Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance

8. White Ignorance and Colonial Oppression: Or, Why I Know So Little about Puerto Rico

CHAPTER 8 White Ignorance and Colonial Oppression Or, Why I Know So Little about Puerto Rico Shannon Sullivan I am not much of a basketball fan, but news of the first round defeat of the United States men’s basketball team in the 2004 Summer Olympic Games caught my attention. The United States was trounced (92–73) by the Puerto Ricans—a stunning loss for a heavily favored team that was composed of some of the top professional basketball players in the National Basketball Association (NBA). But what struck me was the particular team that defeated the United States. I was not surprised that an underdog could be victorious but rather that, given my vague knowledge that Puerto Rico is somehow part of the United States, a country effectively could be beaten by itself in the Olympics. How could Puerto Rico field its own team, separate from the United States? Perhaps I was wrong that Puerto Rico was still part of the United States; perhaps an independence movement had taken place of which I was unaware. This seemed doubtful, but I could not otherwise explain the existence of a separate Puerto Rican team. And so I found myself stymied by the question, what exactly is the relationship of Puerto Rico to the United States? The short answer, I now know, is that Puerto Rico is an “insular area” or unincorporated territory of the United States that was granted a limited form of self-government in 1948, the same year that the International Olympic Committee recognized Puerto Rico as sufficiently independent to participate separately in the Olympic Games (Dryer 2004). But there also is a longer, more complicated answer that involves the United States’ past and present status as a (neo)colonial power. That answer is related to at least three other questions: why do I and many other white people in the United States tend to know so little about the United States’ relationship 153 with Puerto Rico, how does that ignorance operate, and what are some of its consequences?1 The answers to these questions point to the crucial role that white ignorance plays in the construction and maintenance of white privilege, including the knowledge that it generates about nonwhite people . They also point to the intimate relationship between power, knowledge , and ignorance, and the relationship of all three to processes of racialized colonization. These questions could be addressed in the context of a number of colonial situations, both without and within the United States. France’s relationship with Algeria, for example, could be described as one in which “[t]he [white] European knows and he does not know. On the level of reflection, a Negro is a Negro; but in the unconscious there is the firmly fixed image of the nigger-savage” (Fanon 1967, 199). And a thorough analysis of the different ways that the United States exoticized and colonized islands with predominantly nonwhite populations must include Hawai’i, which was annexed by the United States in 1898 and made a state in 1959 and which today continues to fight for its independence (http://www.hawaii-nation.org/index.html ). I focus on Puerto Rico in particular because it is “the oldest colony on earth” owned by “the oldest representative democracy on earth” (Fernandez 1996, 262). As such, the ongoing oppressive relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico strikes me as especially egregious. I also wish to examine the case of Puerto Rico because of the growing Latinization of the United States. This transformation makes particularly important and timely the issue of the United States’ relationship with a Latino/a and Spanish-speaking island that both is and is not part of itself. I am less interested here in ignorance as a simple lack of knowledge than I am in ignorance as an active production of particular kinds of knowledges for various social and political purposes. Of course, there is plenty of the former kind of ignorance when it comes to the United States’ relationship with Puerto Rico, and United Staters’ lack of knowledge about Puerto Rico has had harmful, racist effects.2 But the epistemic relationship between the two lands is much more complex than the simple opposition between ignorance and knowledge indicates. This is because rather than oppose knowledge, ignorance often is formed by it, and vice versa. In such cases, ignorance is better thought of as ignorance/knowledge. The notion of ignorance/knowledge does not collapse ignorance and knowledge into one another. It instead...