting more engaged, more politically active, more woke. You know, and I mean that in the positive connotation, not the negative connotations it's come to have. I'm glad you even mentioned that because particularly as an epistemologist in some ways, you want people to be woke. Right? And we're walking the sense of an epistemic perspective, but it's been used as a pejorative. Now we've been talking about the ways it can be misused. We can misuse anything, but it's been used as a pejorative as it suggests that knowing things being able to name things is somehow a bad thing. And as a epistem, I mean, as an individual period, I get upset when it's used as a pejorative. Yes. But I can also imagine as a epistemologist, that must be upsetting when people are using consciousness and being aware of certain kinds of things, being knowledgeable about certain kinds of things is considered a bad thing. Yeah, it's deeply frustrating, but I think it comes from this place where, I mean, it's sort of unsurprising, right? You've been able to keep an entire segment of the population quiet for a long time just by keeping them blind to their own experiences. And the internet has really ruined that because now we can interact with each other, even if we're not in the same words, we can share stories, which is consciousness raising, we can come to the awareness that, oh, this thing that I thought was happening to just me is happening to everyone who looks like me. That's that's a systemic issue. That's not a Brianna issue, a me issue. And so it is frustrating to see it used pejoratively, but most of the time I just think, I guess at least it's good that we're talking and I try to remind myself that this is just what it looks like when when conversations start to unfold and grow. People are going to over-correct. They're going to misuse terms. And then there they're going to sort of, they're going to I like to use the metaphor with my students. Cars these days have that literal lane correction. And I think that's sort of like what we see happening out in the world. We shouldn't be engaging these conversations. It's going to be messy. It's going to be ugly. We're all going to make mistakes. But that's how we get corrected. That's how we figure out what the right position is by engaging in dialogue. And so I'm mostly hopeful because like I said, I grew up in the small town, super repressive. People did not discuss difficult issues. And I think that's worse. I think that's way worse than talking and getting it wrong. So I want to talk about some of your outreach work. We've been talking about teaching in the context of the university. But I want to talk a little bit about your program, corrupt the youth. And I want to know why you decided to even name that. Why did you start that program? What is this aim? What do you hope to accomplish? Well, you know, I just thought I'd be maximally scandalous. Oh my god. My dissertation advisor was like, "Prayana, I just don't know how successful you're going to be if you keep that name." And I was like, "Sanon, I am not changing it. I mean it." So yes, corrupt the youth is a philosophy outreach program that I started when I was in the third year of my PhD program at UT Austin. We bring philosophy to students at Title I School. So this is a school with a high number of students on free or reduced lunch. We prioritize working with populations that are underrepresented in the academy. So students of color, students from low income backgrounds. And the goal is both to expose them to philosophy so that they know it's an option that they can pursue when they go off to college if that's what they choose. But also to do exactly what I'm doing with my college students, which is to arm them with some of the concepts that they need to understand the things that are going on around them. That was my deepest frustration as a child. And funnily enough, it's one of the things that comes up in Toni Morrison's "The Blueest Die." But adults just don't talk to children, which is deeply unfortunate because children are learning and listening and watching everything we do and they're internalizing, the things we say and the things that we don't say. And I thought it was really important to them and something I would have loved as a kid to have someone taught to me as if I could understand and to treat me seriously and to take my ideas and thoughts and engage with them as if they were valuable. And so that's what we're trying to do with corrupt the youth. Now, as far as the name goes, it is inspired by the charge for which Socrates was sentenced today. The way I tell it to the students when I go in for their first day is, you know, Socrates is a sort of this like old, grumpy guy who would walk around. And instead of starting fights with people, he would start conversational disagreements and ask them these questions and make them realize that they didn't know as much as they thought they knew. But he was particularly a pest to the Athenian nobles who ruled over Athens because he was sort of encouraging the youth to question their authority and to question the basis of their power. And so they did what they had to do, you know, they offtim because he was an inconvenience and they sentenced him to death on the charges of corrupting the youth and made him drink him lock. And I thought, you know what? That is actually exactly what we need. We need a new Socrates coming around and corrupting our youth, encouraging them to question a authority, to question the basis of power. And that really gets students interested because I'm always like, you know what? I know that you argue with your parents, with your teacher, with the principal. After this class, you're finally going to win an argument. And then they're hooked because every kid wants to win an argument with an authority figure. So I think public philosophy is becoming much more accepted than it used to be within our profession. But when we talk about public philosophy these days, we tend to think of just public writing or what we're doing now, just podcasting. Do you think we should begin talking more about pre-college programs like corrupt the youth? Yes, absolutely. And to tell you the truth, because of the pandemic, we had to, I think like many outreach programs, we had to stop operations because schools weren't open. And that has given us some time to step back and think about what it is we want to do, what the future looks like for us. And one of the things I've realized we really need in our discipline is we need philosophers advocating and lobbying for increasing philosophy in schools. I just don't understand why you wouldn't want to teach a discipline like this to students. When there's so much evidence that it does make them more critical, it does make them more empathetic, it does help them take on and consider different perspectives. And I think, okay, if I'm thinking about the function of schooling, what is it? What do we want to accomplish by educating kids? Ideally, we want them to become better citizens because these kids are going to grow up and vote and shape the country that we all live in. And I think you can't do that without teaching kids to be critical, to unpack the motivations behind certain policies, to realize that when a teacher tells them something, they're getting a limited amount of information. And so they might have to extrapolate from what's been said to what isn't said. And so I would love to see us working more to do that to lobby for increasing access to philosophy in schools. So because I think it's incredibly valuable. Well, Brianna, I am smarter as a free sort of this conversation. Thank you so much. So glad to hear I didn't bore you up. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. For more access to the Unmute Podcast, subscribe on iTunes or head over to the website at www.unmutepodcast.co. There you can get more information about our guests, participate in giveaways, as well as learn more about people, books and concepts mentioned in today's episode. Until next time, remember that your silence will not protect you. Listen, think, speak, the world will be different as a result. [Music]