Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance

6. Managing Ignorance

CHAPTER 6 Managing Ignorance Elizabeth V. Spelman James Baldwin’s searing indictment of white America in The Fire Next Time begins with this vivid declaration: [T]his is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it. (Baldwin 1993, 5)1 Baldwin offers several explanations for such ignorance. First, and most generally, he remarks that “For the horrors of the American Negro’s life there has been almost no language” (1993, 69); the absence of such language threatens the availability of understanding even to those who have experienced the horrors. But even in the case of nameable and articulable horrors, he insists, “White America remains unable to believe that Black America’s grievances are real; they are unable to believe this because they cannot face what this fact says about themselves and their country” (Baldwin 1985, 536). Moreover, they have immunized themselves from the kind of criticism that might correct their misunderstandings . After all, “the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white man’s definitions” (Baldwin 1993, 69). Moreover , “there is simply no possibility of a real change in the Negro’s situation without the most radical and far-reaching changes in the American political and social structure. And it is clear that white Americans are not simply unwilling to effect these changes; they are, in the main, so slothful have they become, unable even to envision them” (Baldwin 1993, 85). Baldwin is claiming, in short, that whites do not have but also do not want to have knowledge of the injuries they inflicted through slavery and the other expressions of racism so manifest in the everyday lives of black 119 Americans; that whites lack awareness of and interest in what it is about them and their institutions that has wreaked such havoc in the lives of blacks; and that they have not developed the imaginative skills that would allow them to envision a world in which such horrible powers would have been tamed. About such failures of knowledge and awareness and imagination , Baldwin remarks: “But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime” (Baldwin 1993, 5–6). Ignorance, as Baldwin hopes to drive home to his readers, is at least sometimes an appalling achievement; managing to create and preserve it can take grotesquely prodigious effort. And where there are costs and benefits associated with what one knows or doesn’t know, with what one wants to know or doesn’t want to know, ignorance is likely to need management . Baldwin’s provocative claims invite us to explore some of the strategies deployed and the stakes involved in managing ignorance. I What is the nature of the ignorance that Baldwin has so vividly described ? Baldwin has said that there is something whites are unwilling to believe, namely, that black America’s grievances are real. We can put Baldwin’s argument crudely but perhaps helpfully in the following way, letting g be “Black America’s grievances are real,” and letting W be the rhetorically conceived white American that Baldwin has in mind2 : (1) W does not believe that g is true and does not want to believe that g is true. W’s not wanting to believe that g is true suggests that W has some worries that g might be true; indeed, on Baldwin’s view, W has fears that were g true, this would have unbearable implications for his understanding of himself and his country. So though W does not believe g is true, W is not quite sure g is false, which in turn suggests that: (2) W does not believe that g is false but wants to believe that g is false. We might regard (1) and (2) together as an elasticized version of Baldwin ’s claim that whites are unwilling to believe that black America’s grievances are real. Such unwillingness to believe that g is true means neither simply that W does not believe g is true nor that W believes g is false (nor, then, that W has in some sense willed to believe that g is false). If he really did believe g was false, he wouldn’t have to be so vigilant about immunizing...