South African singer and Grammy Award winner, Tyla Laura Seethal is under the spotlight of an uncharitable debate about her “Coloured” identity, which is a legitimate racial classification in her native country. Since her relocation to her new professional headquarters in the United States of America (US), she has encountered aggressive resistance from sections of African Americans, who denounce her professed racial identifier. Some have rejected this self-presentation, insisting that she is “Black” and that the term “Coloured” (spelled “colored” in US English) is a racial pejorative or slur that they will not tolerate.
The nub of the contention is that the term is historically trauma-laden”—a racist classification for the US Black population that was denied human ethical consideration during the Jim Crow segregationist era. The most extreme among the dissenters are threatening to “cancel” Tyla if she continues using the term on US public platforms, given that she is seeking professional credibility and opportunities on their turf.
Her international career was launched by the viral song “Water” on South African and African music platforms and ultimately the Billboard Hot 100 Charts. The song peaked at number seven on the Billboard Charts, fifty-five years since fellow South African Hugh Masekela also made it onto this premier list. It is also no small feat that as a South African artist, her single topped the US Billboard Hot R&B Songs Charts. The pinnacle of her accolades is arguably clinching the inaugural Grammy Award for Best African Music Performance. What is certainly most impressive about her trajectory is that she has accomplished all this in less than eighteen months.
In tandem with her meteoric rise came an unsettling development on her international stage. Tyla proudly identifies as Coloured, and this has ignited a volatile debate around Coloured, mixed-race and Black identities and cultures. I find that this controversy makes for an interesting philosophical case study.
Whereas many news and opinion articles about the “Tyla race debate” can be found easily on the internet, what I find lacking in the discourse, is a philosophical analysis of what we are witnessing in real time. So, my philosophical claim in this respect is that Tyla is currently at the epicenter of an epistemic injustice perfect storm. At just twenty-two years old, the East Johannesburg native makes for an interesting case study through the lens of British philosopher Miranda Fricker’s “epistemic injustice” concept, coined in 1999.
Epistemic injustice results when someone is wronged in their capacity as a knower. Fricker articulated two kinds of epistemic injustice, namely testimonial injustice (telling) and hermeneutical injustice (interpreting). The former arises when the speaker is prejudiced due to the hearer ignoring, undermining, distorting, or not believing the speaker’s word. This results is an unjust credibility deficit against the speaker. The latter pertains to misrepresentation of someone’s experiences by themselves and/or others due to the inability to articulate or understand them, respectively. This is the exclusion of the knower or speaker from hegemonic understanding, concepts and language. In this respect the hearer enjoys an unjust credibility excess.
Since Fricker introduced this concept and substantiated on it in her book Epistemic Injustice (2007), many scholars and intellectuals have engaged, interpreted, and added to it, to explain a phenomenon related to capacity and credibility as a knower, speaker, and knowledge producer. Gaile Pohlhaus (2012) contributes an additional kind of epistemic injustice called “willful hermeneutical ignorance,” which is of particular interest to me pertaining to the Tyla situation.
Pohlhaus defines it as follows: “With attention to the way in which situatedness and interdependence work in tandem, I develop an understanding of willful hermeneutical ignorance, which occurs when dominantly situated knowers refuse to acknowledge epistemic tools developed from the experienced world of those situated marginally. Such refusals allow dominantly situated knowers to misunderstand, misinterpret, and/or ignore whole parts of the world.”
This particular brand of ignorance has paraded itself on the global stage as a shadow of Tyla’s otherwise dazzling spotlight. The proponents of this kind of epistemic injustice are a subset of the African American and/or US Black community (the complainants) who are insisting that Tyla should refrain from referring to herself as Coloured. Others have pejoratively labelled her an “uppity African” with a superiority complex, claiming that she allegedly looks down upon Black identity. The components of Pohlhaus’ willful hermeneutical ignorance that interest me are situatedness, interdependence, and dominantly situated knowers.
In order to undertake a comprehensive analysis of the epistemic injustice that I claim, I will do so in the form of a three-part series that engages the three elements of Pohlhaus’ definition of willful hermeneutical ignorance mentioned above, that I think are relevant. In this first part of the series on “Tyla, Coloureds, Color, and Culture,” I propose an existential phenomenological understanding of her situation, situatedness and positionality in this debate. I offer my suggestions on where the epistemic injustice lies.
In the second part, I will interrogate the interdependence aspect of Pohlhaus’ definition of willful hermeneutical ignorance, with respect to race in both Tyla’s native and professional homes. In the US, she is a transnational minority, and her situation and positionality have unfortunately collided with those of the complainants. Her identity has been problematized. In her capacity as a public figure, and due to the awkward interdependence she has with the African American community, she cannot in good conscience ignore the concerns raised by the complainants. Ironically, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), dedicated to fighting racial inequality since 1909, still uses the term “Colored,” which is considered historical and neutral in this context. Yet Tyla is not afforded the same charity.
In South Africa (SA), Coloured identity is also currently being deconstructed, particularly among academics, intellectuals and social commentators who argue that the term is not an appropriate and authentic fit for the South African population group. I touch on this concurrent debate that has been reignited by Tyla’s highly publicized plight, and which has historical ties to the Black Consciousness Movements’ philosophical definition of blackness. The recent launched book Coloured: How Classification Became Culture (2023) by Tessa Dooms and Lynsey Ebony Chutel is a valuable contribution to the debate. I will engage the classifications “Coloured,” “Black,” “of color,” “African,” and the tensions they provoke for Tyla’s own racial, ethnic, and cultural self-definition, self-presentation, and self-representation.
The third aspect that I will highlight in the final part of the series is the paradox of the (previously/currently?) marginalized African American complainants assuming the role of Polhaus’ “dominant situated knower” in relation to Tyla—who is arguably currently marginalized in her capacity as a knower of her own cultural identity and its representation. Here I will focus on epistemic injustice through credibility excess, of which the African American contingent could be accused. I explore the applicability of the concept of bad faith, according to Africana philosopher Lewis R. Gordon—where the deceiver and the one being deceived are the same person.
The situation or situatedness at issue here, is Tyla’s Coloured identity that is a legal racial classification in her home country, but a taboo slur in other parts of the world, particularly in the US. Her credibility as a knower based on her lived experience is at issue and my claim is that as a result, she is suffering a testimonial credibility deficit. This is owing to her professed Coloured identity coming into conflict with the previously imposed “colored” identity of Black people of the US.
In contemporary times in the US, this term has been replaced with “Black” and “African American.” In some instances, the term “person/people of color” is used as a catch-all term that encapsulates a more affirming identity of people previously considered non-white. It captures the social justice and political solidarity among African Americans, multiracial Americans, Native Americans, some Latino Americans, Asian Americans, and Pacific Islander Americans. However, this term is also highly encumbered.
Starting with an analysis of Tyla’s “situation,” in existential phenomenological terms this concept is extensively defined by French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, as the possibilities and limitations for freedom, due in part to one’s facticity. In turn, facticity is the cluster of facts or attributes that one is saddled with upon coming into existence. They include the conditions of one’s birth, nationality, race, class, physiological structure, character, past, experiences, and point of view. These attributes all constitute embodied existence and being-in-the-world, which is one’s situation.
Pertaining to the facticity of race, Tyla was born into a family with mixed ethnic and racial ancestry. She is vocal about her Indian, Mauritian, Zulu, and Irish ancestry, and as a South African national, this informs her mixed-race and multicultural heritage, and Coloured racial classification. This in no way implies that her identity is stable, even in South Africa. I will engage this tension in the second part of the series.
The notion of situation is significant for being-in-the-body, as well as the facticity of the body because it defines the corporeal role that one plays in society, that can either be embraced or rejected, or that may cause ambivalence. Situation may be redefined in the pursuit of freedom and becoming, based on one’s capacities and possibilities. South African feminist scholar, Pumla Dineo Gqola adds that the body itself is a situation due to where it is placed and is thus processual and generative, as opposed to being pre-ordained, finite or closed-off.
Tyla’s experiences in the US are intimidating and compelling her to redefine her situation, her bodily-being-in-the-world. Initially she attempted to push back by offering a definition of what it means to be from the South African racial and ethnic group called “Coloured.” Subsequently, she added the awkward disclaimer that she is both Coloured and a black woman. Throughout the protracted debate, she has been hopping from one rock of self-definition and self-representation to another, in the torrential river of US African American identity politics—trying to acquiesce a social media-based mob, keyboard warriors, and social commentators.
Africana scholar, Frantz Fanon describes the painful repercussions when one’s body is usurped and objectified as a body-for-others. He provides the anecdote of a White child, who upon seeing him, exclaims to his mother: “Look, a Negro!… Mama, see the Negro!” He narrates that this encounter left his subjectivity negated, his body-for-itself destroyed, where his “body was… sprawled out, distorted, recolored.” While I do not imply that the complainants’ concerns about Tyla’s identity are equivalent to the White boy’s blunt (racist) exclamation, I draw attention to Fanon’s use of the term “recolored.” For the most part, this debacle is attempting to “recolor” Tyla as Black, while she knows herself to be Coloured.
Tyla is in a pickle, where she has unwittingly become the spokesperson of the Coloured situation, its facticity, the accompanying bodily-being-in-the-world, and resultant body-for-others. This scenario is echoed by South African philosopher Mabogo Percy More who asserts that human existential experiences and problems are situational—in the Sartrean sense—for they arise in, or out of, certain historical, racial or cultural situations.
The willful hermeneutical ignorance in the Tyla case lies in the refusal of the African American complainants to try and hear, learn and understand that there are numerous situations and identities across the spectrum of blackness, and beyond the borders of the US. I maintain that the stance of the African American complainants is resonant with Pohlhaus’ description of willful hermeneutical ignorance as the refusal that allows “dominantly situated knowers to misunderstand, misinterpret, and/or ignore whole parts of the world.” I find that this is an apt way to describe the cause of the various dialectical tensions, ironies and paradoxes that are intersecting in this debacle. Nonetheless, I see an opportunity for mutual and ethical knowledge generation through a synthesis of the “Coloured-colored” dialectic, if both the credibility deficit and credibility excess could be resolved.
Sarah Setlaelo
Dr. Sarah Setlaelo is a writer with a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. She is currently a fellow at the Harvard University Center for African Studies, where she is doing independent research for a book on political philosophies of Africa and the Diaspora.
