Abstract
Epistemological violence is alive and problematic. There is no gainsaying that it dehumanizes members of non-Western societies or persons who differ from the Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) Whites. Psychology has a white, affluent, Western skew as the values of the middle-class, Western, Christian, male, Whites (MWCMW) are held as the frame of reference. In this commentary, I first show how Held’s (2020) “true-for and true-about prepositional” frame is useful for understanding the findings that Africans tend to attribute mental disorders to spiritual causes. However, I respond to her major thesis by clarifying the concept of epistemological violence and addressing the concept of “othering” as a form of linguistic violence. I further argue that interpretations of group differences that do not harm the members of the comparison group are not violent; if something promotes social justice, it is no longer violent but an instance of epistemological “positive peace.”
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