testimonial injustice ‘out here in the projects’ – misrecognising victimhood in the bed intruder meme

In the wake of ‘Black Lives Matter’, this paper examines the concept of testimonial injustice and the prejudicial stances held towards victims that diminishes the credibility of their claims and the social support they receive from the public. To explore this concept, the following work revisits the widely parodied U.S. originating broadcast news report, The Bed Intruder. In the broadcast, victims of a home invasion and attempted rape deliver a public call that outlines the conditions of their victimhood and the potential threat to the community. A rhetorical stylistic analysis of the victims’ testimonial discourse and a thematic analysis of a sample of YouTube videos that reappropriate and parody their discourse are conducted. The analyses highlight the memetic elements of the video parodies that acknowledge the victimisation and yet strategically misconstrue events in ways that 1) render the victims and their claims less credible and 2) fail to provide them with the moral concern such an acknowledgement deserves.

Is Testimonial Injustice Epistemic? Let Me Count the Ways

Miranda Fricker distinguishes two senses in which testimonial injustice is epistemic. In the primary sense, it is epistemic because it harms the victim as a giver of knowledge. In the secondary sense, it is epistemic, more narrowly, because it harms the victim as a possessor of knowledge. Her characterization of testimonial injustice has raised the following objection: testimonial injustice is not always an epistemic injustice, in the narrow, secondary sense, as it does not always entail that the victim is harmed as a knowledge-possessor. By adopting a perspective based on Robert Brandom's normative expressivism, we respond to this objection by arguing that there is a close connection, conceptual and constitutive rather than merely causal, between the primary and the secondary epistemic harms of testimonial injustice, such that testimonial injustice always involves both kinds of epistemic harm. We do so by exploring the logic and functioning of belief and knowledge ascriptions in order to highlight three ways in which the secondary epistemic harm caused by testimonial injustice crystallizes: it undermines the epistemic agency of the victim, the epistemic friction necessary for knowledge, and the possibility of occupying particular epistemic nodes.

The Movement for Black Lives and the Language of Liberation

This chapter explores the content and strategy of the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) by describing the speech that sustains and promotes the movement. It explicates the content of the movement through the protest chants and other communicative tools M4BL has borrowed from past black liberatory movements. After a brief discussion of some of the challenges facing the movement, it describes four more novel communicative tools associated with M4BL—the hashtag and slogan #BlackLivesMatter, videos of police violence, naming the dead, and stereotype engineering. Each of these tools helps address some challenge, and also bears on some questions of independent philosophical interest—how to remedy testimonial injustice, what it means to engineer a concept, what makes a mental state a moral attitude. It concludes with a brief discussion of the limitations of some of these tools.