Following the legal changes of the Civil Rights era, white supremacy moved from a de jure reality—something codified through law—to a de facto reality—something that appears to exist naturally. No longer were separate entrances obligatory, separate (and unequal) schools a requirement, or separate seating assigned through legislative fiat. Instead, the political movement culminating in signed legislation in the mid-to-late 1960’s, removed some legal barriers but did not, and arguably could not, affect the underlying racialized knowing, the epistemology, of American society. That underlying racialized epistemology results in “a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions…producing the ironic outcome that whites will in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made.”[1] In other words, in the post-Civil Rights era we have actively and intentionally cultivated an epistemology of ignorance.
Practitioners within the field of epistemology have historically concerned themselves with theories of knowledge, how we come to know what we know, and what distinguishes a justified belief from an unjustified belief. In short, it is the intentional investigation of the process and method of how we move from not knowing to knowing. If knowing means that one has understood, mastered, or comprehended something why speak of an epistemology of ignorance? Should we not simply focus on traditional epistemological projects which investigate what we know, and the methods used to know it? What benefit or outcomes can we expect from looking at our methods and practices of non-knowing?
Michael Smithson highlights how most philosophers approach the topic of ignorance stating that it, “…simply consists of the absence or distortion of “true” knowledge. Underlying this assumption is a naively absolutist epistemology which holds that there is always only one correct way to think of anything.”[2] To know something, in common vernacular, usually means to think the right thoughts about the thing. Whether we discuss race, gender, class, economics, or God right thinking is the primary vehicle through knowing is structured in the West. Stretching back millennia, nearly every philosopher questions their own knowing, but they have repeatedly opted not to investigate how and why they come to an ignorance about certain things.[3] However, in the last few decades scholars, writers, and philosophers from a variety of disciplines have begun to question if there exists another narrative worthy of exploration—a counter-narrative. One that interrogates how we come to not know things, especially in terms of our racialized and gendered understanding of our social positions—an epistemology of ignorance—an ignorance that is “socially constructed, negotiated, and pervasive.”[4]In fact, not-knowing, and its corollary not-seeing—personified in the ideologies of meritocracy and colorblindness—become institutionally romanticized as a form of higher-level thinking. The systemic machinery of Whiteness provides the necessary foundation for a structured ignorance among its signatories while simultaneously infusing their ignorance with active justifications.
Nancy McHugh in a 2005 essay provides an initial framework for defining my study,
Epistemology of ignorance is the study of not knowing or unknowing and the study of the generation of subject positions that are ignorant. It is also the study of the refusal to be ignorant and the active reconstruction of one’s knowing. The study of the epistemology of ignorance has been an overtly political project in the academy, one that seeks to disrupt structures of unknowing, reveal patterns of active ignorance, and insert Others as knowers.[5]
Nancy McHugh. 2005. “Telling Her Own Truth: June Jordan, Standard English and the Epistemology of Ignorance.” In Still Seeking an Attitude, edited by V. Kinloch M. Grebowicz, pg. 87
The layered complexity of our social experiences[6] informs how we know the world, and as such, knowing is embodied and communal. We connect with others and in so doing learn about the world and our social position. Our knowledge is negotiated through our interactions with one another and the systems we build to order society. Just as we come to know things in community with others, we come to a socialized ignorance that forms in and through our community, due in no small part to our racially segregated society. The active naming and exploration of these social phenomena grants us the beginning steps towards “active reconstruction” and the explicit development of a counter-narrative that dynamically works to cultivate a new community of knowers, a community of marginalized embodied positions, a community of Others.
In his 1997 work The Racial Contract, Charles Mills worked to uncover one such system specifically. He wrote, “White supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today.”[7] Building on Mills’ argument, ignorance and its out workings operate as one such aspect in need of additional exploration within this unnamed political system. Our social experience embeds itself within a complex matrix of laws, religion, politics, science, art, and culture. My work aims to investigate, name, and problematize how ignorance operates within our Western American matrix. Using an interdisciplinary array of lenses such as critical race theory, standpoint theory, and historical critiques, my dissertation complicates the hegemonic discourse of white supremacy by focusing analytical attention on the social phenomenon of epistemic ignorance.
All knowing is embodied, and likewise, all non-knowing is located within particular social contexts. Therefore, social positions of lived ignorance will generate demonstrable domination which work to reify one group’s social advantage over and against all others. Further, a socially structured ignorance impacts the ability of marginalized groups to be understood as credible (testimonial injustice), to have comparable and readily-available resources at their disposable to interpret their lived experience (hermeneutical injustice/marginalization), or have the language to fully articulate their relationship to one another, the dominant group, or other marginalized communities (linguistic/narratival injustice). The socially constructed notion of race creates a hierarchy which socially reproduces itself in and through our methods, means, and ability to know.[8] It fundamentally forms the very question(s) we deem worthy of exploration and the means we use to validate that exploration. An intersectional lens willing to explore the multiplicity of lived complications that creates our embodied experience needs deeper investigation to expound how our non-knowing helps construct these very identities.
We are collectively united through an “inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of identity,”[9] and we need to investigate the material effects that not knowing, in fact, operates intentionally as a part of the structure maintained by the dominant knowledge generating community.[10] The creation, maintenance, and perpetuation of non-knowing manifests itself as an aspect of Whiteness.[11] As philosopher Charles Mills argued, “…the Racial Contract prescribes for its signatories an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance, a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions (which are psychologically and socially functional), producing the ironic outcome that whites will in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made.”[12] Therefore, a cultivation of ignorance—whether active or passive—materializes itself within a society of raced peoples where the dominant group is unaware of the complexity of their own social makeup, its attendant benefits, and the means through which this ignorance also constructs the Other.
My research will work to expand on Mills’ concept of an “inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance” exploring questions like how is ignorance defined? How does ignorance manifest itself within our daily experiences? What are the different types of ignorance in operation and can be they named, articulated, and related to concrete events? Can we define a taxonomy of ignorance and its relation to Whiteness and white supremacy? How and in what ways does ignorance get embedded in society, religion, politics, and language? All ignorance is not of equal weight or import and explicitly naming and deconstructing the various types and how they become de facto will help to apply language to experiences that often go unexamined.
Therefore, my work aims to interrogate the social pedagogy that works to structure and reify a particular narrative of colorblind meritocracy, that disciples its adherents in an invisible system of hierarchy built on power and subjugation. That hegemonic narrative encapsulates the views, morals, values, and socio-cultural practices of the dominant group. Thus, the knowledge generated and maintained is the knowledge of that hegemonic narrative. As a corollary, the people, concepts, and histories we are taught to not know—a type of collective social amnesia—are likewise generated and maintained through this same hegemonic narrative of epistemic ignorance. Articulating a pedagogy of ignorance is then simultaneously, an effort to “disrupt structures of unknowing” while peeling the curtain back to “reveal patters of active (and passive) ignorance” that are socially located while working to build a counter-narrative that inserts “Others as knowers.”[13]
[1] Charles W. Mills. The Racial Contract. Cornell University Press. Kindle Edition, p 20.
[2] Michael Smithson. (2007). Toward a Social Theory of Ignorance. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. 15. 151-172. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-5914.1985.tb00049.x, p 151.
[3] As Aristotle wrote in chapter 7 of Metaphysics regarding knowing, “To say of something which is that it is not, or to say of something which is not that it is, is false. However, to say of something which is that it is, or of something which is not that it is not, is true.” In other words, to say of something which does exist within reality that it does not (or that you choose to ignore it) is false. To say of something which does exists within reality that it does indeed exist is true. Knowing then becomes linked to truth.
[4] Jennifer Mueller, 2020. “Racial Ideology or Racial Ignorance? An Alternative Theory of Racial Cognition.” Sociological Theory 38, no. 2: 142-169, https://doi.org/10.1177/0735275120926197. Because my study works to highlight the complexity of non-knowing, I will borrow from others writing before me who have employed a range of terms to reference this core idea of epistemic ignorance: Hussein Abdilahi Bulhan calls it “white incomprehension,” Janet McIntosh calls it “structural oblivion,” Melissa Steyn termed it “an ignorance contract” in reference to Charles Mills’s Racial Contract, Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls the ignorant outworking “epistemicide,” author Michael Phillips calls it a “laboratory of forgetfulness,” and finally Charles Mills–whose work heavily informs my argument–calls it “white ignorance.”
[5] Nancy McHugh. 2005. “Telling Her Own Truth: June Jordan, Standard English and the Epistemology of Ignorance.” In Still Seeking an Attitude, edited by V. Kinloch M. Grebowicz, pg. 87
[6] Thinking here of what Dr. Jeanette Hill-Fletcher terms “a weighted world” or what Dr. Harold Recinos has called “a slanted life.” See further, Jeannine Hill-Fletcher, The Sin of White Supremacy: Christianity, Racism, & Religious Diversity in America (p 80). Orbis. Kindle Edition. See also, Harold J. Recinos, After Dark. United Kingdom: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2021 (p 107).
[7] Charles W. Mills. The Racial Contract. Cornell University Press. Kindle Edition, p 9.
[8] When speaking about “race” and “racialization” I start from the position that race is a social construct. This means that socially we apply interpretative valuation to different phenotypic traits like skin color. As such, race has no scientific backing other than a phenotypic expression of alleles that form varying levels of melanin creating the spectrum of “color” we see. Therefore, making normative, unilateral pronouncements based on “race” becomes as ridiculous as using height, or eye color, or finger length. It also obfuscates our ability to speak directly of the tangible actions done by people. In their work Racecraft, I think Karen and Barbara Fields are exactly right when they say, “Racism is first and foremost a social practice, which means that it is an action and a rationale for action, or both at once. Racism always takes for granted the objective reality of race, as just defined, so it is important to register their distinctness. The shorthand transforms racism, something an aggressor does, into race, something the target is, in a sleight of hand that is easy to miss.” However, it is critically important to realize that while a social construction is entirely made up that does not diminish its impact on how our lives are lived or structured. The $20 bill in my wallet is a complete social fiction. Yet, its ability to purchase goods or services has a profoundly material, psychological, and emotional impact on my lived experience. Race is likewise a livable social fiction whose impacts can manifest in the starkest of terms, whether one lives or dies in the course of daily events.
[9] Martin Luther King. Why We Can’t Wait. New York: Penguin, 1964.
[10] I will argue the dominant group is defined as white, male, heterosexual, Christian, able-bodies, neurotypical, and fall socioeconomically into the middle-to-upper class. As discussed below, I locate myself within this identity matrix. Thus, my research and my dissertation come from one “on the inside” working to explicate how it is that ignorance is so pervasively embedded in the white male experience through Whiteness (see note 11 for further specificity).
[11] Whiteness, as I will use it throughout my argument, is not meant to be tied to the phenotypic expression we call “white skin,” nor is it meant to refer to people raced as “white.” Instead, I use capital W Whiteness to denote a dynamic social, political, economic, and cultural matrix of interlocking power dynamics. The dominant group that has cultivated this matrix has historically presented with white skin (and continues to do so today). However, it is just as possible for a Black man to adhere to Whiteness as it is for a white woman or a Puerto Rican woman. As scholars Vron Ware and Les Back noted in the journal KEYWORDS, “…whiteness itself contains a significant paradox: it is charged with meaning but at the same time empty and meaningless.” Ware and Back go on to state, “One feature of whiteness is that it is often implicitly present but explicitly absent and as a result has ‘an everything and nothing quality’. Representations of whiteness are equated with normality and as such it is not seen to be in need of definition. Thus ‘being normal’ is colonized by the idea of ‘being white.’” While a person from a marginalized group can uphold Whiteness there will always be limitations of their ability to advance within the system due to the constant operation of white supremacy. Ware, Vron and Les Back. 1994. “White/Whiteness.” Paragraph 17, no. 3: 281, www.jstor.org/stable/43263449.
[12] Charles W. Mills 1997. The Racial Contract. Cornell University Press. Kindle Edition, p 27. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctt5hh1wj.
[13] Quotations from Nancy McHugh’s definition used above, see block quote and footnote 5.
Cover photo: Photo by Jukan Tateisi on Unsplash
Inline photo: Photo by Adolfo Félix on Unsplash
