Discounting Sheep: Authority, Arrogance, and Particularity in Whiteness Discourses
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Following Audrey Thompson's previously aired incitement to unreliable narration, I have not generated a seamless response to her analysis of the absence of sheep in poststructuralism.Rather, I illustrate here some ways Thompson's work resonates with me, emphasizing in particular the performances of materiality she advocates and enacts.First, I cast Thompson's present essay in solidarity with two of her previous works, "Tiffany, Friend of People of Color," and "Philosophers as Unreliable Narrators" (TFPC and PUN, respectively), construing each as advocating, to decenter whiteness, resistance to conventional scholarly practices related to authority. 1 Second, I deploy Mara Lugones's work on arrogant perception to amplify Thompson's implicit but important focus on relationality. ANTIRACISM, UNRELIABLE NARRATORS, AND RACE AND CULTUREThompson's persistent attempt to problematize authority across the aforementioned essays is revealed by her interest in "destabiliz[ing] the whiteness of our intellectual and pedagogical practices."Consider the following formulations, each a quotation or close paraphrase:1. "Regarding ourselves as authoritatively antiracist, we keep whiteness at the center of antiracism." 2
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".