Higher education institutions are increasingly prominent sites for civic engagement. Just within the last year, dozens of student encampments have sprung across North America in which student protestors demand that their universities divest from Israel over the war in Gaza. The pro-Palestinian students blame the universities for their complicity in the war and call on them to disclose and divest funds.
Now that the finger has been pointed, how are these institutions responding? Consider the University of Toronto’s (UofT) response regarding divestment:
- The President will establish an Advisory Committee
- Final decisions regarding membership in the Advisory Committee rest with the Executive Committee of Governing Council, on the recommendation of the President
- President will consider the Advisory Committee’s report and make a decision on next steps in a timely manner
Now, you might be thinking to yourself something fishy is going on here – and you’re probably right. This is because UofT’s response cleverly employs a blame avoidance strategy that I refer to as performative blame avoidance. Performative blame avoidance is a specific type of blame avoidance strategy that avoids or minimizes criticism of one’s failings (e.g., moral or epistemic) by merely performing a symbolic act without any further follow-up actions.
By having the sole authorization to establish and determine membership of the Advisory Committee and then instilling the ability to merely consider the report in order decide how the university ought to proceed, UofT is avoiding blame for the moral failings they are accused of by performing a symbolic act aimed at addressing students’ demands of divestment without any further action being taken.
While the phenomenon of performative blame avoidance is nothing new, to my knowledge, it has not received sufficient attention. Examples abound. Consider a corporation administering a survey to its employees to gauge if there is anti-Asian racism in the workplace and despite responses showing there is, no further action is taken once the survey results have been analyzed. Or consider when individuals and institutions perform land acknowledgments without taking any further action beyond recognition.
While the cases above involve moral failings, there are ways we can performatively avoid blame for distinctively epistemic kinds of failings ranging from asserting falsehoods, engaging in bad faith inquiry, drawing faulty inferences to other pernicious and systematic failings such as willful ignorance, and testimonial injustice. And this has important social and epistemic consequences.
Let me illustrate what I mean by this. I recently attended an interdisciplinary workshop on epistemic reparations which Jennifer Lackey refers to as “intentionally reparative actions in the form of epistemic goods given to those epistemically wronged by parties who acknowledge these wrongs and whose reparative actions are intended to redress them.” Many of the conversations that ensued critically asked how victims of gross violations and injustices have, what Jennifer Lackey refers to as, the right to be known. This is the interpersonal right for victims to be seen and heard, have their stories receive proper uptake, and to be givers of knowledge. We explored the right to be known in contexts of Indigenous legal traditions, health and healing, education, community-led restorying, art/curation, and media.
As the first day was coming to a close, an Elder powerfully posed a question along the lines of, “now that you’ve heard from us, what are you going to do with this knowledge?” The room went silent. How was I or the other participants supposed to respond? Was I even supposed to respond? Initially, some may have felt that the question came out of left field. But it did not come out of nowhere.
We must understand that settler colonialism is a structure that “reinforces the total appropriation of Indigenous life and land.” As Abraham Tobi carefully articulates, this includes among other things, the delegitimization of knowledge systems. Why, then, should the Elder trust us with this knowledge? While they may not have been blaming me, maybe they were blaming us settlers for the way in which we have failed to properly listen to and hear their stories. What was I actually going to do with this knowledge?
If I left the workshop believing that the epistemic work here is done, I would, in a sense, be employing a performative blame avoidance strategy. I would be avoiding blame for my epistemic failings by performing a symbolic act aimed at epistemically reparative work without taking any further action.
I can’t speak for others, but I felt a discomfort that reflectively instructed me. As listeners, we need to appreciate that to be seen, heard, and have one’s stories receive proper uptake requires us to recognize that this is a dynamic and continual process. What we learned about the right to be known in these contexts fall short if we assume that the epistemic work is finished here. I would be committing what Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang call “settler moves to innocence.” After all, avoiding blame is an attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity in order to move toward innocence.
We start to notice that performative blame avoidance comes in variety of guises. It can be either deliberate or non-deliberate. And sometimes, it can be pernicious. Even when we are well-intentioned, avoiding blame for our epistemic failings by performing a symbolic act aimed at epistemically reparative work without any further action can be a way to exacerbate epistemic exclusion and impair our epistemic relationships, whereby we exclude Indigenous ways of knowing and marginalized voices as givers of knowledge.
At this point you may be thinking that the idea of epistemic reparations was never intended as a sufficient way to address past wrongs. So why think that the workshop participants are not taking additional steps?
I concur. I do not think that the participants think that they are sufficiently addressing past wrongs, but rather, are contributing in ways that aim at epistemic and social progress.
My point is that by not carefully reflecting on the epistemic resources we bring to bear when we listen to and hear the stories of victims of gross violations and injustices, we may unreflectively avoid blame (even when well-intentioned) for our epistemic failings and undermine social progress.
By identifying how we employ blame avoidance strategies we can aid people in navigating complex epistemic environments. We ought to be cognizant of how performative blame avoidance is employed as a general blame avoidance strategy and especially in contexts where it undermines social progress.
If our information exchanges are shaped by the desire to avoid blame, then this ought to give us pause. Are we really listening to and hearing others when they speak?
Nick Nicola
Nicolas Nicola is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at Brandon University. His research interests are in epistemology, social and political philosophy, and philosophy of education. Currently, he is working on a series of projects that examine how blame avoidance shapes how we exchange information and on another project concerning approaches to epistemic decolonization in higher education.
