Empathetic Understanding and Deliberative Democracy

Epistemic democracy is standardly characterized in terms of “aiming at truth”. This presupposes a veritistic conception of epistemic value, according to which truth is the fundamental epistemic goal. I will raise an objection to the standard (veritistic) account of epistemic democracy, focusing specifically on deliberative democracy. I then propose a version of deliberative democracy that is grounded in non‐veritistic epistemic goals. In particular, I argue that deliberation is valuable because it facilitates empathetic understanding. I claim that empathetic understanding is an epistemic good that doesn't have truth as its primary goal

Unconscious bias in the suppressive policing of Black and Latino men and boys: neuroscience, Borderlands theory, and the policymaking quest for just policing

his article applies neuroscience and Borderlands theory to reveal how unconscious bias currently stabilizes suppressive policing practices in America despite new efforts at reform. Illustrative cases are offered from Oakland and Santa Barbara, California, with a focus on civil gang injunctions (CGIs) and youth gang suppression. Theoretical analysis of these cases reveals how the unconscious biases of validity illusions and framing effects operate despite the best intentions of law enforcement personnel. Such unconscious or implicit biases create contradictions between the stated beliefs and actions of law enforcement. In turn, these unintended self-contradictions then work to the detriment of Latino and Black boys. The analysis here also extends to how unconscious biases and unintended self-contradictions can influence municipal policymaking in favor of suppressive police tactics such as CGIs, thereby displacing evidence-based policies that are proven to be far more effective. The article concludes with brief discussion of some of the means by which the unconscious biases – effects to which everyone is involuntarily prone – can be disrupted

Rendering the Implicit Explicit: Political Advertisements, Partisan Cues, Race, and White Public Opinion in the 2012 Presidential Election

In The Race Card (2001), Tali Mendelberg claims that once the racial content of an implicit racial appeal has been exposed the appeal loses its ability to mobilize voters. In this paper, we investigate this claim by employing a survey experiment embedded in Amazon\u27s Mechanical Turk in which respondents view Mitt Romney\u27s “Right Choice” television ad on welfare and then read a short op-ed. The op-ed, written by a fictitious member of Congress whose partisanship was systematically varied, argues that the Romney ad (1) is racist or (2) has no racial undertones. In line with Mendelberg\u27s predictions, we find that – regardless of the partisanship of the elite in question – exposure to an op-ed that denounces the Romney welfare advertisement as racist leads white Democrats and Republicans to more strongly perceive the advertisement as racist and express greater opposition to Romney\u27s campaign. Our findings contribute to the literatures on racial priming and partisan motivated reasoning, and also make a strong case for further evaluating the influence of political leadership on racial attitudes