Why would a person ascribe to themselves a belief that they do not endorse? I was confused by the ease with which some philosophers talked about the phenomenon of alienation. It was as if the existence of an unendorsed belief within a subject was not at all problematic, leading to no conflict whatsoever. But at least in my personal case things have not been as harmonious. Reflecting on myself, I too found beliefs that I did not fully endorse, yet ascribed to myself. I often denied that I had experienced racism, but I felt very alienated from that belief. On the contrary, when I reflected on my experiences I would have said that I was subject to racist discrimination, but I was not very confident about this observation. Instead, I was encouraged by my environment to believe the opposite: That what I experienced was not racism, that certain remarks *could not* have been racist because they were not *intended* to be racist. With everyone denying my experiences, I doubted what I took to be true and stopped trusting my epistemic abilities. Instead, I tried to internalise what I seemed to be supposed to believe. I was deeply troubled.

The confusion around alienated beliefs remained until I took an introductory lecture on social epistemology, where I first encountered the notion of hermeneutical injustice. Going beyond the scope of the lecture and reading Miranda Fricker’s (2007) Epistemic Injustice provided me a means to make sense of the alienation that I experienced: The hermeneutical resource dominant in my environment did not encompass an understanding of racism as a structural phenomenon that could occur in many different ways, intentional or not. Fricker’s work deeply resonated with me. I was fascinated by the idea that inadequate hermeneutical resources and the social practices arising from them (denying experiences of racism due to a shared ill-fitting understanding of it) could negatively influence a subject’s trust in their own epistemic abilities. I concluded that it was hermeneutical injustice that made a subject prone to the self-ascription of unendorsed beliefs. 

My initial question about the nature of alienation and unendorsed beliefs has not been finally solved, as the concept of hermeneutical injustice in turn brought many new question with it. But to me it looked like a promising approach, it still does. If anything, it provided me with theoretical tools to identify a lacuna in my understanding that otherwise would have remained unnoticed. I became aware that my past silence about racism not at all stemmed from the illegitimacy of my experiences, but rather from a lack of adequate words to understand and address it. Now I find myself encouraged to actively seek conceptions and vocabulary to express this defining aspect of my life reality. In this, I am joining many Black people before me. It is not unless this new language is collectively shared, that substantial change about racism can be put into action.