Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance

SUNY Series: Philosophy and Race

by Shannon Sullivan (Editor), Nancy Tuana (Editor)

Leading scholars explore how different forms of ignorance are produced and sustained, and the role they play in knowledge practices.

Offering a wide variety of philosophical approaches to the neglected philosophical problem of ignorance, this groundbreaking collection builds on Charles Mills’s claim that racism involves an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance. Contributors explore how different forms of ignorance linked to race are produced and sustained and what role they play in promoting racism and white privilege. They argue that the ignorance that underpins racism is not a simple gap in knowledge, the accidental result of an epistemological oversight. In the case of racial oppression, ignorance often is actively produced for purposes of domination and exploitation. But as these essays demonstrate, ignorance is not simply a tool of oppression wielded by the powerful. It can also be a strategy for survival, an important tool for people of color to wield against white privilege and white supremacy. The book concludes that understanding ignorance and the politics of such ignorance should be a key element of epistemological and social/political analyses, for it has the potential to reveal the role of power in the construction of what is known and provide a lens for the political values at work in knowledge practices.

Contributors include Linda Martín Alcoff, Alison Bailey, Robert Bernasconi, Lorraine Code, Harvey Cormier, Stephanie Malia Fullerton, Sarah Lucia Hoagland, Frank Margonis, Charles W. Mills, Lucius T. Outlaw (Jr), Elizabeth V. Spelman, Shannon Sullivan, Paul C. Taylor, and Nancy Tuana.

Genres: Philosophy, Race, Nonfiction, History, Sociology, Politics, American

276 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Shannon Sullivan is Chair and Professor of Philosophy at UNC Charlotte

She teaches and writes in the intersections of feminist philosophy, critical philosophy of race, American pragmatism, and continental philosophy. She is author of Living Across and Through Skins: Transactional Bodies, Pragmatism and Feminism (2001), Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege (2006), and Good White People: The Problem with Middle Class White Anti-Racism (2014). She is co-editor of several books including Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (2007). Her book on The Physiology of Sexist and Racist Oppression is forthcoming with Oxford University Press in July 2015

Reviews

[Jessica Zu · Rating 5 out of 5]

I commemorate June Fourth today by reading this book. China has its own epistemology of ignorance. Today, Han Chinese has its own epistemology to socially reproduce Han ignorance.

[Sami Eerola · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting theories and examples of how ignorance is a essential part of white supremacism. Not just ignorance of personal experiences with minorities, but wilfully and maintained ignorance of ones owns peoples history. For example white racist do not know much about the history of Indian genocide or Trans-Atlantic slave trade, because knowing it, would make defending white supremacy immoral and evil.

But most of articles in this book are the worst examples of postmodernist Marxist writing that i have read so far. You have to be some kind of master philosopher and sociologist to understand the cryptic theoretical text to understand most of the things that the authors are trying to argue. Without the examples i would hardly have understood anything. And i have studied postmodernist Marxist theory!
For my, if a book is hard to understand, it is not good.

[Maryam · Rating 4 out of 5]

The most interesting paper in this collection was the one by Charles Mills on the idea of 'white ignorance'.

[Scott Neigh]

Scholarly collection. Earlier this year, I read and reviewed *The Racial Contract* by philosopher Charles Mills, which inserts the realities of global white supremacy into the social contract tradition within political philosophy. As I said then, I'm not super interested in the social contract as a way of understanding the world, but one of the things that drew me to that book was Mills' discussion of an epistemological element to the racial contract that he describes as an "epistemology of ignorance." This book is a collection of essays – one by Mills, the rest by other philosophers – building specifically on that part of the original book. They cover quite a range in terms of how they take up Mills' ideas, and where they go with them. I found the essays by Mills and by Linda Martín Alcoff that deepened the idea of epistemology of ignorance, the essays that explored ignorance not just as an element of oppression and privilege but as a strategically deployed element of resistance by oppressed people, and the essays that looked at how racist ignorance has played out in the work of certain revered white philosophers (Dewey, Sartre) to be interesting and thought provoking. The essay that I found least compelling also happened to be the one that was most critical of the idea of an epistemology of ignorance – not, I should say, because I am particularly attached to Mills' way of characterizing how knowledge and power wind together versus the many other possible ways that can be understood, but because this essay seemed more broadly hostile to social epistemologies, with objections that we need to be mindful of but that I think would fundamentally get in the way of our ability to understand and intervene in the world. And I was pretty lukewarm about a couple of the later essays that really didn't add much to the discussion, and seemed to be oriented mostly towards connecting the idea of an epistemology of ignorance to their own particular analytical language and areas of work, and did so in pretty ho-hum ways. Anyway...I read this in part because of its relevance to my current book project, though doing so was definitely one of those instances of overkill that I have been working hard to restrain, as it's the sort of thing I'll reference in passing once but not actively use. The reason why I went ahead and read it anyway, though, is because it is perhaps more relevant to an idea I have for a future book project that is still very preliminary and unformed – don't know if that idea will ever amount to anything, but the thoughts that this book made me think were a useful part of the percolation process that will eventually help me decide. Overall, I think this is really interesting and important stuff, but obviously it isn't a book for everyone.

[Akmal A. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sebulan jugak aku nak habiskan buku ni, tapi tula baca buku falsafah ni bukan senang perlukan baca, paham, proses. Sebenarnya ada juga hal-hal yang aku tak faham sangat mungkin kerana kes yang diberikan merujuk kepada hal2 kulit hitam vs kulit putih yang banyak berlaku di Amerika Syarikat. Apa-apapun buku ini memberi sedikit gambaran kepada aku bagaimana ignorance itu berperanan dalam masyarakat. Walaupun tajuk buku ini sangat kontradiksi antara race and epistimology of ignorance. Bagaimana memahami selok belok pemikiran orang yang tak tahu. Banyak yang ditulis dalam buku ini yang rata-ratanya menggunakan framework pemikiran kiri; feminis & marxis. Walaupun study ini khusus di AS, tetapi ada satu dua hal yang terkait walaupun tak banyak tentang pembentukan negara bangsa Malaysia. Sedari awal lagi pembentukan negara bangsa Malaysia adalah hasil dari tokoh politik yang pro-kolonial, jadi tidak dapat tidak white ignorance itu masih melekat dalam pemikiran ahli politik dan sebahagian besar warga Malaysia yang berbangsa Melayu & Islam. Meskipun pada dasarnya Malaysia mengiktiraf kedudukan bangsa-bangsa lain tetapi hakikat pada polisinya lebih menguntungkan hanya satu bangsa dengan meminggirkan bangsa lain yang wujud dalam Malaysia. Lebih malang lagi idea ini dimadukan dengan kapitalisme dan neoliberisme yang terang-terang dalam bangsa Melayu di bahagikan lagi antara kelas, dan golongan elitlah yang berhak mengaut kekayaan di Malaysia ini. Sebagai orang Malaysia tidak kira Melayu, Cina, atau India, dalam wacana apa sekali pun jarang kita mengambil kira tentang pendapat orang Asli (indigenous people) yang wujud di Malaysia. Akhirnya seperti yang berlaku di Kelantan, meskipun retorik ahli PAS utk mewujudkan negeri bersyariat Islam, tetapi mereka gagal dalam menyantuni orang Asli yang hidup terpinggir. Di Selangor pula, sekian banyak penduduk Asli, apakah mereka dihormati? Begitulah sedikit sebanyak white ignorance yang wujud dalam masyarakat majoriti rakyat Malaysia.

[Durrah]

“epistemology of ignorance” which is an examination of the complex. phenomenon of ignorance that seeks to describe different forms of ignorance, examining how they are produced and sustained, and what role they play in. knowledge practices.

[Audrey Saltarelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of it is a bit repetitive but a solid race theory read.

[Dawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Theoretical text...difficult to conceptualize at times...nevertheless, forced me to think about knowledge and ignorance in ways I had never considered. Well worth the struggle.

[Boka]

Often great, occasionally repetitive

[Megan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book brings together current philosophers and their ideas of race and ignorance.