The Adultification of Black Girls as Identity-Prejudicial Credibility Excess

Bibliographic Data

ID21701883
AuthorsCatalina Carpan (0000-0001-5794-3067, University of Warwick, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume25
Issue5
Pages793-807
Publication date2022-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEthical Theory and Moral Practice (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1386-2820 • E-ISSN: 1572-8447
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media LLC (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1007/s10677-022-10324-6
OpenAlexW4306777225
LanguageEN
Citations received6
References cited29

On Miranda Fricker’s influential account, the central case of testimonial injustice occurs if and only if the speaker receives a credibility deficit owing to identity prejudice of the hearer. Her critics have taken issue with her view, arguing that cases in which speakers are given more credibility than they deserve, may also amount to testimonial injustice. Furthermore, they argue, these cases cannot be captured by Fricker’s account of objectification as the primary epistemic harm of testimonial injustice; rather, it is an account of othering that best captures a wide range of epistemic injustices. In this paper, I join Fricker’s critics in advancing a novel case of testimonial injustice through identity-prejudicial credibility excess – the adultification of black girls in testimony-giving settings. When testifying, black girls are likely to receive a credibility excess with respect to adult topics such as sex and consent because they are perceived as older, more self-reliable, and mature than they actually are by the hearers. Nevertheless, when examining the girls’ intersecting social identities defined by age, race and gender, it becomes clear that this constitutes an unjustly and prejudicially inflated estimation of their credibility. These cases also involve hermeneutical injustice since the identity-prejudicial credibility excess denies the victims a meaningful opportunity to make sense of their traumatic experiences of sexual assault. I conceptualize this compounded injustice as testimonial obfuscation , where an identity-prejudicial credibility evaluation (either in excess or deficit) causes an experience to remain unintelligible to the hermeneutically marginalized speaker

Aesthetics · Credibility · Epistemology · Injustice · Sociology · Testimonial · Critical Race Theory in Education · Feminist Epistemology and Gender Studies · Philosophy · Political Philosophy and Ethics · Psychology · Social Psychology

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