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‘KNOWING ENOUGH TO ACT’: THE EDUCATIONAL IMPLICATIONS OF A CRITICAL SOCIAL JUSTICE APPROACH TO DIFFERENCE Crain Soudien

‘There is more to ethical consciousness than deciding what to do’ Miranda Fricker (2007:74)

IntroductionThe purpose of this discussion is to explore one of contemporary political and social life’s more troubling paradoxes – why is it that increasing levels of formal education around the world are making so little impact onour capacity to understand each other? Why is it, when the fundamental purpose of education is to enlarge human understanding and our capacity to see beyond our own reproductive mythologies, that there is within and between us and our countries no diminution in our levels of suspicion, marginalization, discrimination, exclusion and disrespect for each other? If the fundamental purposeof education is to prepare us for full citizenship of theplaces in which we live, why is that many groups and individuals amongst us are unable to fully realize the benefits of this membership? What is it about the educational experience that only some of us are able to participate fully and productively as individuals and as members of communities in the world today?

To come to an understanding of the nature of this paradoxVanessa d’Oliveira, Sarada Balagopalan and I focus on a major goal of education, that is our capacity to ‘know’ and particularly our capacity to ‘know’ about each other,our differences and similarities. Each of us, drawing largely on the experiences of our own contexts, develops an argument to explain how ‘knowing’ and social ‘knowing’works discursively – its inflections - to produce particular kinds of action or ‘inaction’. Two inter-related questions provide the backdrop for the arguments we make:

1. Is there a problem with dominant forms of ‘knowing’ with regard to questions of social difference and particularly the relationship of ‘knowing’ to how weextend a sense of solidarity with others? If there is a problem, what are the epistemological features

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of this problem? What kind of response does an analysis that suggests that dominant forms of knowing are structurally flawed demand of us in education and especially, in what we teach and how we teach?

2. If our dominant forms of ‘knowing’ with respect to social difference are not problematic by themselves,what would we need to be doing to make them more responsive to our commitment to social justice? Do our individual social locations matter for ‘knowing’, or does ‘knowing’ override our individualsocial, cultural and economic histories?

In approaching the discussion we are motivated by a concern with the moral implications of ‘knowing’. If ‘knowing’ has moral consequences, when, we ask, does one ‘know enough’? What action does ‘knowing’ demand? We posethese questions in an attempt to situate what we would like to argue is a real challenge for pedagogy and for what we teach – the cultivation of the capacity to transcend our own histories and to conduct ourselves as if we value each other. We are aware of discussions in the ‘bystander’ literature and the classifications used there of three kinds of approaches to knowing and not acting: the first where there is acknowledgement of something that may have happened but a genuine ignorance,for whatever reason, of the facts; the second where thereis deliberate and intentional denial that is clearly meant to deceive; and a third where a ‘switching-off’ or a ‘blocking-out’ takes place (see Cohen, 2001:4). It is the third form that is most interesting for the purposes of this discussion. It is about ‘knowing’ and yet not ‘knowing’. As Cohen (2001:5) says, there seem to be ‘states of mind, or even whole cultures, in which we knowand don’t know at the same time.’ The implicit and unarticulated cultural compacts within this kind of knowing are important to unpack and make sense of. How experiences of oppression, discrimination and exclusion can be ‘known’ but disavowed or not fully acknowledged iswhat I attempt to explain.

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Taking the discussion forward we have to be clear what ‘knowing’ is. Education produces what can be called ‘knowing’, or consciousness. I refer to ‘knowing’ here asthat ability developed by an individual to determine his or her own actions on the basis of a sense of what is right and wrong. In this sense it is individual but it isalways formed in a context in which community or collective interpretations of reality come to be formed. Because ‘knowing’ is a social activity, as opposed to onewhich is mechanical, it is never coherent, singular or logically consistent within itself. The debate in anthropology about ‘psychic unity’ is helpful here. Scholars such as Shore (1996) have done much to explain how problematic the idea of cognitive coherence – the unity of the psyche – is. This view he argues is essentialist and ignores the flexibility of the brain andits openness to the world, with all of its contradictions, around it. The human psyche, in this explanation, cannot be reduced to its biological substrate. There is also in philosophy in reaction to a Kantian split between mind and body, and so compounding our picture of the complexity of our psyches, a view thatthe affective and the cognitive are not separate mechanisms. This discussion recognizes our capacity, on one hand, to distinguish between feelings, sensations andemotions, but also, on the other, to reason and control our behavior. Informing these capacities, the affective and the cognitive, is a multiplicity of concurrent and simultaneous factors. Nussbaum says, following this trainof thought, drawing on Aristotle, that it is wrong to make a sharp split between the affective and the cognitive (Fricker, 2007:78).

Internally fluid as our ‘knowing’ might be, it still is structured in particular ways. It has what one might refer to as an ‘orientation’. This orientation is determined at a collective level on the basis of what scholars such as Geertz would call a ‘public template’ and comes to operate as a hermeneutic (see Shore, 1996:75). It could be racial, gendered, classist, religiously-determined or any other social factor that characterizes, or, indeed, a combination of these. This

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hermeneutic is important to understand in relation to thesociety in which it operates. It is seldom, if ever, solely responsible for the social problems of racism, gender inequality, class discrimination and other forms of privileging and exclusion. It is, however, implicated in them. It regularly comes to supply socio-political regimes with the discursive legitimacy they need to maintain the kinds of divisions that come to characterizethem. How education as ‘knowing’ is implicated in the processes of engaging division, hierarchy and exclusion –the phenomenon of social difference - is the subject of focus in this discussion.

The South African Iteration of the ProblemIn looking at the South African case of the problems around ‘knowing’ in relation to social difference the argument I make proceeds along the following lines. I begin by articulating what I think is the essential paradox confronting our ‘knowing’ and the ‘will to act’ stimulated by it. The contradictions characterizing this paradox are that the formal knowledge base on which contemporary representations of our ‘knowing’ rest is largely progressive in its point of departure but that our behaviors are essentially socially self-serving and reactionary. I develop an argument for why this is so andsuggest that an explanation can be found in what Paul Gilroy calls ‘cultural insiderism’ (1993:3). The burden of what I seek to do is to explain how this ‘cultural insiderism’ over-determines ‘knowing’ and comes to condition agency. In closing I make an argument for the cultivation of what I call a ‘for-the-other’ reflexive rationality.

To knowThere are many ways of approaching the question of what ‘knowing’ in relation to social difference looks like in South Africa. Official knowing in the apartheid past was based on white supremacy. At the heart of this supremacy was, and still is where it lives on surreptitiously, the racial biological idea. In terms of this racial biology humankind consists of discrete and identifiable races each of which is endowed with immutable physical and

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intellectual characteristics. These immutable characteristics not only signify what make them differentfrom each other but critically also provide the evidence for where they should be placed in the great chain of being. Particular kinds of Europeans are at the top of the evolutionary ladder while Africans are at its base.

Post-apartheid knowing draws on a significantly differentview of humanity. Its sensibility is rhetorically that ofnon-discrimination and equality. What this sensibility consists of can be seen in the official policy texts of the state such as the Constitution and key legislative, regulative and other direction-providing documents issuedby it. In these documents questions such as citizenship and status are defined in deliberately anti-discriminatory ways. There is significant work in South African education relating to this discussion (see, for example, Stu Woolman and Brahm Fleisch’s (2009) The Constitution in the Classroom: Law and Education in South Africa (1994-2008) and Christie (2010). Two scholars, Carrim (2012) and Keet (2010), drawing on their own empirical work and a wider international literature made up of conventions, commentary and critique have developed an enormously useful analysis of the issues which I myself use in this discussion (see United Nations Conventions of the Right of the Child, 1989 and 1996; the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights, 1981;the African Charter of the Rights and Welfare of the Child, 1990; the UNESCO Recommendation Concerning Education for International Understanding, Co-operation and Peace and Education relating to Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, 1974; MacKinnon, 1993; UNICEF Respect: Citizenship in a Global Context for Secondary Schools (http://www.unicef.org.uk/education/developing_citizenship.htm ); Keet et al, 2001 and DoE, 2002)

This non-discriminatory approach can also be seen in workwith the curriculum and its textbooks. It is evident inSouth Africa’s new curriculum, Curriculum 2005, which waslaunched in March of 1997 by the then Minister ofEducation, Professor Bhengu. It was described as astrategy for moving away from a racist, apartheid, rotelearning model of learning and teaching to a liberating,nation-building and learner centred outcomes-based one.

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As with People’s Education it committed the new educationsystem to the values of democracy, non-racialism and non-sexism (Harley & Wedekind, 2004:196). Reflecting on whatthe curriculum contains, Karikan and Ramsuran (2008:87)say that the Revised National Curriculum Statements(RNCS) are sensitive to issues of diversity such aspoverty, inequality, race, gender, language, age,disability and other factors: “The RNCS adopts aninclusive approach by specifying minimum requirements forall learners. A regulative discourse of dispositions,attitudes and values is embedded in the instructionaldiscourse of the discipline. This is clearly the case ofthe Natural Sciences.” In an assessment of the Englishand History curricula I argued that the two subjects wereon the face of it exemplary in the ways in which theysought to include and work with difference (Soudien,2008: ). In the History National Curriculum Statements(NCS) the purpose of studying History is described in thefollowing way:

A study of History builds the capacity of people tomake informed choices in order to contributeconstructively to society and to advance democracy.As a vehicle of personal empowerment, Historyengenders in learners an understanding of humanagency. This brings with it the knowledge that, ashuman beings, learners have choices, and that theycan make the choice to change the world for thebetter. (NCS, History, 2003:9)

The History NCS also talks about ‘truth consist(ing) of amultiplicity of voices’ (ibid). Significant too,reflecting the influence of debates in the socialsciences about the nature of evidence and the move awayfrom positivism and empiricism, the document talks about“identity as a social construct” (ibid), and how History“enables us to listen to formerly-subjugated voices andfocuses on the crucial role of memory in society. Thiscomes particularly through an emphasis on oral historyand an understanding of indigenous knowledge systems”(ibid).

The purpose of the Home Language is described insimilarly inclusive terms. Language is described as a:

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tool for thought and communication. It is through language that cultural diversity and social relations are expressed and constructed…. In view ofthe linguistic and cultural diversity of South Africa, its citizens must be able to communicate across language barriers and foster cultural and linguistic respect and understanding.… Recognise theunequal status of different languages and language varieties. Learners will be able to challenge the domination of any language or language variety and assert their language rights in a multilingual society. (NCS, Home Language, 2003:9-10).

Higher education, as should be expected, operates differently, but its orientation is framed by a similar set of human rights and anti-discrimination commitments (DoE, 1996). Ideological as it might be argued these orientations are, the larger point to be made is that these formal and even official positions, now carried in the material which is transacted in the teaching and learning experience, are derived from a scientific base of ‘knowing’. What this scientific base has revealed, andof course it would be foolish to argue that the process of enquiry around biology and race is over, is the extraordinary unity of the human race genetically and biologically. There is, on the basis of what we currentlyknow, no evidence to support the idea of race in biological terms. Race is a thing we have made up. Moore,Pandian and Kosek (2003:2-3) argue that race is an historical artefact made up of, “assemblages of material,discourse, and practice irreducible to a universal essence….”

One should not lose the opportunity to celebrate the immense achievement that this policy and the ‘knowing’ itcontains represent. While it is true that our policy approaches and our scientific universes contain a significant number of tensions and even contradictions, it can be said that the discursive form of our formal ‘knowing’ around social difference matters such as race is orientated towards a sense of the inclusive. Where earlier ‘knowing’ sensibilities were orientated towards the exclusionary and the search for an explanation of the

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superiority of some of us over others, the basic spirit of modern knowing is towards a sense of our equality.

To behave as if one does not knowBut there are problems. Christie is helpful in bringing us to the heart of the matter. She says,

First, the case of South Africa illustrates without doubt what I have highlighted as the paradox of rights: that statements of rights do not deliver what they appear to promise. The post-apartheid constitution (1996), an exemplar of liberal modernity with its attendant rights and freedoms, states unequivocally that everyone has the right to basic education provided by the state, and progressive rights to further education. These principles are unambiguously stated in the first White Paper on Education and Training (1995), which provides the framework for a restructured education system. (Christie, 2010:8)

Christie continues to explain that the post-apartheid vision has not been realized. Why it has not been realized is an important discussion that I have tried to account for elsewhere (Soudien, 2007). In that discussionI emphasized the enduring impact of apartheid and made the suggestion that its legacy continued in the way people lived and in how they conducted their lives. That explanation was structural. I extend that line of thoughthere in seeking to move beyond the structural to focus onwhat might be loosely called the attitudes, the structures of thought that surround the structural. The point I am making is that the survival of the kinds of inequalities that continue from the old order to the present has to do with both social structures and social forces such as the economy, on the one hand, and attitudes and ways of understanding, on the other. These support each other. Many privileged South Africans, including some in the universities, behave as if they do not know and understand the basis of their privilege. What I do here is start a conversation about the kind of agency and the knowing that informs this way of thinking.I do so through an analysis of the public response to two

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events and social developments in the country in which ‘knowing’ has come to be an issue. The approach I take is, I acknowledge, at best schematic and at worst polemical. In characterizing the approaches to social difference in these events I am not drawing on empirical evidence to assert a ‘truth’ about positions with which Iam attempting to engage. I am not also seeking to attribute weights, volumes or frequencies to the positions I describe. All I am doing is making the point that positions exist and to problematize the nature of these positions.

The two public events/processes to which I refer here provide us with the opportunity to develop a sense of thetension between knowing and not knowing. The first is the response to the educational crisis in South Africa and the second is the response to a Ministerial Committee into Discrimination in Higher Education that I chaired in2008. Important about both these public events is the kind of ‘knowing’ they reveal and particularly the ‘knowing’ of dominant groups, those to whom the formal and official ‘knowing’ is most available and to whom, it could be argued, the making and authorship of what knowingconsists of can be attributed.

What then do these two public events/processes reveal about ‘knowing’?

Talking about the first, one of the most important observations to make about the educational crisis in South Africa is how little public opprobrium it has occasioned. The fact that the majority of the country’s children are performing at least three grades below wherethey ought to be is now well-known but seemingly acceptedas a way of life. Why this is so I suggest has to do withthe powerlessness of the victims themselves, but, from the perspective of action, also with the reality that thevictim-children are not perceived to be from the communityor group of those with the power to make a difference.

With respect to the second public event, the Ministerial Committee into Transformation in Higher Education came to

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the conclusion that while institutions were complying with the country’s transformation policies there continued to exist within them attitudes and practices ofdiscrimination. Striking about the responses, were their racial character. By and large, those who thought of themselves as black supported the report while those who were white, particularly from the Democratic Alliance, the country’s major opposition political party, rejected it. The report, the latter argued, was based on unsubstantiated allegations made by disaffected people and was useless. It offered no help to the development ofhigher education.

Important in coming to a sense of the significance of these two public phenomena is the way in which ‘knowing’ comes to work. In the first ‘knowing’ is accompanied by indifference. In the second ‘knowing’ is characterized bya sense of either ‘vindication’ or ‘disbelief’. In the first, interestingly, empirical statistical evidence is available to which the ‘knowing’ is asked to respond, in the second it is the evidence of the victims themselves around which the dispute about ‘knowing’ comes. The firstis in some ways easier to account for. Drawing on the bystander discussion about social responses to major catastrophes it is relatively easy to see how the plight of others distant from ourselves can be displaced from our minds. The second raises more issues. Here displacement is not possible because it involves us directly. It is now no longer a distant ‘subjected’ otherwho is the subject of analysis. It is all of us. Controversy has dogged our every move as we have tried tounderstand what is at play here. This is the situation. We ‘know’ officially that we have a problem. We put in place all kinds of reactive measures. We develop ‘knowing’ policies to engage with the problems we can see. But we struggle immensely with working out our ‘knowing’ positions as practice. We struggle with workingwith the implications of ‘knowing’ that we have a problem. Who the victims and who the perpetrators are amongst us become immensely fraught matters. When some ofus raise our hands in response to the question of whetherwe are victims others amongst us react with disbelief.

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You, when? When the challenge is put to us that some of us are perpetrators many of us react with outrage. Prove it. Where is the evidence? What proof have you got that there is racism?

What then is the ‘knowing’ we demonstrate and exemplify all about? What is going on here? How might we begin to explain our extraordinary statements about our equality and our recognition of how social structures work and, simultaneously, our disavowal of any responsibility for these social structures? How is it that we ‘know’ officially and formally but do not ‘know’ personally and even collectively?

Some of the Challenges to Our KnowingIn coming to a response to this question, I acknowledge that there are difficulties. I acknowledge, first of all,how intensely traumatic the situation is when this ‘knowing’ is subjected to any kind of scrutiny, when people of different social experiences sit around a tableat a meeting or at a dinner-party, and, much more poignantly, when the situation arises when discriminationis alleged. Having to say that I have experienced discrimination, or even just getting to the point of saying that I suspect that I may have been discriminated against without being able to prove it, is on the one hand, an extraordinarily intimidating move to make in one’s life. Being clear in one’s head about what one is experiencing is deeply disorientating. But so too is it immensely traumatic to hear the accusation that I may be a perpetrator of any form of discrimination. It produces unspeakably difficult social and personal anxiety. In relation to all of this I acknowledge how important ‘proof’ is for everybody involved in these experiences. Icome at the discussion from a different point, however. This point, and it is a vantage point arising from my ownpositionality as a social scientist interested in the relationship between structure and agency, is that the most crucial matter that we now have to be clear about isour relationship to social structures and our agency. We have to be clear about the social forces and structures that predispose us to take one position or the other with

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respect to social processes such as discrimination, exclusion and othering. And we have to get it clear in our heads how we are able to preserve and develop the kind ofagency that is able to work with situations such as theseproductively.

To return to the question of proof, it is notable, at least in the South African context, how few cases of racial harassment move on from the complaint stage to theformal hearing stage. This, of course, needs a study all of its own. The point is, nonetheless, that we must in the longer term be developing ways of ‘getting at’ what happens in the event involving discrimination or even theperception of it – both as so-called victims and so-called perpetrators – so that we can begin to change those situations. But we cannot do so naïvely. Taking recourse to the framework of the law is necessary but we all need education around this. The growth in the significance of a critical race jurisprudence in the United States is testimony of how important this is. The critique that critical race theory makes is that we cannot present the space of the court-room as an ideologically neutral arena of reason. It is sociologically naïve to think that putting the aggrieved and a supposed perpetrator in a space intended to establish guilt is by itself sufficient. There are circuits of power that operate in the processes of framing charges, in the processes of constructing and handling evidence, and critically, in appraising evidence. To assess guilt and innocence requires more than an awareness of process. Trying to demonstrate our own positions and responses in situations involving othering through the methodologies of superficial warrant, proof and evidence as the first step towards understanding what is happening in processes such as these is not helpful. It is not helpful for a host of reasons. Not least of all, amongst these, is the reality of how structures of power inform processes of reasoning,including legal ones in which ‘facts’ are determined. I argue here for the deliberate commitment to a prior step,before we can begin the forensic job of testing evidence,of understanding our positionalities in discrimination

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and othering processes and appeal for the development of a deeper sociology of knowing.

What would such a prior step be?

Essential to such a step is coming to an understanding ofhow our ideas of solidarity, kinship and connectedness are constructed. Bhabha (1994:250) asks “Do we need to rethink the terms in which we conceive of community, citizenship, nationality, and the ethics of social affiliation?” It is there, in what we understand by ‘us’,I suggest, that the ‘stuff’ holding up our ideas might bebetter understood. Historicizing the processes by which our sense of ‘us’ have been constituted would provide us with the means to understand how we have come to our positions. Bhabha’s (ibid) analysis of the work of Frederick Jameson is valuable here. Jameson, he says, represents the “fundamental ambivalences of the ethical (honour/guilt)… as the allegorical restitution of the socially concrete subtext of late nineteenth-century rationalization and reification.” Behind this ambivalence, and taking me to the core of my own position, is Bhabha’s explanation of what Jameson fails to address sufficiently in his analysis of Conrad’s Lord Jim. Jameson’s failure, says Bhabha, is to engage the “specifically colonial address of the narrative aporia contained in the ambivalent, obsessive repetition of the phrase ‘He was one of us.’ This is the major trope of social and psychic identification throughout the text.” What the repetition of the incantation, ‘he was one of us’, reveals is the ‘fragile margin( ) of the concept of Western civility and cultural community.’ Jim, at the moment of his most intense vulnerability, is either cast out – ‘he was not one of us ‘ - or is reclaimed, ‘he was one of our people’.

What an historicization of this moment of vulnerability –the moment of accusation -makes possible is the surfacingof the particular ethics that will come to inform how themoment is negotiated. I argue that the moment of vulnerability rests fundamentally on knowing in a particular kind of way.

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The point of departure for this knowing is essentially that of identity and the idea that belonging, whether it is that of nation, community –‘us’ - is a timeless given.Holding it up are conceits of our own absolute homogeneity and our absolute difference to the ‘other’ (see Gilroy, 1993:3). Both work on the basis of an over-integrated conception of culture sprung fully formed fromits ‘own special viscera’ and hence historically pristine(Gilroy, 1993:4). It is this sense of who we are that provides collective ‘knowing’ with its basis. Informing who we are is a battery of beliefs and traditions. We then come to ‘know’ reality in particular kinds of ways: our relationships with others who are supposedly like us and with those who are supposedly different.

A second step in understanding how the moment of vulnerability works is to come to an awareness of how this identity then is operationalized in the process of knowing. It is here that I turn to Fricker (2007) and heranalysis of what she calls epistemic injustice. Epistemic injustice is a ‘wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower’ (Fricker, 2007:1). She identifies two kinds of epistemic injustice, testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. The first occurs when “prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word; hermeneutical injustice occurs at a prior stage, when a gap in collective interpretive resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences” (ibid). Classically the first is when someone is not believed because of the identity attributed to him or her. The second is when a culture lacks the hermeneutic resources to identify the problem in front of it.

Testimonial injustice depends on prejudice and stereotyping. The way it works is to distort the hearer’sperception of the speaker. Two kinds relating to testimonial injustice can be identified. One kind is doxastic, that is it depends on personal beliefs. Anotheris the non-doxastic – that which is drawn from the social

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environment. It is the second that is more important to address in this discussion. Fricker (2007:36) argues thatwe under-estimate its incidence in our behavior: “I believe that the right vision of epistemic relations is such that testimonial injustice goes on much of the time,and while it may be hard enough to police one’s beliefs for prejudice, it is significantly harder reliably to filter out the prejudicial stereotypes that inform one’s social perceptions directly, without doxastic mediation.”She refers to non-doxastic prejudice as a stealthy, residual phenomenon “whose content may even be flatly inconsistent with the beliefs actually held by the subject… the philosophically intriguing prospect is that we may very frequently (perpetrate) injustice in spite of(our beliefs)” (ibid). How this arises is important to understand. It could be the product, in one who is a so-called victim, of what Fricker calls residual internalization, “whereby a member of a subordinated group continues as host to a sort of half-life for the oppressive ideology, even when her beliefs have genuinelymoved on” (Fricker, 2007:37). More critically, it could arise in one who is also supposedly a beneficiary of the ideology. As Fricker says (2007:38), it takes a special feat of self-consciousness to be alert to this kind of prejudice within one. There are two ways in which a prejudicial residue subsists. The first is what Fricker (2007:39) calls the diachronic way and the second the synchronic. In the diachronic instance, our beliefs may change but things we have in our social imagination do not. In the synchronic we might have moved on in what we believe but the social environment in which we operate hasn’t. Impinging on our judgements is the residue of thesocial ether surrounding us. It insinuates itself into our schemas of thought. We have, as a result, difficulty in filtering out how it works as prejudice. It lurks there, surreptitiously conditioning our behavior. And so we, possibly unknowingly, undermine the speaker as a knower. The danger that this represents is that it comes tobe the normal way in which we do things, a kind of base-line, and so, as Fricker (2007:39) argues, the norm in our discursive life.

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Before I look at how one recovers from this determinant state of knowing it is important to remember what holds itin place. Central to how testimonial injustice works is the idea of ‘us’ – what I referred to earlier, drawing onGilroy, as cultural insiderism. Almost inevitable as thiscultural insiderism is, an engagement with the problematic ways it is inflected cannot be evaded. We need to recognize the difficulties it generates. Because it depends on the naturalizing of socially constructed attributes in identity and community – attributes that can be shown to have their origins outside of people’s bodies – and thus is utterly ideological, it is always going to cause difficulties. These difficulties are the prejudices and the racist, sexist, classist and other exclusions that then continue to percolate as normative frameworks of reference. ‘Us’, ‘we the nation’, ‘our race’, ‘my people’ or ‘our community’ become the allegorical tropes around which ideas of our superiority are packaged. It is for this reason that one has to be utterly careful of any form of atavism, primordialism or a sense of our difference which is based on an unproblematised idea of belonging. It is this ‘cultural insiderism’, I suggest, that lies behind the way we here in South Africa have come to react to matters in which weethically should have taken a larger view. Through it, often unwittingly, we have refused to ‘know’ that which we should actually ‘know’.

A recovery of inclusive ways of ‘knowing’In bringing this discussion to a close, I don’t wish to deny the need for communities and people to belong. What I do wish to open up here, however, is to call for a greater recognition of the need to cultivate ‘knowing’ practices which don’t depend on the inferential steps which underpin the kind of testimonial injustice I described above, and particularly which do not depend on a racial, gendered or classist inferential point of departure. In these terms I look towards the creation of much more conscious and deliberate pathways towards making solidarity. But where does one go in recovering aninclusive way of knowing, a way of knowing which is, as Isuggested earlier, reflexive for-the-other?

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In coming to know do I take the route of accepting the word of others uncritically? When a person completely unknown to me addresses me do I accept whatever he or shesays uncritically? The answer has to be a clear no. As Fricker (2007:65) says, this would be justificationally lax and would leave us defenseless. It presents a pictureof the hearer which is no different to the prejudging hearer I have described above. The hearer I described above begins the process of hearing from a default position – that of mistrust – which supplies all the inferential substance for undermining what a speaker is saying. Automatic trust is based on a similarly non-reflexive position. It accepts the testimony of the otheruntil a cue for doubt is provided to awaken a critical consciousness. Both these positions work on the basis of the hearer moving from an unreflective point of departure. In both these states, it is the collective consciousness that supplies the hearer with his or her capacity to engage with what is being conveyed.

Against this I make an argument for a reflexive ‘for-the-other’ rationality, or, to use Fricker’s (2007:67) phrase, the cultivation of ‘the responsible hearer’. Central to this ‘for-the-other’ rationality is a sensitivity, or a doxastic responsibility, to the place we occupy in what Fricker (2007:67) calls the ‘space of reasons’. Being reflexive means being sensitive to whatever the arguments for and against a proposition might be without starting with inferences of any kind. Fricker’s point of departure for how we would put this into practice is useful. She makes the argument that we need to be looking for or using something other than inference in how we listen to others. The burden of responsibility here is with me, the hearer. This something other than inference for me the hearer is my ‘on-stage rational sensitivity’ (Fricker, 2007:69). Fricker describes this ‘on-stage’ rationality as a ‘learning mechanism’ that needs to become spontaneously operative in response to any new discursive experience. This ‘learning mechanism’ can be understood as a way of seeing the world or a disposition. It is a sensitivity to

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the reality that we make moral judgements all the time but an understanding that we need to always recognize theparticularity of what is salient in front of one. It is asocial perception that has been trained in testimonial sensibility. It isn’t based on a fixed code but is informed by a set of ‘background assumptions’ about the trustworthiness of different people in people different contexts – it is the capacity, as Fricker (2007:74) says,to see the world in ‘moral colour’. This she describes asan ‘enriched’ position in which to be. There the shades of the moral landscape which we inhabit are brought into as full a view as is possible. We come to appreciate its vastness and its complexity. We come to realize that different situations will demand renewed application of thought.

I endorse Fricker’s ‘on-stage rationality’ but ask for itto go further. She talks of learning the capacity to see in moral colour. How this learning happens she explains is through an awareness of the need for sensitivity. Justhaving this awareness carries a motivational charge (Fricker, 2007:76). The point is important. ‘Knowing’ that we are always morally challenged is an important stimulus or injunction that we always place ourselves in the position of needing to learn. But we might need some help here. ‘Knowing’ that we need to learn and coming to a sense of our own learning strategies are two different things. It is this that needs elaboration. The politics of how our moral landscape comes to be constituted and our own ‘knowing’ histories inside of these is a deeply important subject. How we are socialized to think ethically, the history and the dynamics of processes suchas these, we need to approach with a very distinct sensibility. This is important for understanding how racial knowing and gendered knowing works and our historical emplacement in relation to these. We each need to know how we arrived at particular points so that we might become aware of and so respond to social cues around us. Working with our historically framed hermeneutics of social difference we need to know that our collective moral positions are constituted in tension. The significance of this, in social spaces such as South

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Africa and the United States, is great. I want to suggestthat the arguments and the positions taken in response tothe charge that our university campuses in South Africa are sites of racism illustrate what the issues are. The critical capacity that needs to be developed in relation to situations such as these is that of recognizing how cultural insiderism kicks in and comes to provide a normative point of departure for our social responses. This capacity is fundamentally about educating or training our instincts to know when race, gender, or any other such catalytic factor is invoked and becomes salient.

Recovering this point about cultural insiderism is important to understand because it brings me back to the point with which I had begun this essay around our formalways of knowing. I suggested there that we should celebrate the achievement that our formal knowing represents. What we have, in many parts of the world, butstrongly exemplified in the viscerally racialized contexts of countries such as South Africa, is a disjunction between what we formally know and what we practice in our responses to events such as racism. How the residue of our racialized collective memory and its prejudices works in over-determining our formal ways of knowing is what we must now confront. It is here that we must assert the value of our formal knowledge and begin the process of making it the basis on which we conduct ourselves. The important point to recover here is recognizing the difference between what we formally know and the subversive prejudices that circulate in the hermeneutics of our collective consciousness and coming to understand how to manage these. I began this discussion with the argument that we have in the corpus of our formal knowledge an orientation to the inclusive but that our behavior is frequently characterized by a disavowal of this formal knowledge. This is where the process of formal education, with all of its contradictions, must be embraced. It is from this that the imperative to act emanates.

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