Subjugated Knowledge

Now that we know how knowledge is produced, let's explore how it is MANAGED.

"I can’t say who I am / unless you agree I’m real." ~ poet Amiri Baraka (2014)

Subjugated knowledge is buried information. It is information that is not recognized or legitimized by power systems that control the DOMINANT DISCOURSE of knowledge (McWhorter, 2009).

In the context of McWhorter's (2009) text, Subjugated Knowledge encompasses the erasure of the harmful and violent pursuit of White supremacy by eliminating the stories and experiences of any individual in a minority body (race, ability, sexuality) from scientific and historical discourse.

Simply put, subjugated knowledge is knowledge held by a minoritized class of individuals that has been "othered" by oppressive hierarchical systems. It is the stories of these individuals that are silenced, masked, de-emphasized or disqualified by power systems.

Subjugated knowledge lives within discriminatory and dehumanizing experiences of the disabled, marginalized and oppressed.

(Eugenics Society, 1930s)

Why are certain knowledges silenced?

McWhorter (2009) explains that hegemonic social and political institutions use tactics of discrimination, disqualification and violence against any abnormal bodies in an effort to rid disability, degeneracy and abnormality from the gene pool and create a single pure Aryan human race. These oppressive actions against minority groups are then rationalized, justified or erased from history, and normalization practices are used to obtain assimilation and compliance from society in belief and action.

Here are some examples of Subjugated Knowledges in McWhorter's context of racism:

· Racial oppression and the Eugenic Movement - white supremacy attempts to create a singular pure Aryan human race, devoid of “defect, deviance and disease” (McWhorter, 2009, p. 297)

· Scientific Racism – formal discourses that promote biological differences that classify and create racial hierarchies as a way to justify the oppression of people of colour (McWhorter, 2009, p.297)

· Social and political institutions (medical systems, prison systems, social systems) that use social progress as justification for eliminating imperfections (McWhorter, 2009, p.298)

· Sexual oppression – campaigns against sexual deviance and sexual subcultures in pursuit of white supremacy (McWhorter, 2009, p.305)

· Harm and suffering produced by such oppression created by classifications of the impure, the dangerous, and the dispensible, and the elimination of these categories (McWhorter, 2009, p. 298)

(Isles-Ahite, 2020)

How does knowledge get buried?

Buried knowledge becomes “whispers” within oppressed communities. They are the stories that live on and that are passed on from generation to generation of the violence, dehumanization, threats and discrimination faced and experienced in an effort to eliminate any abnormality from the human race.

Knowledge gets buried in these ways:

When violence against women, queer communities, racial minorities does not get reported to police (McWhorter, 2009, p.306)
When police control the narrative of a crime i.e. when mental illness explains the crime rather than being motivated by hate (McWhorter, 2009, p.306)
In the social disapproval of queer lifestyles, or interracial relationships (McWhorter, 2009, p.307)
Activist groups against same-sex marriage, ultra-right-wing Christian Coalitions promoting the preservation and protection of family values, and the labeling those who did not agree with these movements as “an agent of social destruction” (McWhorter, 2009, p. 298)

Below are some examples of subjugated knowledge paired with quotes from McWhorter.

(Viva Oxnard, 2022)

"[We know] what we know about ourselves in opposition to what they tell us – for example that we are unwilling to tolerate humiliation politely, that we are violently opposed to the degradation of our lives and loved ones, that we embrace the novel and the serendipitous while passionately adhering to meaningful traditions, that we are able to think and imagine things that our detractors find too frightening to contemplate, that even when burdened with illness and threatened with ostracism we can be brave and loving" (McWhorter, 2009, p. 327).

"Scientific racism was not just an attempt on the part of some scientists, intellectually comprised by irrational prejudice, to justify the oppression of people of color. It was a set of scientific theories, disciplinary practices, and social and political institutions that projected and attempted to realize a program of human perfection in evolutionary biological terms by purging the human species – the Race – of defect, deviance, and disease” (McWhorter, 2009, p. 297).

)

(Texas Center for Disability Studies, 2022)

(Public Health Sudbury & Districts, 2022)

"Most anti-queer attacks aren't reported to authorities and certainly don't make the papers, especially [...] when the attacks are not public and the physical injuries are not catastrophic [...]. They get lost in the sea of crime statistics or the silence of the victim's fear. But we hear them. We know” (McWhorter, 2009, p. 306).

"To obscure a history that an oppressed group has lived through is, whether one means to or not, to exercise domination over that group" (McWhorter, 2009, p. 317).

(Dr. Masood Raja, 2024)

(Lamar Advertising Company, 2024)

Pursuing subjected knowledge results in “an awareness that things are as they are, not because God or Nature so decreed, but because of the balance of power at a given time, the pressures and strains of a historical moment. And one consequence of that awareness is the recognition that today's status quo was far from inevitable and need not persist into tomorrow – even aspects of it as seemingly intractable as racism and homophobia” (McWhorter, 2009, p. 296).

“In 2005 alone the FBI reports that there were 4,895 racially motivated hate crimes and that 68.2 percent of the victims were African American. From harassment and intimidation to robberies, beatings, and stabbings, African-Americans bear the brunt of racist brutality” (McWhorter, 2009, p. 300).

(TED, 2016)

Subjugated Knowledges are quelled within webs of oppression: unique and differing experiences of struggle and harm. As we can see from the stories above, though they are individual, subjugated knowledges are bound together by the common experience of being categorized as inferior in worth by the interloping networks of knowledge and power (McWhorter, 2009).

Please continue on to learn more Subjugated Histories.

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