Three: The Berlin Wall vs. the European Border, or #Jesuischarlie vs #Jesuisnigeria - on the Workings of Epistemic Injustice in Race Matters

IntroductionIn November 2014, the German public commemorated the deaths of the victims of the former German-German border in a big celebration of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. As part of the three-day long festivities, a light installation representing the former wall was mounted as "a symbol of hope for a world without walls" (Berlin.de, 2014). At the same time, at the European border, thousands of people were waiting for their chance to jump the fences of the Spanish enclaves and to cross the Mediterranean. The death toll of those having tried in the past decades is now reaching well into the five-figure realm.Two months later, in January 2015, an outcry of indignation shook the international public after the Paris Charlie Hebdo shootings. Read as an attack on the freedom of speech by the self-identified Islamist shooters with Al-Qaeda ties, an international campaign of solidarity was launched under the banner of JeSuisCharlie. In France, the rallies on the 10th and 11th of January united nearly 4 million protesters with numerous heads of states (including six African presidents) and public figures from all over the world. The white-on-black JeSuisCharlie slogan went viral on social media, but was also omnipresent on banners hanging from French town halls, taking over advertisement screens, and even making it onto the Oscar red carpet. In the same week, the killings and shootings committed by the Islamist Boko Haram in Nigeria went largely unnoticed, including the murder of nearly 2000 people in the town of Baga on the 7th of January.There are plenty of such examples for different standards along racial lines in global politics, another example being the Charleston shootings1 which - interestingly - do not fall under the US anti-terror agenda (see Baraka, 2015b). 2It surely comes as no surprise that race is a crucial element in defining who is worthy of media attention, and who is not. Nevertheless, I believe that examining these instances in direct comparison can yield some interesting insights, when it comes to the question of how epistemic injustice works in race matters - even if I can only represent the complexity and recent developments of my cases in a very fragmented way. The purpose of my analysis is to show that it is not only a question of media attention and coverage but more fundamentally, it is about whose life is conceptualized as meaningful.Therefore, in this contribution, I will investigate how people are apprehended and differentiated as bearers of knowledge, political agency and rights along racial lines. I will firstly resort to recent philosophical scholarship on epistemic injustice, focusing on how people are validated or silenced as witnesses. I will then turn to the epistemic resistance that was sparked by the Berlin Wall commemoration and the JeSuisCharlie campaign. By focusing on the freedom of movement (Berlin Wall) and the freedom of speech (JesuisCharlie), I do not uncritically postulate the liberal and allegedly universal discourse of human rights as the normative goal for mitigating epistemic injustice. As I will develop below, I do not equate epistemic recognition as a bearer of human rights with epistemic justice. I rather intend to follow the strategy outlined by other critical interventions on human rights: According to Baxi (see 2009) and Hoover (see 2012), claiming human rights (such as the freedom of speech and freedom of movement) can be used strategically by grassroots groups and social movements when fighting for their liberation or self-determination. In these two cases, the agents of epistemic resistance do employ the framing and language of human rights, and emphasize their belonging to a shared humanity.Drawing from these examples, and from some interventions made by decolonial/deconstructivist scholarship concerned with theories of subject formation, I will argue that any theories of testimonial injustice cannot separate the credibility denied to an agent of knowledge from the credibility denied to a person as a witness to her/his own lived life. …