Racial Ignorance Research Articles

Predation in State and Nation

U.S. criminal justice policies have created the uniquely American style of mass incarceration. Since 1973, America has seen a sustained and substantial rise in its incarcerated population and the formation of a carceral state. Currently, the United States imprisons 2.23 million people, which amounts to 23% of the world’s total incarcerated population. The most important takeaway is that the carceral state is an institution of predation, and predatory institutions create, maintain, and reproduce difference through the use of violence. I argue that the racial state is the predatory state, but the predatory state is not necessarily always the racial state. The predatory state is different from the racial state in that is applies violence toward various intersections of marginalization. This article contributes to the theoretical development of the concept of predation by its machinations through the institution of criminal justice. I discuss the predatory state, violence, and race. Next, I examine some of the ideas surrounding the collective knowledge, memory, and guilt, as well as the epistemologies, of race. Additionally, I discuss racial ignorance and selective knowing. Lastly, I offer Ferguson and Baltimore as case studies in the relationship between predation, identity, and violence as they affect criminal justice.

“The Education of Mingo,” or the education of Moses: reading Charles Johnson’s novella through the lens of whiteness studies

The rise of whiteness studies has been a very remarkable phenomenon in the past three decades. Many of its key arguments are very productive in criticism concerning racial issues in ethnic literature. This article reads “The Education of Mingo,” a novella by the contemporary African American writer Charles Johnson, through the perspective of whiteness studies. Mostly adopted in this article are theories about the racial contract and white ignorance proposed by such critics as Charles Mills, Barbara Applebaum, George Yancy, Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tunna. Their theories, I argue, prove to be very helpful for the reader to understand the moral paradox in the story, that is, why Moses, seemingly a well-intended white who hates slavery, could actually be a complicit in racism, and hence in the two murders committed by Mingo.

Better the devil you see, than the one you don’t: bearing witness to emboldened en-whitening epistemology in the Trump era

Critical scholars of race maintain that racism that is not clearly seen every day is the most dangerous kind. Notwithstanding ‘invisible’ racism qua racism without racists—per some race scholars—explorations on mechanisms of Whiteness in the Trump era must be had. One mechanism is perpetuating epistemological racial ignorance. However, that epistemological moment has passed. Instead, US society is returning to an emboldened en/whitening epistemology characterized by perverse re-appropriation of civil rights terminologies—once used to support People of Color—to instead strengthen White nationalism. Towards racial justice—dismantling White supremacy—we unveil how Whiteness incites an en/whitening epistemological moment so captured in today’s mindsets. Methodologically employing critical hermeneutics, specifically, metaphors, to forever remind Whiteness as dehumanization, this paper identifies the devil of Whiteness so to facilitate the futurity of humanity.

An Unexamined Life: White Male Racial Ignorance and the Agony of Education for Students of Color

ABSTRACT This article critically analyzes the narratives of 62 White male undergraduates at a single institution about their views on race and experiences with racism. It is framed by Mills' (1997) conception of Whiteness that is founded upon an inverted epistemology or an epistemology of ignorance. Therefore, this analysis centers the ways in which White male undergraduates concurrently downplay the contemporary significance of White privilege while examining the role college experiences have at reinforcing this structured ignorance. The themes from their interviews included: (1) White ignorance and White identity as meaningless; (2) Evasive White racial ignorance; and (3) Racial arrested development and racial regression. These findings emphasize the need to creatively challenge White males to develop their racial selves, especially because their ignorance fuels the linguistic and physical violence Students of Color regularly experience.

To ‘Prepare White Youngsters’: The Catholic School Busing Program in the Archdiocese of Chicago

The Archdiocese of Chicago, acting in response to public school busing and concerns over “racial isolation” in Catholic elementary schools, initiated a voluntary busing program referred to as “Operation Hospitality” in the fall of 1968. Catholic interracialists, driven by their faith in the power of integration, believed busing could help overcome white racial ignorance and bias, an achievement that would have a positive affect on race relations. However, this busing program was controversial. Catholics debated the program, with those both in favor and against employing arguments similar to those used in disputes over busing in Chicago’s public schools. A relatively small number of black families agreed to participate. Furthermore, Operation Hospitality showed that a busing program primarily focused on white racial views could create problems for black participants. Nevertheless, many Catholics, including archdiocesan officials, expressed support for the program. Operation Hospitality also successfully bused a small number of inner city black students to white suburban schools. Additionally, evidence suggests integration did help improve the racial views of white and black participants. Despite these achievements, a growing financial crisis confronting the archdiocese undercut institutional support for Operation Hospitality and resulted in the end of the Catholic school busing program at the conclusion of the 1973–1974 school year.

Color Blindness, Meta-Ignorance, and the Racial Imagination

AbstractDrawing on contemporary epistemologies of ignorance, I analyze the American ideology of color blindness as a recalcitrant form of active ignorance that operates at a meta-level. I contend that the meta-ignorance involved in color blindness operates through distorting second-order attitudes about one's cognitive and affective attitudes, resulting in cognitive and affective numbness with respect to racial matters: ignorance of one's racial ignorance and insensitivity to one's racial insensitivity. I contend that the black/white binary that has dominated the American racial imagination has contributed tremendously to establish and maintain meta-blindness about racial differences. I suggest that overcoming the black/white binary demands that we expand current conceptions of racial lucidity and that we go beyond the notions of double consciousness that critical race theorists have defended since Du Bois and Fanon. According to a more expansive social pluralism, lucidity with respect to racial differences requires a kaleidoscopic consciousness that does not reinscribe the black/white binary in one's racial imagination.

<i>Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance José Medina Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance. Edited by Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. Pp. 276. $28.95 pbk. 978-0-7914-7102-9. Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance is collaborative philosophy at its very best. The essays that the editors have assembled constitute a very successful critical intervention in philosophy through a set of challenging dialogues on race and epistemic practices. This critical intervention raises exciting questions for future generations of scholars in epistemology, race theory, political philosophy, and philosophy more generally. Drawing on the pioneering work of Charles Mills and standpoint epistemologists (e.g., Marilyn Frye and Sandra Harding), the essays in this volume identify problematic limitations and assumptions in traditional ways of philosophizing that have been pervasive. They delineate the contours of blind spots that operate both in academia and in the social world outside it, tracing their origins and their consequences. They identify questions that have gone not only unanswered but unasked for too long. The critical work that this volume does is innovative and at the same time firmly grounded in rich theoretical traditions that have been marginalized by the philosophical establishment (race theory, feminist theory, and—more recently—queer theory). In this sense, Lorraine Code calls attention to the philosophical excavations of Michèle Le Doeuff, who uncovers a forgotten critical tradition of women philosophers (such as Gabrielle Suchon in the seventeenth century) who offered critical reflections on the exclusions and distortions of masculine knowledge, providing critical tools to develop alternative epistemic practices. On the other hand, in African American philosophy there has been a long and important tradition of critical discourses that identify and diagnose racially motivated forms of ignorance. From DuBois to contemporary race theorists, racial ignorance has been shown to involve entrenched habits and attitudes that go well beyond a mere absence of true belief or a mere presence of false belief; racial ignorance has been shown to be based on a lack of interest to know and a lack of opportunities to explore social realities pertaining to race. As Elizabeth Spelman points out, this is the centerpiece of James Baldwin's powerful indictment of white America: "that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it" (119). This ignorance is based on a deeply seated epistemic resistance to know. It is a very active and resilient form of not-knowing, not a mere unwillingness to believe, not a mere casual neglect or a simple form of self-deception. It is an ignorance that requires a carefully orchestrated and laboriously maintained form of epistemic neglect, an unknowingness carefully [End Page 313] generated and supported by an entire range of institutions, practices, habits, and attitudes. This ignorance does not bear the mark of passivity but actually takes a lot of agency. As Spelman puts it, this form of ignorance is "an appalling achievement" that requires "grotesquely prodigious effort" (120); it is an ignorance that needs management. Spelman's analysis of epistemic management sketches a "route to undoing such ignorance" through an understanding of "the labor it takes to create and sustain it" (123). As many of the essays in this volume show, the proactive lack of epistemic concern for racial others is also a lack of concern for oneself in relation to these others, that is, an ignorance of one's racial positionality and responsibility. This ignorance—far from being a mere ideological excrescence, an accidental side effect of relations of oppression—is actually a fundamental cultural mechanism for safeguarding privilege and domination. Relations of oppression are protected by being erased from the minds of those who perpetrate them and sometimes (when possible) from the minds of those who suffer them. Sarah Hoagland offers an analysis of racial ignorance as based on a denial of meaningful relationality, which simultenously produces a lack of understanding of oneself and a lack of understanding of others with whom one is constitutively related. Paul Taylor and Shannon Sullivan illustrate this relational ignorance and its consequences by showing how U.S. citizens' ignorance of Haiti and Puerto Rico...