Racist Agnotology: How Myth-Making about Institutions and Knowledge Production Contributes to Racialized Ignorance

Abstract

Recently, scholars have revitalized the study of race by exploring how ignorance epistemologically fortifies racial domination. To articulate terms of analysis, much of this literature invokes two recurrent modes of racialized ignorance—racist essentialism and racialized nonknowing. We introduce a third mode—racist agnotology. With racist agnotology, actors perpetuate racialized ignorance by characterizing social constructionist accounts of race or anti-racist forms of knowledge as evidence of how knowledge-producing institutions—like science, academia, or other research-intensive fields—have become intellectually compromised or beholden to political principles that produce inaccurate knowledge about race. Whereas racist essentialism and racialized nonknowing produce ignorance by, respectively, distorting and occluding knowledge about racialized subjects, racist agnotology produces ignorance through stories and narratives about how such knowledge is prefigured by institutions. To demonstrate the usefulness of our contribution, and its relationship to extant literature, we empirically explore the intersection of race and health to illustrate how racialized ignorance thrives in patterned ways that reflect the logics of racist essentialism, racialized nonknowing, and racist agnotology. Our analysis reveals additional stakes and contours involved in the phenomenon of racialized ignorance. Importantly, it also reveals how many of the hermeneutic processes that have been revelatory for scholars and their study of race and ignorance—for example, demystification—can be used toward racist ends as well. In this regard, our contribution helps apprehend and theorize the social politics of knowledge involved in much of the contemporary, reactionary response to anti-racism or racial equity interventions.