ABSTRACT
The epistemological literature in Anglo-American analytic philosophy has been dominated by Cartesian individualism. An epistemology oriented by the realities of social oppression on a global scale and informed by the international relations (IR) history of racially tainted categories could be very useful in assisting the cognitive liberation which classically, to return to where this chapter begins with Caves both Platonic and Rawlsian, philosophy promises to humanity. If philosophy is about understands the world and its inhabitants and trying to make both morally better, then recognition of the way that world has been whitened in both fact and representation is crucial, and IR as history and theory has been at the heart of both processes. So the unwriting and unwhitening of this unjustly racialized world should be done by philosophy and IR working in tandem. Research in cognitive psychology has documented the extent to which we are all prone to racializing attributions and implicit bias.
