UNLOCK 39.1 Epistemic Injustice

39.1: Epistemic Injustice Matthew Remski Hello everyone, this is Matthew Remski with Antifascist Dad Podcast episode 39.1: Epistemic Injustice. I'm really grateful for your support. I hope that this project brings some joy and hope and utility to your works and days. You can find me on Bluesky and Instagram under my name, and I'm on YouTube and TikTok as antifascistdad. And if you're listening to this on the day that it was published, you already know that the Patreon for this show is antifascistdadpodcast. And you know that as a subscriber you get early access to every second part of the main-feed episodes, including this one, which is a coda reflection on my interview with Lisa Matthews. She's the mother of Finn Collins, one of the Filton 25. In August 2024, a group of six Palestine Action activists broke into the newly built site of Elbit Systems, Israel's biggest weapons producer, and during that action they dismantled and destroyed a shipment of killer quadcopter drones that Israel uses in Gaza. Finn is one of the nineteen young people who were not there on that night, but who have since been arrested and charged in alleged connection with the action. So in my book and on this podcast and over on Conspirituality, I've been open about the fact that one of our sons is autistic and has high enough support needs that we have not found a school that can accommodate him yet. And that means that my partner has had to put her psychotherapy practice on hold indefinitely to provide home support. Now, I'm always very careful about how I speak about our son because I never want to speak for him or turn his life into my content. As it turns out, he's incredibly articulate and self-reflective about his neurodivergence, and he might one day speak about it or even pursue it as a path of study. So that's for him and his time. What I can do is talk about my learning journey as a caregiver and how this part of my life has radicalised me like nothing else has. The brief scenario I want to start with is this question of what I thought about our kid before I understood the bare bones of his point of view, his experience, his life — and what I did in the interim before that really came into focus. Looking back, there were all kinds of things that I didn't understand, and because I didn't understand them, I simply metabolised them into the language and the concepts I had available to me from the generations and from my ableist framework. He's shy, he's adjusting, he'll get over it, he'll be fine. I think the darkest corners of that story involve the time I spent reinforcing these very tone-deaf, very unresponsive beliefs. Whenever I was provoked by a behaviour I couldn't understand, it was almost like a toxic dialectic — I doubled down in ignorance and fear. For example, there was no doubt that he was having an extremely negative and resistant response to being left at school. At one point I realised that in order to drop him off, I was literally peeling his fingers off of the door frame he was clinging to, trying to stay out of the classroom, trying to stay out for dear life. But even with that experience, I was, for a while anyway, able to brush it away or tamp it down with the thought that he'll get over it, he's just shy, he'll adjust, he'll get used to it. When I close my eyes and remember those months, I also remember feeling unsettled, maybe even scared. Because if my self-assurances on his behalf didn't work, where would that lead us? It wasn't within my imagination that we had a kid who couldn't go to school. I had never heard the term school refusal. Even now I say the term and I smile, because it's usually said or felt in ominous tones. The kid is presenting school refusal — as though it were a rash or a mental illness, instead of a totally reasonable response a person could have to an incompatible environment. Now, for whatever reason, that contradiction was unsustainable for me. And I'm not congratulating myself, because I also didn't come to this on my own at all. I was pulled into this awareness by my partner, who had more tools for listening and sitting with and sidelining the demands of a culture that didn't make sense. But until this changed, my experience was generated by an absolute disconnect between the experience he was having and what I had already decided was true. And now that I've had many years to think about this, I can see this gap between actual experience and imposed interpretation everywhere. When I finished that interview with Lisa Matthews, I hit the stop button in the studio and I just started to cry right in front of her — somewhat awkwardly. And it wasn't just because she was describing the torture of waiting for Finn's trial and what they were trying to do to cope in the interim. It was because I realised that the injustice of the trial system towards his comrades was built on this fault line that I had felt in myself. Just to review: Justice Johnson looked at the behaviour of the young people who broke into the war factory, and he decided that their own experience of the world was irrelevant. Whether it's a trick of law or a fault of his personality, he was able to create a discourse in which his interpretation of what the young people were doing and why was the only valid interpretation. And this meant that their inferior position, their powerless position, their position of being accused, of being in detention, of being restrained from doing what they needed to do with their lives — all of that was simply justified. Now, my attitude towards our kid was more innocent. It carried with it just the simple weight and momentum of the generations, a lack of knowledge, a lack of curiosity, and also the ongoing effects of capitalist productivity propaganda — which I'm not free of — which dictates that of course my kid should go to school like everybody else, because how else would he become a worthwhile citizen? But Justice Johnson took his logic to a different extreme by actively suppressing the legible, confessable, rational intentions of the young people who were saying no, who themselves were gripping the door jambs with their fingers and refusing to be pushed into complicity. In my situation, I could have taken Johnson's next step. Many parents do. And this would have been in the form of not just simply ignoring my kid's distress with some sort of passive shrug — he'll get over it. I could have gone one step further. I could have pathologised it. I could have made up a story that somehow he was spoiled rotten, somehow he was too attached, somehow he was too needy and he really had to just work his shit out. And in an earlier era, I might have substituted a spiritual pathology in to describe his behaviour. I might have said he was possessed by a demon, or by an unclean spirit that caused him to be disobedient, to be resistant, to refuse school. He was under the influence of Satan, after all. That is how far Justice Johnson went in claiming that the intentions of Palestine Action were to create terror. What is the difference between attributing terrorism to young people versus attributing satanic possession to them? I can't see it. So I had this very personal response to this story of judicial abuse. I thought of our son, who — before he could describe for himself what his condition was as he understood and felt it — I had decided what he needed and what he needed to do. Not only not based on what he was trying to show me, but in active resistance to what he was trying to show me. And the worst part was that as a caregiver, I became a betrayer. I became the one who was trying to convince him that what he didn't want, what he couldn't tolerate, was actually best for him. In that sense, I was actually more dangerous to him than the school was — perhaps because he also had to trust me for everything else. And I used that trust on behalf of the state. Now, part of the reason I couldn't sustain this — in addition to my partner's influence — was that I do have a radar for injustice that I think I inherited from my parents. I have a genetic loathing for bullies. Also, I can feel internal conflicts pretty acutely. I can't push them down for too long. And so there is a doorway between this developmental psychology world in which parents project onto children and disfigure their needs and desires, and the political world in which authorities dictate what the people must be thinking or why they are acting as they do. And when it's young people, I get very itchy very quickly. I think Leonard Cohen's line was, it begins with your family, but soon it comes around to your soul. And I think sometimes that's very accurate, but sometimes it's also: it begins with your family, but soon it comes around to justice and Marxism. So I remember how in the spring of 2024, students were disrupting normal business to protest genocide on campuses. And they were also forming spontaneous interfaith and cross-cultural communities. Democratic governors in the US and liberal functionaries here in Canada greenlit militarised police to crack their heads. This was one of many bipartisan steps toward Trump's NSPM-7 and now Canada's new surveillance laws. Some of the worst behaviour I saw in response to these kids came from Boomer and Gen X liberals and centrists who not only failed to stand up for them, but actively repeated right-wing talking points that these kids were privileged, misguided, egotistical drama queens. They didn't know anything about the world. They would harm the Harris campaign. They would ruin things for everyone. These reactionaries had a knee-jerk and fragile reaction to the disorder of dissent, and they decided that the kids were stupid so that they didn't have to listen to them about their own complicity in genocide. And that continues with the Filton 25. The court ruled that the defendants could not present the lawful excuse that they were taking an action to prevent harm — this is a defence enshrined in British law. In other words, they couldn't tell the jury why they had taken sledgehammers to destroy drones, which was to prevent them from killing civilians in Gaza. Their story and reasons were immaterial to the damage allegedly caused. And then the justice took that other step, trying the case under terrorism provisions that led to the extreme sentences, yet concealing this framework from the jury that was trying their peers. He didn't let the young people speak, but he gave them their intentions after their peers had convicted them. So in searching for background and resources for how to think about all of this, I came across the book Culture and Imperialism from 1993 by Edward Said, in which he wrote: "The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them." And of course, this is a gateway to a huge body of postcolonial literature on exactly this — writers who describe colonial and neocolonial authority as that which cannot engage with the resisting subject's self-account, because that subject has been considered and labelled as dangerous and irrational. Frantz Fanon says that the native is declared an absolute evil, or the depository of maleficent powers. Aimé Césaire says that within this structure, the rule of law and due process and open justice are deployed as instruments for the powerful alone. Stuart Hall talks about the manufacture of crisis that suspends normal legal protections in response to a threatening Other. Eqbal Ahmad says that the political function of the terrorism label is merely a determination about whose violence is legitimate and whose resistance is not. And of course Spivak, in her famous essay Can the Subaltern Speak?, said that no, it can't — not because they are silent, but because the institutions have predetermined that their speech is meaningless. And then there's this hinge with the developmental psychology thing I'm talking about. There's a whole literature that explores that as well. And the consensus is that when an authority silences a subject's self-account but then substitutes in their own characterisation of who that person is and what they intend, that's one of the most destructive things you can do to a person. Marsha Linehan, the American psychologist who developed Dialectical Behaviour Therapy, described this injustice as the cornerstone of what she called an invalidating environment — one in which the subject's account of their own interior life is ruled inaccurate, while a replacement account is attributed to them. "The invalidating environment teaches the child that their interpretations of their own emotional responses are incorrect." Melanie Klein, the object-relations pioneer who studied infants, talked about projective identification. In this case it would mean that terrorism is dumped into the subject, who is then managed as if they contain it. Gregory Bateson talked about the double bind, where the subject is required to account for their state of mind in a forum that has ruled that their own self-account is irrelevant. So in reviewing some of these things, I then also came across a book from 2007 called Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, by the British feminist philosopher Miranda Fricker. Now, I posted a little bit about this on Instagram, and I got this flood of comments saying, yes, this is a classic — but also it's been developed since then, and also there are antecedents that not a lot of people know about in Black feminism. And so I know that as I'm reading this book, I'm entering into another rabbit hole of references. I'm sure I'll learn a lot more as I go, but I just want to give a little introduction to this, because the clarity and precision that Fricker brings to the subject gives me a lot of relief. Fricker says that if you are a human who knows something, there are structures of prejudice out there in the world, amongst the people who would hear you tell that story, that will degrade your credibility before you even open your mouth. This is, in her words, a "wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower." Fricker then divides the umbrella category of epistemic injustice into two things. "I call these two things testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. Testimonial injustice 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 experience." An example of the first might be that the police do not believe you because you are Black. An example of the second might be that you suffer sexual harassment in a culture that still lacks that critical concept. This is so clear and so refreshing to me, and part of it is very familiar. Testimonial injustice is something that I think many of us know. You have a story, and you know that if you want to tell it, you will be attacked, you'll be bullied, you'll be micromanaged, you'll be nitpicked. And I see this happen in the world all the time. But hermeneutical injustice gets to the thing that happens before you have a story, which is that you know something is wrong, but you can't name it. And this I can see in my kid's struggle to tell me — in ways that I could understand — what he was going through. And I'm starting to wonder if the majority of childhood, just in general, is spent in the experience of hermeneutical injustice. Now these two forms — testimonial and hermeneutical — become intersectional. They loop into each other. They feed into each other in a process that Fricker calls runaway credibility deflation. She says that there's a hermeneutical gap in the society, or a general inability to accept and name an experience that nobody has really articulated before. And for the person who has that experience, their would-be speech is very difficult to hear. They almost become invisible, because there's no space in which to receive this new experience. And because of this invisibility, the ground is established to deflate their personal credibility. Then the personal deflation makes the already scantly understood experience they're trying to bring to the public forum appear even less plausible. And so the injustice is compounded. Now, one relieving aspect of this analysis for me is that it depersonalises and de-psychologises the experience. When we sought support for our kid, we had this continual experience of adults and professionals listening or not listening — often the latter. And what Fricker allows me to do is to not lay the verdict on the individual exchange, as to whether the doctor, the adult, the authority are more or less receptive — like, are they one of the good ones? — and whether I am being more or less clear — like, am I explaining this well enough? Usually the calculus is about whether I'm a good enough advocate and whether I got lucky in speaking with someone in power who actually happens to be nice. And this is what the Filton 25 defendant faces. Will the judge be kind and let me speak? This is what a sexual assault victim faces in going to the police. Will I be believed? Fricker's answer, so far in my reading, is: you are credible. And if you enter a space in which that is already taken from you, that's not your fault. That is a structural injustice. It's something you can expect from structures of power. So for me, my mission as a journalist and writer will now include asking the question: how am I contributing to epistemic injustice? And I can apply what I've learned in parenting to exactly that. How did the limits of my generation and my education and my personality give me this instinct to ignore what my kid was telling me and to impose my own meaning upon the situation? It's not that the world of journalistic subjects is a world of children, but that the stories of injustice and human need don't just become visible and meaningful on their own. They become visible and meaningful because you refuse to impose on them what you already know, and because you support their ability to express themselves. I know the feeling of betraying my child. And this is a way of recognising that same gravity of feeling when I betray any other person who is trying to tell a story against the current of what is normal. Thanks for listening, everybody. Until next time, take care of each other.