CHAPTER 4

White Ignorance

White ignorance...
It’s a big subject. How much time do you have?
It’s not enough.

Ignorance is usually thought of as the passive obverse to knowledge, the darkness retreating before the
spread of Enlightenment.
But ...
Imagine an ignorance that resists.
Imagine an ignorance that fights back.
Imagine an ignorance militant, aggressive, not to be intimidated, an ignorance that is active, dynamic,
that refuses to go quietly— not at all confined to the illiterate and uneducated but propagated at the
highest levels of the land, indeed presenting itself unblushingly as knowledge....

C

lassically individualist, indeed sometimes— self- parodically— to
the verge of solipsism, blithely indifferent to the possible cognitive
consequences of class, racial, or gender situatedness (or, perhaps more
accurately, taking a propertied white male standpoint as given), modern
mainstream Anglo- American epistemology was for hundreds of years from
its Cartesian origins profoundly inimical terrain for the development of any
concept of structural group- based miscognition. The paradigm exemplars
of phenomena likely to foster mistaken belief— optical illusions, hallucina-
tions, phantom limbs, dreams— were by their very banality universal to the
human condition, and the epistemic remedies prescribed— for example,
rejecting all but the indubitable— were correspondingly abstract and gen-
eral. Nineteenth- century Marxism, with its theoretical insistence on locat-
ing the individual agent and the individual cognizer in group (basically
class) structures of domination, and its concepts of ideology, fetishism,
societal “appearance,” and divergent group (basically class) perspectives
on the social order, offered a potential corrective to this epistemological