Green Book, which won the Oscar for Best Picture, just came out on Netflix and in various other places. Its success has been controversial, largely because the story is told through the eyes of the white driver, Tony Vallelonga (Tony Lip). Reportedly, no members of the family of Don Shirley (Dr. Shirley), the black concert and jazz pianist who employed Lip as his driver for a pre-Christmas tour through the segregated Deep South, were contacted before or during the making of the movie.

Critics such asBrooke Obiehave called the movie a "white man's savior film" that harms Dr. Shirley's legacy, his family, and Black people as a whole. The reply to this objection has been that the story is Tony Lip's, not Dr. Shirley's, so there was no need to contact the latter's family. A contributing author to the film was Tony Lip's son, Nick Vallelonga; the story was based on interviews with Tony Lip and Dr. Shirley before they died, and on the letters that were written to Lip's wife during the trip.

But is this reply—that the story is Tony Lip's—adequate? I don't think so. One reason is that the movie represents itself as more than just Tony Lip's story. It claims it is "Inspired by a True Story," which invites the viewer to see the story in abstraction, asastory rather thanTony Lip的故事。电影的后记也同样脱离了任何一个特定角色的视角:它告诉我们托尼·利普(Tony Lip)和他的妻子后来发生了什么，雪莉博士(Dr. Shirley)发生了什么，两人仍然是朋友，而且他们在同年去世(似乎这以某种方式巩固了他们之间的关系，或在某种程度上让他们处在一个平等的竞争环境中)。在这期间，我们看到了他们每个人的生活场景，我们听到他们每个人显然都在用自己的声音讲述他们对所发生的事情的反应。叙述的角度不仅仅是托尼·利普的，而是故事的真相。

But suppose the movie represented itself more consistently as Tony Lip's story. Would there be anything wrong about that? A case to be made that Black people are harmed by the movie? I think there would be, and that recent philosophical writing about an approach to knowledge called epistemic injustice can suggest why.

Epistemic injustice, ashighlighted by Miranda Fricker, considers how possibilities for knowledge can be suppressed by social conditions of structural injustice.Epistemic injusticecan take many forms. One form is that testimony can be given less credence because of the social situation of the person testifying. Women are given less credence than men when they claim sex was non-consensual, or Black witnesses less trust when they report police harassment.

AsKristie Dotsonpoints out, testimony may not only be discounted but may also be smothered or never even find voice. In the 1962 Birmingham, Alabama, ofGreen Book, we see Dr. Shirley go down the road to perform at great acclaim at a bar where Blacks are served, after he has refused to perform at the country club that would not allow him to eat with the other guests. In the bar, the Black patrons are celebrating happily.

We do not see the full picture of the Birmingham of the early 1960s where officials responded with high pressure fire hoses to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s civil rights campaign, or where angry segregationists responded to desegregation by bombing the 16th Street Baptist Church. To be sure, we do see threats in the movie, but they are muted or bought off. The last scene involving police is a happy one helping the travelers on their way. This wider context of Birmingham is testimonial injustice: what the movie does not show.

Another form of epistemological injustice is hermeneutical injustice: that persons may find significant areas of social experience obscured from understanding owing to prejudicial flaws in shared resources for social interpretation. People experiencing hermeneutical injustice may be unable to conceptualize what is happening to them; for example, "sexual harassment" went unrecognized beforeCatharine MacKinnon给它起了个名字。对解释学上的不公正的描述往往描述受害者在获得认识和验证其经验的概念性工具后如何有了新的认识。这些以受害者为中心的叙述描述了受害者如何受到双重的伤害，既受到不正当的骚扰，又受到知识上的不公正，这使他们无法充分理解他们需要获得的自信来对抗这种错误。

Other writers, such asLaura Beebe, point out that the wrongs of hermeneutical injustice can also affect those who are privileged. The privileged, too, lack understanding in a context of structural injustice in which wrongs like sexual harassment have not even been identified. Of course, this does not mean they are harmed, much less wronged—indeed, their obliviousness may embolden them to act in ways that entrench their privilege. Nonetheless, they may be morally lessened as a result—and some might even be morally improved when given the conceptual tools.

Along these lines, there's a case to be made that the Tony Lip ofGreen Book因为解释学上的不公正而在道德上贫穷。原因如下:这部电影对种族主义的概念是公开的偏见，但这是一种贫穷的种族主义观念。电影一开始就把利普描绘成一个公开的种族主义者，他对家里的黑人工人抱怨说:“我不知道他们会送茄子来。”托尼把工人们用过的杯子扔了出去，他的妻子德洛丽丝后来把它们从垃圾桶里拿了出来。随着电影的发展，利普观察了雪莉医生被对待的方式，他应该开始理解种族主义的错误，并纠正自己的方式。

影片以一个感人的友谊场景结束。节目鼓励观众带着这样一个振奋人心的信息离开:只要我们能通过直接的经验教育人们偏见的危害，种族主义就可能在家庭餐桌上被克服。我们可能会进入一个理想的后种族社会，一个种族就像眼睛颜色的世界。This world,Richard Wasserstromwisely observed, is not at all like our own. The problem withGreen Bookis not just that its writers didn't talk to Dr. Shirley's family; it's that they didn't recognize that racism is a structural phenomenon that continued to affect who Tony Lip and Dr. Shirley were and could be.