Persecution Complex and Epistemic Injustice

The personal experiences of racism by black people is supposed to carry significant epistemic weight for white people’s beliefs about the extent to which racism is a problem in the United States (and around the world). There’s reasonable arguments for why that should be the case.[1]

However there appears to be a double standard when it comes to Christians and their claims of bigotry or persecution. These are mockingly dismissed as an irrational “persecution complex.” On the one hand, to pick some low-hanging fruit, intentional steps taken to remove the word “Christmas” from occurring in the public square apparently has no negative structural effects and it doesn’t contribute to marginalization. In fact, you would have to be stupid — and worthy of mockery — to think otherwise. On the other hand, the phrase “color blind” or the word “Dixie” or the Gator Bait chant are taken to have such negative structural impact and marginalizing effects that they have to be eradicated. This is taken as so obvious that you’d have to be morally deficient to think otherwise.

My point here isn’t to suggest that coming down on one or the other side of this issue is correct. My point is only that there seems to be an inconsistency in affirming the structural significance of microaggressions, epistemic injustices, and ‘everyday racism’ but denying the structural significance of similar attitudes and actions when it comes to religious bigotry. Furthermore, there’s a very obvious inconsistency in how testimony is treated as a weighty matter of epistemic justice in one case, but quickly dismissed as anecdotal in the other case.

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[1] Though Lagewaard’s argument in her paper Epistemic Injustice and Deepened Disagreement has a (huge) gap in connecting the sort of epistemic advantage which she describes for oppressed groups and the specific case of being better situated to know whether systemic racism exists.