Racial Injustice and Information Flow

Abstract

I submit that the critical epistemology of race and standpoint literature has not explicitly focused on the properties of information about racial or gender injustice in a way similar to how epistemologists have focused on propositions and information when they describe propositional justification. I present an account of information flow in which I describe information in the racial-injustice-information domain in a way similar to how epistemologists describe propositional justification. To this end, I argue (C1) that if subjects in racially unjust societies tend to violate norms that promote a community’s reliable information flow because racial prejudice is widely held in racially unjust societies, then racial injustice can make information flow less reliably in a community. And I argue (C2) that if racial prejudice can make information flow less reliably in a community, then information that nondominant subjects are more likely to have will less reliably flow to community members who lack it.