In her concession speech, Vice President Kamala Harris invoked one of the principles of solidarity when she encouraged Americans to continue fighting for the principles of her presidential campaign “by looking in the face of a stranger and seeing a neighbor.”
One of the primary goals of contemporary nation-states is to foster a sense of civic solidarity or shared principles—for example, the French slogan of liberty, equality, fraternity—that binds strangers to one another. As Sally Scholz describes, the raison d’être of states builds an interconnection of strangers “to utilize social policy to decrease the vulnerabilities” for everyone through programs like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, or public education more generally (27).
Providing for the common good is, however, distinct from political solidarity, which requires that people who want to act in solidarity with others “work for social change to alter the conditions that create that suffering” (56). Thus, political solidarity is a form of “existential commitment” to communities with whom one has been socialized to view as fundamentally different in some respect—for example, whether it is based on (but not limited to) ethnicity, gender, race, religion, or sexual orientation.
Previous philosophical and political-theoretical analyses of solidarity have examined these questions in terms of what ought to be demanded of people in positions of epistemic privilege. Juliet Hooker, for instance, calls on such people to address their blind spots, while Scholz calls for these blind spots to be renounced (164, 181). These analyses imply such blind spots as being typified by the phenomenon that Charles Mills and other subsequent scholars have called “white ignorance.”
In what follows, I seek to elaborate on the dynamics informing these analyses. I do so by seeking to develop a concept of epistemic solidarity in more explicit terms. As such, I seek to offer an account of epistemic solidarity that could be used in present circumstances by whites committed to anti-racist organizing and practice.
Epistemic solidarity has three key components: First, epistemic solidarity assumes an openness to the possibility of different understanding of one’s received identities, including but not limited to class, ethnicity, gender, indigeneity, nationality, or race.
Second, epistemic solidarity requires learning about the world from the perspective of those who experience more pronounced or multifaceted forms of oppression. For example, if a person is cisgender and wants to be in epistemic solidarity with transgender communities, it would mean the beginning of learning—in group conversations and by oneself through independent study—how the economic, legal, political, and social norms of their society have been written from perspectives drawn from the lived experience of dominant cisgender assumptions about the world.
Third, epistemic solidarity may require deferring to and following the judgment of oppressed groups in certain contexts. For example, it may, in some cases, require of cisgender people their deference regarding appropriate or best actions in combatting proposed anti-transgender legislation. I see epistemic solidarity as building on theoretical investigations by Scholz and José Medina, who both recognize the need for people in more privileged epistemic positions to renounce their assumptions of correct and complete knowledge about the political and social world, in what Medina describes as “responsible epistemic agency” (53–54).
Epistemic solidarity does not mean surrendering one’s responsibility for political judgment. Rather, it means that, under certain conditions, one should follow the lead of the oppressed—who represent diversity in experience and ideas—as they engage in political action. What differentiates epistemic solidarity as a practice is that it focuses on the problem of what people need to understand, especially those in more epistemically privileged positions (whether that be class, gender, racial, etc.). Epistemic solidarity assumes an openness to the possibility of different understanding of one’s received identities, including but not limited to class, ethnicity, gender, indigeneity, nationality, or race.
Epistemic solidarity may require deferring to and following the judgment of oppressed groups in certain contexts. One statement that captures the importance of this sentiment is related by Michael Orsini. An advocate for autistic individuals, in an interview with Orsini, stated: “[I]f you act on behalf of a population, you have an obligation to defer to the leadership of the people who are directly affected in any community. You should not set policy about the African-American community or gay community without consulting them. Same for the autistic and disabled community” (822).
Epistemic solidarity begins on a path described by Boaventura De Sousa Santos as “an epistemology of seeing … that inquires into the validity of a form of knowledge whose point of ignorance is colonialism and whose point of knowing is solidarity” (156). In the context of U.S. settler colonialism, ignorance means accepting the standard liberal narrative that everyone is equal under the law, that race and other identity markers are irrelevant in the public sphere where we all meet as democratic citizens to discuss and debate ideas on equal terms. The ideas and histories of Indigenous nations are, however, relegated to “pre” history. Santos makes an important point about the relationship of knowledge to solidarity, writing that “solidarity as a form of knowledge is the recognition of the other both as an equal, whenever difference makes her or him inferior, and as different, whenever equality jeopardizes his or her identity” (156).
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwo raises a salient objection to deference politics. Here, he invokes what happens when white persons just ask the people of color in the room to speak on behalf of all Asians, Black, Indigenous, or Latine populations. He writes, “‘centering the most marginalized’ in my experience has usually meant hanging conversational authority and attentional goods to whoever is already in the room and appears to fit a social category associated with some form of oppression—regardless of what they have or have not actually experienced, or what they do or do not actually know about the matter at hand” (70). The problem raised here points to a static understanding of race, ethnicity, gender, or identity in general—that, for example, any Black person in the room adequately speaks for all Black people in the U.S. or even all Black people globally. This is patronizing and ignores the interstices of experience, history, migration, etc.
Addressing the issue raised by Táíwo points to the possibility of a phenomenological approach as an alternative way of navigating the relationship between epistemic solidarity and the prospect of deference. As Mike Monahan contends, a phenomenological approach to race begins from the premise that identity is an open process of becoming, one not mired in essence. Phenomenological investigation begins with a basic yet difficult task that Shannon Sullivan describes as making “the familiar strange so that one can understand it in ways that its familiarity typically prevents” (208). This means interrogating one’s assumptions about what one takes for granted, that is, what about the social and political world is, in the words of Linda Martín Alcoff, “in no need of questioning” (177).
Such a phenomenological approach, as well as an explication of much that recommends it, can be found in the work of Frantz Fanon. As Fanon argues in The Wretched of the Earth, truth is messy and can be, initially, discombobulating to the Manichean mind of Black–white, good/evil during the fight for decolonization: “some blacks can be whiter than the whites, and that the prospect of a national flag or independence does not automatically result in certain segments of the population giving up their privileges and their interests” (93). Fanon’s weaving together a more complete picture of race and class, in that skin color is not the sole component of what makes one’s interests line up with others of the same skin tone, can help guide us in making sense of the social world of racial hierarchy.
A related problem with deference is, as Táíwo puts it, that “it displaces onto individual heroes, a hero class, or mythicized past the work that is ours to do in the present” (81). What this problem makes clear is that deference alone is insufficient for epistemic solidarity. Epistemic solidarity requires not only that one learns from the past but also that one takes responsibility for educating and working with others in order to transform the present and render certain futures possible. This is what Táíwo describes as “constructive politics” (84). For the purposes of epistemic solidarity, “a constructive politics focuses on institutions and practices of information gathering that are strategically useful for challenging social injustices themselves, not just the symptoms manifest in the room we happen to be in today” (84).
Such constructive politics, I argue, are precisely what we find in the eponymous newspaper of the Chicago-based group Rising Up Angry (RUA), published from 1969 to 1975. The group not only publicized and argued in favor of the anti-racism of the Black Panther Party and Young Lords Organization, but also organized white youth to turn out and support causes for socio-economic and racial justice. For example, RUA organized a boycott campaign in solidarity with the United Farm Workers against a chain of local grocery stores that refused to sell only union-picked produce and vegetables. RUA also amplified voices for Puerto Rican self-determination and campaigns led by Chicanos in the city to revamp Chicago schools and promote Mexican-American history and identity.
My argument is that epistemic solidarity does not simply involve reading a book, learning some facts about members of oppressed groups, or simply deferring uncritically to any person who happens to be associated with a member of an oppressed group. Instead, it entails putting insights derived from that knowledge into practice through supporting boycotts and talking to others one knows or meets about what one has learned and why they should do the same. In essence, RUA devoted extensive attention to cognitive reasoning overall and connected their anti-racist, women’s rights, and racialized minority self-determination positions to the process of learning and acting. In a sense, they were, to paraphrase Walter Mignolo, epistemically disobedient; such disobedience calls for—in the words of Raewyn Connell—“[prioritizing] the interests of [the] least advantaged” (60).
To return to Táíwò’s critique of deference, epistemic solidarity requires that we not only pay attention to who is in the room but also do the difficult work of organizing to build a bigger room based with the folks that continue to be locked out (112–113). Hence, we can conclude that the project of epistemic solidarity does, ultimately, demand giving due consideration to the possibility that it often cannot be achieved without deference of some sort. Nonetheless, where deference may be necessary for such solidarity, it remains insufficient.
Brooks Kirchgassner
Brooks Kirchgassner is Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science at DePauw University. He earned his PhD in Political Science from the University of Connecticut. His research interests are in political theory, phenomenology of race and identity, and social movements. He is currently working on a manuscript about Rising Up Angry, the Rainbow Coalition, and epistemic solidarity.
