Gad, I wish I could wake up thinking for a change. I need at least two cups of joe first. But seriously, this is an issue that I love to wrangle with so....
>Is the issue in part about direct experience being
the basis of some kind
>of epistemic privilidge? That is, "you can't know if
you haven't lived
>it?". If so, I'd like to weigh in on the side of
those who, at some level,
>accord direct experience some priviledges.
It didn't start out ths way initially. (I've included my rendition of what was being said at the end, Charles pls correct me if I'm wrong. Niles might want to jump in too.)
As for the epistemoligical issues involved. I'm not sure. I think it altogether too easy to believe that we can really understand what it might be like to live in the Other's world. And yet, I also side with Habermas (in his critique of Gadamer), Sandra Harding, Linda A;coff, and if I remember right, Steven Seidman.
Harding, for example, has argued for the need to include historically oppressed people in the production of knowledge. This would mean that they must be accorded a wider institutional role in the actual work of knowledge production, and not merely accorded veto power over the work of social scientists as they blithely go about their work. However, as she points out with regard to women and the debate over women's standpoint, it doesn't follow that truth is to be equated with whatever women theorize about their condition and the sources of their oppression. In other words, as HArding writes, we don't want to leave the "knowledge where it is and 'go native'" (Harding's words, so don't jump on me).
Like Habermas, Harding sees knowledge as a political project. Knowledge is to be realized in political practice. To wind up this post, I'll draw on Horkheimer's pithy, though I think trenchant, claim that "If the proof of the pudding is in the eating, then the eating is still in the future"
This isn't wholly theoretical for me either. It comes from a life lived in those liminal spaces in between where one belongs in neither world and so must forge a space in between. Somehow. Well shit, doesn't that sound pretentious. Forgive me. Anyway, it also comes from watching, living with and talking with people in the very community where I grew up, where I moved from people a citizen of that community, to a researcher intervening in that community in order to learn from the community, go beyond their local knowledge, all without being patronizing about it, all with a political commitment to 'bringing the people back in' rather than working over their heads and behind their backs, as you say. It also comes from watching my brother-in-law steadfastly cling to his claim that the closing of his plant was due to the union's overzealous demands. Even though he was one of the the damn union reps and should have known better. Even after he watched the documentary film we produced out of our research, Huskitown USA, which detailed exactly how the company had planned for a *long* time to shut that plant down, no matter what the union did. It comes from watching the men in my neighborhood move from working at the plant earning a decent wage to pushing brooms, ashamed to look at their children and their children's friends, blaming themselves.
SnitgrrRl
As for the discussion w/ Charles and others:
In fact, if I have understood him correctly, Charles was suggesting that people can, in fact, identify with the other in important ways, essentially through personal and social struggle. Indeed, he said that Blacks have always had to understand both their own culture and that of whites, they've had to operate in both worlds, speak both langugages, and thus, according to Charles, it would follow that whites could become Black In order to become Black, whites need to immerse themselves in and understand Black History and Culture in order to affirm Blackness. As DuBois's argued in "The Souls of Black Folks" Blacks are both Black and White. They must learn to love their Blackness, rather than rejecting it in favor of whiteness and assimilation But, DuBois argued, they must also recognize that they live in the US and so must embrace white history and culture, overcoming and helping to shed through struggle the shame of white racial domination. DuBois, trained in Germany, wanted to affirm white history and culture, its positive aspects, rather than throwing the baby out with the dirty diaper. Whites, I think Charles was arguing, might take a cue from DuBois and embrace the Blackness within them. And here I think he was picking up on Niles point that much of White culture is indebted to Black culture. You'll have to correct my misreadings here Charles I intervened for two reasons, one of which I never addressed. First, I was concerned that the commodification of Black culture has rendered this project highly problematic. I look out my window and see my white neighbor, a young man of 15, who embraces the language, dress, music, attitude, comportant of what we might call hip hop culture. He loves Blackness in all sorts of ways. Spends lots of money on it even. But, he says the most incredibly racist things. They are sometimes called Wiggers. Also, I think of the street market I visited while conferencing this summer and recall my colleagues rushing to buy trinkets, rugs, scarves, jewlery and pottery that had the 'right' ethnic look that might signify their progressive politics. It sickened me, as I wondered who sweated and labored to make these things for a pittance in some factory somewhere. They weren't authetic, they were mass produced crap. These weren't idiots,my colleagues. They were good and decent people who genuinely care about the plight of historically oppressed people. I think about the fad of slumming: visiting the oh so hip areas of inner cities where people can be weekend warriors and return to their gentrified neighborhoods and suburban enclaves when the going gets a little too rough for them.
I hope that clarifies.
SnitgrrRl