SOAS Research Online

Abstract

In this chapter, I want to develop a thus far comparatively neglected critique of white privilege and entitlement, one which fuses resources from critical social epistemology and contemporary recognition theory. My focus is on making sense of whiteness as a power structure that also manifests itself through practices of epistemic exploitation. I contend that the activity of epistemic exploitation, which is geared towards credibility excess attribution, may be understood as an operational activity of what Axel Honneth has termed ‘ideological recognition’. This social pathology is potentially the most concerning of recognition abuses because it mutates the affective dimension of approval and encouragement, a dimension which all intersubjectively vulnerable agents require for a healthy practical relation-to-self. I argue that whereas practices of manifestly unsubtle violent silencing and invisibilisation aim to deprive marginalised and oppressed groups of that affective dimension by obvious practices of degrading, delegitimating, and dehumanising, the practices of epistemic exploitation and ideological recognition both aim to marginalise and oppress precisely through discourses of approval and encouragement that are degrading, delegitimating, and dehumanising. In this way, credibility deficits do not have a monopoly on painful humiliation and trauma.