Final

Have you experienced epistemic injustice? If so, tell us about a time in which you experienced it. Have you misjudged someone's epistemic ability before? How do you think this lesson will influence your future experiences with testimony?

Epistemic injustice occurs when a person is wrongfully undermined of his role as a knower. There are two kinds of epistemic injustices, namely testimonial injustices and hermeneutical injustices. Epistemic injustices are normally associated with biased assessments on the speaker's credibility. Biased assessments on the speaker's credibility can undermine the listener's ability to rely on the speaker's experience. Epistemic injustices are significant in courts or police departments during investigation or prosecution when the jury wrongfully assesses a witness's credibility based on color, socioeconomic status, or gender. The biased assessment of a witness can thwart the truth of the investigation.

Witnesses are generally used to provide information regarding incidences or events in their presence before the court of law or to top the police department for investigations. Therefore, witnesses are capable of disclosing relevant information about the fact that the police may not obtain without them, thus make them valuable. However, in an event when witnesses' role is undermined based on their ethnicity or socioeconomic status, they become useless. Prejudicing against witnesses or portraying them as hindered in giving the right information can interfere with a prosecution issued against culprits. An instance of epistemic injustice experienced in my neighborhood involved two young men who were found in a crime scene, and the police, the police officers, regarded them with suspicion. These two young men witnessed an assault on a young girl by two other men who escaped after committing the crime, and on police arrival, they regarded suspicion on innocent two young men. The officers failed to concentrate upon them and to follow energetically to the information, which they gave them. Nobody suggested that they were to be used in searches of the area, although they knew where the assailants had escaped. Nobody appeared correctly to have tried to calm them or to accept that what they said was true. The police officers failed to view them as credible witnesses due to racial bias. This is because the two innocent young men who were found next to the crime scene were all blacks. According to Fricker (2007), this was a case of testimonial injustice, which occurs when "prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker's word."

Epistemic injustices occur everywhere, even in school. There was a classmate who lost misplaced his pen and accused his desk mate of stealing it. The student ended up reporting the "thief" to a class teacher. The class teacher did not listen to the innocent boy's claim and instead of suspending him from school. The client was sent home because the teacher claimed that black children are dishonest and have bad school behaviors. The following day, the student reported to the teacher that he found the pen on top of his desk after school, and his mother told him that he forgot it that day. The teacher wrongfully undermined the student's role as a knower because he could not listen to what the accused student was telling her.

Based on the reading, this lesson can be applied in many spheres of life apart from the law. The experience is helpful because it outlines the importance of listening and paying attention to witnesses and using their testimonies in conducting investigations and prosecutions regardless of their ethnic background or social status in the society.

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Reference

Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford University Press.