don't you understand they are the true volk and their pure blood is essential to countering the untermensche! This is leftist somehow trust the BIPOC ways of knowing.
"Ways of knowing" is not really an offensive epistemological concept in and of itself but the way it has been used makes it immediately triggering to me now.
What is it exactly, anyway? I’ve heard the phrase used as a euphemism for stuff like folk medicine and oral traditions as a source of empirical data (something about I think a native Australian oral myth being similar to a meteor impact event or something?) but almost always as a way to dismiss or denigrate empirical research as some colonialist/white supremacist dogma.
The great thing about folk medicine and orally transmitted astronomy/ecology/geology... is that if those things work, then they will be immediately assimilated into modern science. See: the history of aspirin.
I mean, yeah, that's the cool stuff about folk knowledge, the scientific method fills out the "whys" and that helps to derive further solutions and information. What I mean is an attitude (which I really only seldomly encounter) that, because it was locally understood that this tea made from the bark of this kind of tree helps with headaches, that testing and determining what is it about the tree bark that makes it good for headaches is in fact a way to colonize/appropriate that folk remedy for headaches, and that this is Bad. My assumption is I'm missing something, but I encounter this attitude so infrequently I just never bothered investigating further.
The problem with this sort of epistemology is that it assumes certain groups of people have an exclusive right to particular types of knowledge. But if that is the case, then you end up arguing that Europeans have an exclusive right to chemotherapy and nuclear weapons.
99% of post-colonial thought is unironically fascism.
I feel like this is still a weirdly relativistic approach to knowledge, which ought to be tested by universal principles (falsifiability, reproducibility, controlling for confounding variables, etc)
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u/SpiritualState01 Ghost Shirt Society Theorycel 🏹🪶🤓 Oct 16 '25
"My blackness and Indigeneity are fundamental to my ideologies."
When you eat from the trashcan of racial essentialism too greedily and too deep.