Race and Gender: Toward a Proper Pattern of Knowledge and Ignorance in Research

ABSTRACT

This paper concerns a project to right a wrong, an epistemic as well as social wrong. The wrong? Science was to serve all humankind; that is what Francis Bacon and the other founders of modern science had promised and what a long line of their successors had signed on to. But by the twentieth century it had become clear that this science was regularly serving some of humankind far more than others and was even, quite frequently, actually harming those others rather than helping them. The problem lay with the knowledge that science offered about those others: the damaging ‘information’ that was really ignorance in disguise. But the problem also lay with the systematic ignorance science allowed, even encouraged, about those others: the helpful, uplifting knowledge about them that the science could have offered but did not. And the project to right the wrong? A transformation of the science-provided pattern of knowledge and ignorance engineered to achieve a more egalitarian result (what I call an epistemological-agnotological reengineering project). Of course, there are many groups of others relevant here. I will focus my attention in the present paper on only two of them: women, and men of colour (especially Black men). .

KEYWORDS:

• race
• gender
• the facts of science
• the values of science
• feminist science
• women scientists
• Black science
• African American scientists
• agnotology

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Martin Carrier for his extremely helpful suggestions regarding the development of this paper and two anonymous reviewers for their many questions and concerns which took that development still further. Thanks, also, to audiences at the University of Bern, Switzerland, and the University of Calgary, Canada for their wonderfully lively discussions regarding the issues of the paper.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://abpsi.org/about-abpsi/#mission

2 https://neaecon.org/our-mission/

3 https://www.associationofblacksociologists.org/about-us/

4 Of course, what is or is not a legitimate reason here might be controversial. See Kourany 2016 or the further developed and updated Kourany 2020 for this issue as it concerns race- and gender-related cognitive differences research.

5 For further information about these organisations, see their websites—such as https://www.neaecon.org/ (for the National Economics Association), https://abpsi.site-ym.com/ (for the Association of Black Psychologists), and https://www.nbcdi.org/ (for the National Black Child Development Institute).