The house negro was socialised in a different way than other Blacks. He was given trinket's such as glass jars and pieces of silk to memorialise the difference between himself and his community (Asante & Hall, 2011) ​

Make no mistake: Knowledge shapes subjects

Within the UK Neo-colonial university, it continues to shape Black Africana scholars and practitioners into marginal figures—too often relegated to footnotes rather than recognised as foundational thinkers.

Studying within what Wilder (2013) describes as a military fort, more commonly known as the master's house, requires confronting a basic but rarely asked question: whose work do we cite, quote, and legitimise—and to what effect? 

This question is not merely academic.

It has profound consequences for Black students navigating the Neo-colonial university.

Does the knowledge they encounter enable them to develop a voice, to be seen and recognised, to act meaningfully within their communities and the wider society?

Or do they enter and leave the institution—three, five, or seven years later—largely unchanged, having learned to reproduce dominant grammars rather than speak from their own epistemic location?  

In many cases, coloniality is not disrupted but reinforced—what I, alongside others, have described as recolonisation. 

​This raises a further question: when is Black knowledge permitted to live and breathe without being appropriated, sanitised, or misappropriated?

When white Western scholars engage Black radical or decolonial thinkers, who do they centre in their theorising?

Who do they consult, reference, and treat as authoritative?

A glance at the reference list often provides the answer.

Are Black scholars—those with lived proximity, historical grounding, and intellectual lineage—centred as experts, or are white interpreters privileged as the primary mediators of Black thought? 

Consider the cases of Frantz Fanon and W.E.B Du Bois.

Their works, long relegated to the periphery of Euro-American philosophy, through what Rabaka (2010) termed the intellectual segregation of epistemes—effectively a conceptual quarantining of Black Knowledge—were translated decades ago into multiple languages, including English.

Within Black intellectual traditions, there exists deep and sustained scholarship engaging their thought—work that is frequently overlooked in favour of white contemporary authors.

This includes Lewis R. Gordon’s What Fanon Said (2015) and The Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences (1995), Brent Hayes Edwards’s editorial work on The Souls of Black Folk (2007), and Reiland Rabaka’s Against Epistemic Apartheid (2010).

These omissions are not incidental; they are structurally produced. 

Until very recently—accelerated by the murder of George Floyd in 2020—Euro-American philosophy remained largely indifferent to Black radical thought, except where it could be contained, aestheticised, or repurposed in ways that leave dominant structures intact. 

This occurs within what Henrich et al (2010) describe as so-called Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies—whose epistemic norms continue to masquerade as universal. 

I have raised these questions previously, both in my doctoral thesis From Behind the Veil: Unveiling the Experiences of Black British-Born Males of African Heritage Navigating Psychotherapy Training Within a White-Dominated Culture, and in forthcoming articles currently under peer review.

In one public piece, I posed a simple provocation: who do we, as Black people of Africana descent, quote?

Whose language and stories do we centre?

How can pluriversality emerge if we merely sprinkle Fanon or Du Bois into our work without the grammar of thought itself? 

These concerns are not abstract; they are embedded within institutional structures that govern knowledge production. 

The failure to grasp the salience of this has far-reaching consequences.

As Adams (2014) observed, regardless of intention, mainstream— what Asante (2001) critiques as 'white-stream' —research practices tend to reflect the perspectives of the powerful—namely whiteness—and in doing so reproduce domination.

The exclusion of Black perspectives is not accidental but structurally reinforced.

Academic journals privilege work aligned with dominant paradigms, marginalising Africana Critical Race scholarship (Roberts et al., 2020).

Research funding structures tended to exacerbate this dynamic, prior to the  murder of George Floyd. 

In the UK, racialised minority scholars—particularly Black academics are significantly less likely to receive research funding.

They are less likely to act as principle investigators.

They are less likely to occupy prestigious research roles (Powell et al., 2022; UKRI, 2025).

Evidence from national funding bodies shows lower success rates for Black applicants compared to their white counterparts (Fisher, 2024). 

Similarly, organisations such as Wellcome Trust have, in recent years, begun to respond to increased public and institutional scrutiny by funding initiatives focused on racial equity and Black scholarship.

While such developments may signal a shift in institutional awareness, their longer-term durability and transformative potential remains uncertain. 

Similar patterns are evident in the United States, indicating that anti-Black racism remains a structural feature of knowledge production across contexts.  

From a semiotic standpoint, Marrone (2011) reminds us that all discourse emerges from a positionality; no one speaks from nowhere.

The enunciator is not a neutral vessel but a situated subject crafting meaning for a particular audience.

Who tells the story? From where? With what accountability?

These questions resonate with Walter Mignolo's (2007) insistence that all epistemic locations are marked by colonial difference and decolonial struggle, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres's (2007) assertion that coloniality persists through knowledge disseminated in books, journals, and research. 

The struggle then, is cultural as much as epistemic.

Marimba Ani argued that Europeans recognised early on that culture shapes perception and consciousness.

By imposing their culture, they imposed a  way of seeing the world—and oneself—thereby constraining imagination, agency, and possibility.

This brings us back, once again, to the question: who do you cite in order to think, to learn, to dream, to become Black-in-the-world?

What legacy are you leaving for those who follow? 

Closing Reflections

At the 2013 Philosophy Born of Struggle conference at Purdue, Lucius Outlaw posed a question that remains deeply unsettling: Who among us takes responsibility for archiving our work?

In a discipline that privileges abstraction over material preservation, this question is often avoided.

Yet without deliberate acts of stewardship, how will our intellectual labour, our ancestors' lives, and their text endure? 

Given the routine marginalisation, distortion, and erasure of Black philosophical and psychological contributions, it is naive to assume our work will be remembered with care.

History shows that when others—particularly white, English-speaking institutions—control the archive, Black thought is sanitised, its radical edges dulled, its context stripped, or erased until it can be made useful to whiteness. 

This leaves us with pressing questions: 

• Who will remember us? 

• Who will protect the integrity of our thoughts?
 
• Who will refuse distortion masquerading as recognition? 

Psychotherapy, like the academy, is also a business, and power does not relinquish its stakes easily.

Violence is being enacted here too.

Black students pay for this violence, while others benefit materially and symbolically from its continuation.

I know this not abstractly but personally.

At the cost of approximately £60, 000, and with profound racial battle fatigue, I did not anticipate the path I would be forced to walk.

Not all will choose this treacherous route—this awakening from what Maldonado-Torres (2017) describes as an enforced ontological slumber-- what Jordan Peele named the Sunken Place.

But the question remains: whom—and what—are we willing to leave behind if we do not take the treacherous path? 

About this essay
​
Doing Epistemic Violence is part of the Afrolantic Series, a collection of essays exploring questions of psychology, culture, knowledge, and human existence from the perspective of Africana intellectual traditions. The series examines how Eurocentric epistemologies continue to shape institutions such as universities and psychotherapy training, and considers what it might mean to think, teach, and practice from different epistemic locations. 

References 

Adams, G. (2014). Decolonizing methods: African studies and qualitative research. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 31(4), 467-474. 

Asante, M. K. (2001). 'African American Studies: The future of the discipline', Norment, N. Jr (ed) The African American Studies Reader. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press. 

Edwards, H. B. (2007). The souls of black folks. Oxford University Press

Gordon, R. L. (1995). Fanon and the crisis of European man: An essay on philosophy and the human sciences. Routledge.

Gordon, L. R. (2015). What Fanon said: A philosophical introduction to his life and thought. Fordham Univ Press.

Henrich, J., Heine, S.J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(2-3), 61-83.

Marrone, G. (2011). Introduction to the semiotics of the text (Vol. 31). De Gruyter, Mouton.

Maldonado-Torres, N. (2007). On the coloniality of being: Contributions to the development of a concept. Cultural Studies, 21(2-3), 240-270.

Mignolo, D. W. (2007). Delink: The rhetoric of modernity, the logic of coloniality and the grammar of de-coloniality. Cultural Studies, 21(2), 449-514. 

Rabaka, R. (2010). Against epistemic apartheid: W.E.B. Du Bois and the disciplinary decadence of so. Lexington Books.
​
Roberts, S. O., Bareket-Shavit, C., Dollins, F. A., Goldie, P. D. & Mortenson, E. (2020). Racial inequality in psychological research: Trends of the past and recommendations for the future. Perspectives on psychological science, 15(6), 1295-1309.


Further Reading

Fisher, O. J. (2024). Promoting equality, diversity and inclusion in research funding.
Available at: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11097576/

UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). (2025). UKRI equalities monitoring 2023–2024.
Available at: https://www.ukri.org/publications/ukri-equalities-monitoring/ukri-equalities-monitoring-2023-to-2024/

UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). (2025). Diversity data for research funding applicants and awardees.
Available at: https://www.ukri.org/what-we-do/supporting-healthy-research-and-innovation-culture/equality-diversity-and-inclusion/diversity-data/

Wonkhe. (2025). UKRI equalities monitoring data 2023–24 released.
Available at: https://wonkhe.com/wonk-corner/ukri-equalities-monitoring-data-2023-24-released/

National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR). (2025). Diversity data in research funding.
Available at: https://www.nihr.ac.uk/about-us/who-we-are/research-inclusion/diversity-data

Wellcome Trust (2020). Our commitment to tackling racism at Wellcome. Available at: https://wellcome.org/press-release/our-commitment-tackling-racism-wellcome