Professor Watchlist

Alison Bailey is a Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Illinois State University. According to Bailey’s university profile, her “scholarship engages issues at the intersections of feminist theories, philosophy of race, critical whiteness studies, and social epistemology (especially epistemic injustice and ignorance).”

Bailey teaches “WGS 490 – Feminist Theories & Methodological Issues.” The course description reads:

“An interdisciplinary approach to the methods, theories, and conceptual tools feminist scholars use to address social justice issues across a broad range of topics and academic disciplines. The course explores the historical and contemporary developments in feminist theory with particular attention to how gender intersects with race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, coloniality, and other social identities.” 

In 2021, Bailey released a book titled “The Weight of Whiteness: A Feminist Engagement with Privilege, Race, and Ignorance.” According to an article by Illinois State University News in February 2021, Bailey’s book “explores the ways white supremacy and privilege operate like an anesthesia, desensitizing white people to the inherited damage of whiteness on collective humanity.”

The article continues:

“In the book, Bailey measures the weight of whiteness in terms of its costs and losses to our collective humanity. These costs include a false sense of entitlement, hypervigilance, resource and opportunity hoarding, a distorted racialized perception of the world, implicit bias, a damaged moral compass, difficulty sustaining relationships with people of color, and a willful ignorance about American history and our family genealogies.” 

Bailey stated:

“White people need to walk into the places that scare them and explore the clean pain required for collective liberation. The stakes are high. Our failure to hold the weight of whiteness ensures that white people will continue to choose anesthesia over knowledge. When we do, we will continue to blow the weight of historical trauma through communities of color.” 

In a 2017 article written for Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Bailey describes why Critical Theory rejects critical thinking:

“…the tools of the critical-thinking tradition (for example, validity, soundness, conceptual clarity) cannot dismantle the master’s house: they can temporarily beat the master at his own game, but they can never bring about any enduring structural change (Lorde 1984, 112). They fail because the critical thinker’s toolkit is commonly invoked in particular settings, at particular times to reassert power: those adept with the tools often use them to restore an order that assures their comfort.”

 

Published – November 7, 2023