Truth

Abstract

When Audre Lorde wrote that “the Master’s tools will never dismantle the Master’s house” (Lorde, 1984, p. 110), she was speaking from her experiences as a Black, lesbian feminist and she was critiquing white feminists for their heterosexual, white bias. In their allegedly progressive attempts to eliminate sexism, white feminists employed the logic of ignoring difference and, consequently, reinforced the very systems of oppression and privilege they claimed to want to dismantle. Lorde’s famous quote highlights the dilemma and the dangers of challenging injustice with the Master’s tools—tools, however, that we might not be able to live without. The dilemma I want to address in this chapter involves the role of truth in social justice education. On the one hand, I will argue that an exclusive focus on truth might be one of the Master’s tools that can obscure what discourse does and, thus, protect dominance from contestation. On the other hand, truth-talk cannot be abandoned as it plays an important role in regards to the credibility of what the marginalized are trying to tell the systemically privileged about their experiences with oppression. When should questions of truth be suspended and when do they matter? This dilemma is a noteworthy challenge for philosophers of education because, as Jose Medina and David Wood (2005) contend, “There is no topic more central to philosophy than truth” (p. 1). While debates about the multiple meanings and complex issues surrounding truth have occupied a special place in the history of philosophical inquiry, these debates will not be rehearsed here. Instead my aim is to examine whether an exclusive focus on truth might make it difficult for systemically privileged subjects to hear the truth of marginalized experience. I use two stories as a canvas upon which to build my argument that an exclusive focus on truth can undermine what the systemically dominant can hear. Story 1: Last year, the Black Lives Matter Movement asked Martin O’Malley, the white former governor of Maryland and then Democratic presidential