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white ignorance

đź“– Definitions

"I would suggest that “white ignorance” has, whether centrally or secondarily, been a theme of many of the classic fictional and nonfictional works of the African American experience, and also that of other people of color. In his introduction to a collection of black writers’ perspectives on whiteness, David Roediger (1998) underlines the fundamental epistemic asymmetry between typical white views of blacks and typical black views of whites: these are not cognizers linked by a reciprocal ignorance but rather groups whose respective privilege and subordination tend to produce self-deception, bad faith, evasion, and misrepresentation, on the one hand, and more veridical perceptions, on the other hand. Thus he cites James Weldon Johnson’s remark “colored people of this country know and understand the white people better than the white people know and understand them” (5)." (Mills 2007, 17)

"What I want to pin down, then, is the idea of an ignorance, a non-knowing, that is not contingent, but in which race—white racism and/or white racial domination and their ramifications—plays a crucial causal role." (Mills 2007, 20)

đź’ˇ Examples

  • Mills gives the example of the protagonist from Ralph Ellison's 1995 novel Invisible Man, who recounts the way white people systematically misperceive him.

đź”— Relations

đź“š References

  • Mills, Charles. 2007. “White Ignorance.” In Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, edited by Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana. State University of New York Press. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/163/monograph/chapter/121151.
  • Roediger, David R., ed. 1998. Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means To Be White. Schocken Books.