Nepo Babies, Corruption, and the Epistemic Oppression of Filipinos

In this paper, I aim to introduce epistemic oppression as another form of oppression that Filipinos perpetually endure that obstructs their conception of truth and knowledge-making brought by decades of corruption. To establish the conceptualization of the epistemic oppression of Filipinos, I begin by clarifying the definition of what it means to be a nepo baby. Then, I go back to the history of corruption in the Philippines to give a brief review on the recent events leading to the present corruption case – the flood control project. Building on these discussions, I illustrate epistemic connections between these two topics using Kristie Dotson's account of epistemic oppression which leads me to my ultimate claim on this paper: Filipinos primarily suffer from third-order epistemic exclusion - an irreducible form of epistemic oppression – due to their situatedness. Therefore, I reveal in the discussion of third-order epistemic oppression on how nepo babies gain epistemic privilege from their corrupt parents and become perpetuators of epistemic oppression. To counter these claims, I make sense of Thomas Bedorf's phenomenology of situatedness in relation to Jose Medina’s epistemic resistance, highlighting the emancipatory role of the oppressed in combatting epistemic oppression and in the process of redefining democracy.