Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (review)

Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance is collaborative philosophy at its very best. The essays that the editors have assembled constitute a very successful critical intervention in philosophy through a set of challenging dialogues on race and epistemic practices. This critical intervention raises exciting questions for future generations of scholars in epistemology, race theory, political philosophy, and philosophy more generally.

Drawing on the pioneering work of Charles Mills and standpoint epistemologists (e.g., Marilyn Frye and Sandra Harding), the essays in this volume identify problematic limitations and assumptions in traditional ways of philosophizing that have been pervasive. They delineate the contours of blind spots that operate both in academia and in the social world outside it, tracing their origins and their consequences. They identify questions that have gone not only unanswered but unasked for too long. The critical work that this volume does is innovative and at the same time firmly grounded in rich theoretical traditions that have been marginalized by the philosophical establishment (race theory, feminist theory, and—more recently—queer theory). In this sense, Lorraine Code calls attention to the philosophical excavations of Michèle Le Doeuff, who uncovers a forgotten critical tradition of women philosophers (such as Gabrielle Suchon in the seventeenth century) who offered critical reflections on the exclusions and distortions of masculine knowledge, providing critical tools to develop alternative epistemic practices. On the other hand, in African American philosophy there has been a long and important tradition of critical discourses that identify and diagnose racially motivated forms of ignorance. From DuBois to contemporary race theorists, racial ignorance has been shown to involve entrenched habits and attitudes that go well beyond a mere absence of true belief or a mere presence of false belief; racial ignorance has been shown to be based on a lack of interest to know and a lack of opportunities to explore social realities pertaining to race. As Elizabeth Spelman points out, this is the centerpiece of James Baldwin's powerful indictment of white America: "that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it" (119). This ignorance is based on a deeply seated epistemic resistance to know. It is a very active and resilient form of not-knowing, not a mere unwillingness to believe, not a mere casual neglect or a simple form of self-deception. It is an ignorance that requires a carefully orchestrated and laboriously maintained form of epistemic neglect, an unknowingness carefully generated and supported by an entire range of institutions, practices, habits, and attitudes. This ignorance does not bear the mark of passivity but actually takes a lot of agency. As Spelman puts it, this form of ignorance is "an appalling achievement" that requires "grotesquely prodigious effort" (120); it is an ignorance that needs management. Spelman's analysis of epistemic management sketches a "route to undoing such ignorance" through an understanding of "the labor it takes to create and sustain it" (123).

As many of the essays in this volume show, the proactive lack of epistemic concern for racial others is also a lack of concern for oneself in relation to these others, that is, an ignorance of one's racial positionality and responsibility. This ignorance—far from being a mere ideological excrescence, an accidental side effect of relations of oppression—is actually a fundamental cultural mechanism for safeguarding privilege and domination. Relations of oppression are protected by being erased from the minds of those who perpetrate them and sometimes (when possible) from the minds of those who suffer them. Sarah Hoagland offers an analysis of racial ignorance as based on a denial of meaningful relationality, which simultenously produces a lack of understanding of oneself and a lack of understanding of others with whom one is constitutively related. Paul Taylor and Shannon Sullivan illustrate this relational ignorance and its consequences by showing how U.S. citizens' ignorance of Haiti and Puerto Rico...