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ABSTRACT
Systemic epistemic failings in institutions are often explained through settler epistemologies and settler colonial frameworks that both obscure and reproduce the conditions necessary for those failings to endure. What is never questioned in the standard picture of institutional epistemic injustice is the implicit origin myth of an ‘institutional big bang’ that spawned many modern social institutions out of presumably noble orienting goals for a well-functioning society in democratic nation-states. We are concerned with the functional outcomes of institutions in settler colonial societies, and how these outcomes consistently undermine whitewashed narratives of any inherent institutional design allegedly aimed at promoting testimonial justice in settler colonial societies. Institutions are built to target and maintain a status quo, especially (but not only) when they are charged with securing part of the social order or fabric of settler colonial societies. We will illustrate this concern through a discussion of various functional outcomes of the U.S. institution of asylum using Shannon Speed’s (2019. Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants and Violence in the Settler-Capitalist State. The University of North Carolina Press) analysis of the violence Indigenous women migrants from Latin America experience within the complex administrative web of U.S. migration and asylum systems.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The basic idea is that some institutions are built with good intentions and begin to fail the people they serve when the institution becomes ‘opaque’ about the terms of engagement necessary to successfully operate within it, or when it fails to enact the orienting institutional values that were set up to make agential navigation of the system fair and equitable to those who requires access to it. ‘Institutional opacity’ is understood as ‘a general tendency within large-scale and internally complex institutions to increasingly become resistant to forms of assessment and understanding.’ (Carel and Kidd Citation2021, 481).
2 This is a non-exhaustive list.
3 We also acknowledge that the costs of synchronized code switching necessary to publish this piece include the lack of decolonizing impact of this work, as no actual land will be returned and rematriated as a result of our writing. This is by design, of course, as most projects that purportedly aim to 'decolonize' philosophical cottage industries like that of epistemic injustice operate by recentering the lifeworlds and interpretive concerns of those most responsible for injustice. Moreover, we do not think situating one's perspective from a marginalized standpoint is sufficient to constitute a decolonial agenda--as is argued by some reviewers in philosophy today. The fact that the fields of inquiry within these institutions co-developed with the adaptive capacities of settler colonialism make such stances untenable. Thus, while we are two Brown women philosophers from the global south working in U.S. academic institutions, we do not take that to 'throw a wrench into the works' in any decolonially significant way, since the conditions that necessitate writing peer-reviewed articles in order to keep our job-dependent health insurance thoroughly structure the entirety of the exchange.
4 Also see, for example, Coulthard Citation2014.
5 This is a non-exhaustive list.
6 Speed’s work, including that on settler colonialism (Citation2017) and Indigenous autonomy movements (Citation2007) in Latin America, offers particularly potent analyses of the structural features of colonial violence. It is especially powerful for illustrating and grounding a politics of refusal against the myriad institutional formations that coordinate violence against Indigenous women, and how institutions coordinate rage-inducing violence as the norm—‘exactly as they intended’ (Speed Citation2021, 35).
7 The following dialogue from a fictional newscast in the climate disaster film The Day After Tomorrow serves to promote a sense of panic and precarity in viewers from the global north who must imagine themselves—possibly for the first times ever— in the position of seeking asylum as climate refugees from a state denying them entry: ‘Breaking news from the U.S. -Mexico border. Just half an hour ago, Mexican officials closed the border in the light of so many U.S. refugees who are fleeing south in the wake of the approaching storm. These people came in anticipation of crossing into Mexico. Instead, they've been met with closed gates.
And now, in a dramatic reversal of illegal immigration, thousands of people are crossing the Rio Grande into Mexico. The scene unfolding here behind me is one of desperation and frustration. People have abandoned their cars, grabbed their belongings and they are wading across the river illegally into Mexico.’ (Emmerich Citation2004)
9 Also see Linarelli Citation1997 as cited in Neacsu Citation2003.
10 In connection with the ‘rise of the for-profit prison industrial complex’ (Speed Citation2019; 71).
11 Also see Resnik Citation2010.
12 This quote comes from the expert witness testimony of Luis Zayas in Speed Citation2019, 83.
15 See Crenshaw Citation1991 for a discussion of structural intersectionality.