Multicultural Literacy, Epistemic Injustice, and White Ignorance
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5206/fpq/2019.2.7289Keywords:
blackface, Black Pete, colonialism, epistemic injustice, epistemology of ignorance, intelligibility economy, multicultural literacy, racism, tradition, white ignorance, Zwarte PietAbstract
The traditional blackface character Black Pete has been at the center of an intense controversy in the Netherlands, with most black citizens denouncing the tradition as racist and most white citizens endorsing it as harmless fun. I analyze the controversy as an utter failure, on the part of white citizens, of what Alison Jaggar has called multicultural literacy. This article aims to identify both the causes of this failure of multicultural literacy and the conditions required for multicultural literacy to be possible. I argue that this failure of multicultural literacy is due to hermeneutical injustice and white ignorance. I close by considering possible avenues for fostering multicultural literacy.
Downloads
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2019 Amandine Catala
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
The authors of work published in FPQ under the Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 License retain copyright to their work without restrictions and publication rights without restrictions. However, we request that authors include some sort of acknowledgement that the work was previously published in FPQ if part or all of a paper published in FPQ is used elsewhere.