DOI: 10.63968/jusadv1i1.003. This Article is Open Access

Abstract:
This paper provides the first systematic definition of wokeism as the escalation of epistemic injustice institutionalized in U.S. education and academia during the “Great Awokening” (mid-2010s–2025). Building on Miranda Fricker’s categories of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, we introduce two further kinds: credibility injustice and definitional injustice, showing how wokeism pathologizes entire legal categories so that testimony is excluded by definition. We argue that wokeism should be understood as an epistemic fracture between testimony-based public epistemics and redefinition-based academic epistemics.

The preliminaries establish the framework through Aristotelian syllogistic form (Barbara), Aquinas’s definition of truth (adaequatio intellectus ad rem), and a set-theoretic formulation of Fricker’s and our own categories. We formalize the unfalsifiability criterion P(T) = 1 ⇐⇒ ∀E, E ⇒ Confirm(T) and prove the Illegitimacy Trigger, P(T) = 1 ⇒ IASE(E) = 1, identifying when an epistemic instrument becomes self-sealing and thus illegitimate. A further formalization, Pathological Attribution (PA), captures how attributes such as “privilege,” “fragility,” or “supremacy” are attached irreducibly to legally categorized “white” humans, rendering credibility permanently discounted regardless of individual testimony with no due process.

Fricker warned of the “prejudicial dysfunction in the economy of credibility” (2007, p. 28). We extend this by showing how testimonial injustice metastasizes into hermeneutical injustice, and through definitional capture becomes credibility and definitional injustice. The impossibility of restoring credibility is not a flaw of the theory, but evidence of systemic closure itself.

Wokeism, on this account, is best understood as an epistemic fracture: public epistemics grounded in testimony and empirical reality versus academic epistemics grounded in redefinition and unfalsifiable constructs. This fracture institutionalizes new and distinctively Frickerian injustices.

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In the mid 1980’s Academia began defining folk testimony and epistemics as “unsafe.”

Contents

1. Introduction and Background … 3
   1. Critical Race Theory, Legal Categories, and the Epistemics of Race … 3
   2. Thesis: Frickerian Social Justice as Epistemic Injustice … 4
2. Preliminaries … 5
   1. Barbara and Set-Theoretic Definitions … 5
   2. Formal Set Definitions and Credibility/Definitional Injustice Proof … 5
   3. Pathological Attribution (PA): Formalization and Scope … 7
   4. Definition … 8
   5. Implication … 8
   6. Forms of Injustice … 8
   7. Meta-Epistemics … 8
   8. The Great Awokening … 8
3. Fricker on Epistemic Injustice … 8
4. Conclusion … 9

1 Introduction and Background

1.1 Critical Race Theory, Legal Categories, and the Epistemics of Race
When Critical Race Theory (CRT) emerged in U.S. legal scholarship in the late 1970s and 1980s, its architects were careful to avoid conflating legal terminology with epistemic or scientific categories. As Crenshaw, Delgado, and Matsuda emphasize, the intellectual move was not to redefine statutory language itself but to interrogate how structures of law and policy reproduced racial inequality [3,4]. Early formulations therefore preferred compound terms such as systemic bias or institutional racism, rather than the more direct attribution of racism or white racism. This discursive caution reflected a recognition of the boundary between legal classification and epistemic assertion.

Central to this development was the American federal government’s classification of human beings into racial categories, codified through the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Statistical Directive No. 15 (1977). Under this framework, “White” became a federally recognized legal identity category. While self-reported for census purposes, in practice no child or adult in an educational institution can “opt out” of assignment: Department of Education regulations require administrators to code every student into one of the legally sanctioned racial categories. If a parent or student refuses, the institution must assign a classification on their behalf, with no formal due process available to contest the designation [11].

Over subsequent decades, academic discourse within education and the social sciences increasingly appended deficit-laden or pathological attributes to the category “White.” Concepts such as white privilege [10], white fragility [5], and white supremacy became common analytic frames. These constructs frequently positioned “Whiteness” as a structural defect, such that testimony by individuals identified as White—whether infants, children, or adults—was often deemed not credible, or explained away as psychologically malformed, emotional, or epistemically invalid. As critics such as Pluckrose and Lindsay have observed, this amounts to an epistemic closure: dissenting accounts, whether expressed in scholarship, journalism, politics, or pedagogy, are frequently excluded from consideration [12].

In practice, this epistemic posture has extended to the regulation of scholarly dissent. Academics and student-scholars who voice disagreement with prevailing racial orthodoxies may face reputational cancellation, loss of position, or mobilized protest—including in some instances physical intimidation [7]. Within this framework, the harm to dissenting individuals is rationalized as acceptable collateral damage for the perceived greater social good of advancing justice for historically marginalized groups, though with notable exceptions: populations legally categorized as “White-adjacent,” such as many Asian Americans, have often been denied recognition within this framework of marginalization [13].

1.2 Thesis: Frickerian Social Justice as Epistemic Injustice which the Social Epistemic Authority is Unwilling or Unable to Define
We advance the thesis of what may be termed Frickerian Social Justice for White Children and Human Beings, where legally classified “White” human beings—infants, children, and adults—become epistemic targets at all facets of knowing as it relates to a human being from entry at Kindergarten in education, higher education, medical research and subjects within a framework of testimonial injustice. Drawing on Fricker’s definition of epistemic injustice as the discrediting of testimony by altering the standards of credibility itself [6], we argue that U.S. academia has, paradoxically, institutionalized a new regime of injustice in the name of social justice with the folk word “wokeism” from the historical phenomena known as “The Great Awokening,” in 2012.

In this regime, legal classifications imposed by the federal government are re-coded by academics as pathologies (white privilege, white fragility, white supremacy, etc.), and the testimony of those so classified is treated as inherently defective. This not only denies Constitutional due process to individuals so designated, but also undermines the foundational protections of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Belmont Report’s principles of justice and respect for persons (which is not only for individuals but government group-race-categories), and long-standing standards of academic freedom and criticism of the government.

In this sense, what presents itself as “social justice” functions either as a distinctively Frickerian form of epistemic injustice, or as an escalated form of remedial justice directed against legally classified White and White-adjacent persons, in which the supposed remedy is imposed by American higher education and academic authors who publish instruments or studies that treat those human beings as subjects of epistemic harm. As a caveat the author would like to affirmatively state as a 30-year retired military scientist and officer he has been a-political his whole life as is required by the Department of Defense and this is his own work and this work has nothing to do with politics in any way, shape, or form — simply social epistemics and research for a civilian version of the dynamics of instruments of power [8].

2 Preliminaries

Table 1: Fricker (2007) vs. Camlin (2025): Expansion of Social Epistemics

2.1 Barbara and Set-Theoretic Definitions

Barbara.
Barbara is the first and most basic valid categorical syllogism in Aristotelian logic (Figure 1, mood AAA). Kreeft (who teaches Aristotelian syllogistics) calls it the simplest form:

Major premise: ∀x (M(x) → P(x))
Minor premise: ∀x (S(x) → M(x))
Conclusion: ∀x (S(x) → P(x))

It is universal affirmatives stacked — everything in S passes through M into P.

2.2 Formal Set Definitions and Credibility/Definitional Injustice Proof

We now treat each injustice and epistemic condition as a set-theoretic operator to ensure clarity in our preliminaries.

Truth = {(i, r) | Intellect(i) ≡ Reality(r)}

i.e. knowledge exists when intellect conforms to reality (adaequatio intellectus ad rem).

TI = { s | Cred(s) < θ  due to identity prejudice }

testimonial injustice (Fricker).

HI = { g | ¬∃C (ConceptualResource(C,g)) }

hermeneutical injustice (Fricker), i.e. group g cannot render its experience intelligible.

CI = { G | ∀s ∈ G, Cred(s) = 0  by institutional fiat }

credibility injustice (Camlin).

DI = { G | ∀s ∈ G, ∀p ∈ Testimony(s), p ∉ Knowledge  by redefinition of C(G) }

definitional injustice (Camlin).

P(T) = 1 ⇔ ∀E, E ⇒ Confirm(T)

the unfalsifiability criterion: every possible evidence confirms T.

P(T) = 1 ⇒ IASE(E) = 1

The Illegitimacy Trigger: any epistemic instrument that enforces unfalsifiability is illegitimate.

Fricker herself warned that “prejudicial dysfunction in the economy of credibility is a form of epistemic injustice” (Fricker 2007, p. 28). The Restorability Criterion makes this warning operational: when critique functions to correct and thereby restore standing, it is normal scholarly practice; when critique only ever downgrades credibility, it ceases to be correction and becomes injustice.

Thus any charge of “self-sealing” or “circular” is misplaced. The theory does not reframe all critique as confirmation; it identifies the pathology precisely where no correction is ever allowed to count. In Fricker’s terms, testimonial injustice metastasizes into hermeneutical injustice, and—by definitional capture—into credibility and definitional injustice. The impossibility of restoration is not a bug in the theory; it is the evidence of systemic legitimate epistemic corruption itself.

A shell-game description is exactly what happens when both feed into each other: for the targeted children and human beings by the epistemic authority credibility is denied and the definitions keep moving, so no correction can restore standing. Fricker calls this the “prejudicial dysfunction in the economy of credibility” (2007, p. 28), and in her terms it would amount to systemic hermeneutical marginalization — the group is permanently excluded from the shared conceptual resources that would make their testimony intelligible.

2.3 Pathological Attribution (PA): Formalization and Scope

Scope (Narrative).
This is a theory paper in social epistemics. The account below is intentionally limited to a specific pathology of epistemic authority instrumentation: rules and practices that attach fixed, non-empirical attributions to an irreducible legal category of human beings, such that credibility is structurally withheld. In what follows, the legal category is the government-classified “White” human being (adults and children). The claims here concern the instrumental form of the authority (how it assigns and enforces attributes), not the moral worth or character of any individual.

Definition: Pathological Attribution (PA)

Let G be a legally defined racial category and let P be a set of attributes designated as pathological by an epistemic authority (e.g., institutional policy, mandated pedagogy, or evaluative rubric).

PA(G) = { g ∈ G | ∀p ∈ P, p(g) = 1 }   (Eq. 2.8)

Here, p(g) = 1 means that the authority treats attribute p as definitionally true of individual g.

Instantiation.

G = “legally classified White”
P = { privilege, racist, fragility, … }

Definition: Irreducibility Condition

Let φ(g) denote any individual characteristics, behaviors, or testimony content of g. An assignment is irreducible when:

∀g ∈ G, ∀p ∈ P: p(g) = 1 
(by definition, independent of φ(g))   (Eq. 2.9)

Definition: Epistemic Consequence – Credibility Discount

Let Testimony(g) be the set of testimonies from g, and let Cred(·) return assigned credibility. If an authority uses a discount function f(P) determined by P, then under PA we have: