Race and racism - ‘They attacked you just like that’: racial epistemics in making claims about racism.

Abstract

Social psychological research on race and racism has shown that tellers’ reports of experiencing racism are not always accepted or received as valid reports. In this paper, I offer racial epistemics as one mechanism by which the telling and receiving of reports about racism occur. I examine how tellers and recipients might be positioned differently in terms of their epistemic rights and entitlements to racial experiences and the various ways that the epistemic gradient across tellers and recipients is navigated. Through examining news media accounts where Black persons were invited to talk about their experiences of racism in India, I show that despite ascribing a privileged epistemic position to Black persons, recipients (interviewers and other panelists) could make salient epistemic rights to commonsense, specialized, or other forms of racial knowledge in collaboratively establishing, confirming or correcting, and challenging claims about racism in India. The findings are discussed in relation to broader understanding of racism in social psychology. The data are in Indian English.