Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance

4. Strategic Ignorance

CHAPTER 4 Strategic Ignorance Alison Bailey [W]hite prejudice completely reverses the truth! It was the slaves and their children who had to be devious, subtle and complicated. Masters and their children kind of had to be simple people. If you can make people do things, you don’t have to persuade them or trick them into doing what you want them to do. (Carolyn Chase, in Gwaltney 1993, 53, emphasis in original) [W]hile the movements and productions of ignorance often parallel and track particular knowledge practices, we cannot assume that their logic is similar to the knowledges they shadow. (Tuana 2004, 196) In ordinary language the word “ignorance” suggests a deficiency of information . Ignorant would-be knowers are uninformed or have incomplete understandings of a given phenomenon. On this view ignorance is theorized as an accidental omission or a gap in understanding that can be corrected by an effort to move toward certainty by finding the missing information or running the experiment again. An important aspect of feminist epistemology in general and of the epistemologies of ignorance in particular is the realization that ignorance is often an active social production . So often what people know is shaped by their social location. From positions of dominance ignorance can take the form of those in the center either refusing to allow those at the margins to know, or of actively erasing indigenous knowledges. More subtle examples of socially constructed ignorance include epistemic blank spots that make privileged knowers oblivious to systemic injustices. But what I find most interesting are the ways expressions of ignorance can be wielded strategically by groups living under oppression as a way of gaining information, sabotaging work, avoiding or delaying harm, and preserving a sense of self. 77 In this chapter I explore strategic expressions of ignorance against the background of Charles W. Mills’s account of epistemologies of ignorance in The Racial Contract (1997), with two interrelated goals. I want to show how Mills’s discussion is restricted by his decision to frame ignorance within the language and logic of social contract theory. And I want to explain why María Lugones’s work on purity is useful in reframing ignorance in ways that both expand our understandings of ignorance and reveal its strategic uses. I begin with Mills’s account of the Racial Contract and explain how it prescribes for its signatories an epistemology of ignorance, which Mills characterizes as an inverted epistemology. I briefly outline his program for undoing white ignorance and indicate that retooling white ignorance is more complex than his characterization suggests. Making this argument requires an abrupt shift from the whitecreated frameworks of social contract theory to Lugones’s system of thinking rooted in the lives of people of color. So the next section outlines Lugones’s distinction between the logic of purity and the logic of curdling and explains its usefulness in addressing ignorance. With both accounts firmly in place the third section demonstrates how the Racial Contract produces at least two expressions of ignorance and explains how the logic of purity underlying the Contract shapes each expression in ways that limit possibilities for resistance. I do not mean to suggest that the social contract theory’s love of purity invalidates Mills’s work, only that this framework limits prospects for long-term change by neglecting the relationship between white ignorance and nonwhite resistance. The final sections explain how people of color use ignorance strategically to their advantage and argue that examining ignorance through a curdled lens not only makes strategic ignorance visible but also points to alternatives for retooling white ignorance. Mills’s Racial Contract and the Epistemology of Ignorance In The Racial Contract Charles Mills uses the conceptual apparatus of the social contract tradition to reveal the cartography of white supremacy as a global political system. Contract talk, he says, is the “lingua franca of our times,” and as such it can provide us with a “powerful set of lenses” for looking at society and government in ways that reveal the inner workings of white supremacy (1997, 3). His comparison points to a visible gap between the imagined nonracial normative ideals of the social contract tradition and white people’s real treatment of people of color as part of the process of nation building. The social contract of Western political theory is not “a contract between every78 Alison Bailey body (‘we the people’),” he argues...