Violent Ignorance: Confronting Racism and Migration Control

by Hannah Jones

An elected politician is assassinated in the street by a terrorist associated with extreme political groups, and the national response is to encourage picnics. Thousands of people are held in prison-like conditions without judicial oversight or any time-limit on their sentence . An attempt to re-assert national sovereignty and borders leads thousands of citizens to register for dual citizenship with other countries, some overcoming family associations with genocide in their second country of nationality to do so.

This is life in the UK today. How then are things still continuing as 'normal'? How can we confront these phenomena and why do we so often refuse to? What are the practices that help us to accommodate the unconscionable? How might we contend with the horrors that meet us each day, rather than becoming desensitized to them?

Violent Ignorance sets out to examine these questions through an understanding of how the past persists in the present, how trauma is silenced or reappears, and how we might reimagine identity and connection in ways that counter - rather than ignore - historic violence. In particular Hannah Jones shows how border controls and enforcement, and its corollary, racism and violence, have shifted over time. Drawing on thinkers from John Berger to Ben Okri, from Audre Lorde to Susan Sontag, the book questions what it means to belong, and discusses how hierarchies of belonging are revealed by what we can see, and what we can ignore.

264 pages, Hardcover

Published January 28, 2021

About the author

Hannah Jones is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick. She writes, researches and teaches on racism, belonging and migration, and on critical public sociology. She is lead co-author of Go Home? The Politics of Immigration Controversies (2017), co-editor of Stories of Cosmopolitan Belonging: Emotion and Location (2014), and author of Negotiating Cohesion, Inequality and Change: Uncomfortable Positions in Local Government (2013) winner of the BSA Phillip Abrams Prize for best first book in UK sociology.

Reviews

[Grace Bartholomew · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a really interesting exploration of how injustice can unfold in plain sight and how certain events “puncture” our ignorance, forcing us to confront the injustices we often overlook. The book covers powerful examples, including the Grenfell Tower fire, the murder of Jo Cox, and Callum Tulley’s whistleblowing on the treatment of immigrants in detention centers. These events highlight the way moments of disruption can momentarily expose these issues, only for society to quickly move on, allowing the injustice to persist.

One particularly striking aspect of the book is its discussion on blame. Jones argues that by focusing blame on specific groups—such as extremists or smugglers—we fail to address how their extreme beliefs were nurtured and created by the everyday practices and societal structures we are all a part of. The book challenges us to look at broader patterns of complicity and examine how we, knowingly or unknowingly, benefit from or contribute to systemic injustices.

Overall, Violent Ignorance is a well-researched and thoroughly referenced academic text that is both engaging and accessible. It offers a critical examination of the ways we turn a blind eye to societal injustices, making it a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the deeper roots of systemic oppression and our role in confronting it.