“A Sort of Public Living Room”: Ignorance and the Racial Management of Disorder in Postwar Los Angeles

Exploring sanitation in postwar Los Angeles, this article argues that as white voluntary groups formed task forces to clean up the city, they endangered Mexican and black Angelinos by endorsing solutions to urban welfare defined by antistatism and carceralism. I read these activities through the lens of white ignorance, whereby white Americans elaborated folk knowledge of successful urbanism on their own terrain and terms, which had no capacity to attend to other classes and races. I treat white ignorance not as a cognitive defect or proxy for innocence, but rather as a structural condition of postwar urban political economy.

Western Feminism and Rescuing Non-Western Women

Western feminism has become one of the most widespread feminist ideologies in our world today and it continues to gain popularity among those in the West who attempt to aid women in foreign nations. This particular feminism is rooted in “saving” non-Western women by attempting to mould their lives so that they may feel “empowered,” much like women in the West. What Western feminism fails to account for, however, is the lack of knowledge towards cultural contexts and the harm caused by Western feminists as they attempt to save these women who they deem oppressed due to their culture. The purpose of this paper is to analyze Western feminism from a variety of perspectives and find the flaws that prevent it from actually having a positive impact on women in the Global South. This essay includes references to prominent philosophic literature as well as present and historical examples of Western feminism that prove that the White Ignorance prevents these types of feminists from actually “rescuing” oppressed women. Through analyzing Western feminism from different lenses of White Ignorance, this paper provides an answer for how feminism can have a genuinely positive impact on non-Western women through the abolition of Structural White ignorance found in Western institutions and corporations.

The House Is on Fire but We Kept the Burglars Out: Racial Apathy and White Ignorance in Pandemic-Era Immigration Detention

Past research shows that crises reveal the sensitive spots of established ideologies and practices, thereby providing opportunities for social change. We investigated immigration control amid the pandemic crisis, focusing on potential openings for both challengers and proponents of immigration detention. We asked: How have these groups responded to the pandemic crisis? Have they called for transformative change? We analyzed an original data set of primary content derived from immigrant advocates and stakeholders of the immigration detention industry. We found as the pandemic ravaged the world, it did not appear to result in significant cracks in the industry, as evidenced by the consistency of narratives dating back to pre-pandemic times. The American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) criticisms of inhumane conditions in immigration detention resembled those from its pre-pandemic advocacy. Private prison companies, including CoreCivic and GEO Group, emphasized their roles as ordinary businesses rather than detention managers during the pandemic, just as they had before the crisis. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), however, manufactured an alternative storyline, emphasizing “COVID fraud” as the real threat to the “Homeland.” Although it did not call for radical change, it radically shifted its rhetoric in response to the pandemic. We discuss how these organizations’ indifference towards structural racism contributes to racial apathy and how the obliviousness and irresponsibility of industry stakeholders resembles white ignorance.

Linked Descendants: Genetic-genealogical Practices and the Refusal of Ignorance around Slavery

The recent expansion of online genetic-genealogical networks has been hailed as a development that could break racial taboos in the United States by providing irrefutable evidence of the myriad historical and genetic links—many originating in slavery—connecting white and black families. These predictions are countered, however, by a scholarly literature on “white ignorance,” defined as an active historical project that works to prevent privileged groups from apprehending their links to, and positionality within, systems of racial oppression. This paper mobilizes concepts from the fields of agnotology and epistemic ethics to assess how far genetic-genealogical technologies can contribute to redressing racialized epistemic inequities between slave and slaveholder descendants, by inducing the latter to respond to the former’s kinship claims and give access to data that could help reconstruct their linked family histories. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data that foreground the experiences of African American genealogists, the study outlines the structural and affective dimensions that have converged to enable white ignorance regarding genealogies of slavery and discusses ethical and technical solutions proposed by genealogical practitioners to redress the racialized power dynamics that continue to condition access to, and public acceptance of, family history knowledge relating to slavery.

Notes on not knowing: male ignorance after #MeToo

The essential premise of #MeToo is that, while large numbers of women are subject to sexual harassment and assault, this reality is not known to or understood by unnamed others. This article interrogates the subject of non-knowing that #MeToo points to but does not name, asking: who exactly does not know, and why? These questions provide the starting point to elaborate the concept of male ignorance. While this lexicon has been fleetingly deployed in canonical feminist works – where it denotes something so obvious that it does not require explanation, functioning instead as a kind of feminist common sense – I develop it here so it might be put to greater use as a dedicated analytic. The work of Charles Mills, particularly his writings on white ignorance, provides a critical precedent in this regard. Following Mills in foregrounding the ideological operations of not knowing, I conceive male ignorance as a structure of concerted if unconscious epistemic occlusion which both stems from and serves to protect male privilege. As such, it plays a crucial role in securing the overall relation of domination and oppression within which gendered lives are lived. While male ignorance is itself multiple and has a variety of stakeholders, I argue that the non-knowing that surrounds sexual harassment and assault – which #MeToo draws attention to and seeks to undo – constitutes a paradigmatic manifestation, one in which cisgender heterosexual men have a particular stake.

White Supremacy and Teacher Education: Balancing Pedagogical Tensions When Teaching about Race

Context University-based teacher education programs are increasingly committed to teaching about race and racism, but programs continue to face challenges in preparing justice-oriented educators. Critical scholarship on teaching about race and racism has identified some core concepts that teachers should learn, including an understanding of systemic racism. A deeper understanding of the structure and function of White supremacy as a system, specifically as it operates within teacher education as a social institution, can provide insight about the challenges faced by teacher educators (TEs) who teach about race and racism. Drawing from articulations of the characteristics of White supremacy, the author identifies operant mechanisms of White supremacy in teacher education. Purpose This article offers a framework for the logic of White supremacy as consisting of three core concepts: (1) the logic of racialized distribution of power; (2) the logic of intentional White ignorance and historical erasure; and (3) the logic of dehumanization of people of color through violence and White cultural hegemony. The study examined the tensions that emerge for teacher educators who aim to teach teachers to disrupt White supremacy but are working from within White supremacist institutions. Research Design The theoretical framework was used to examine emerging tensions experienced by TEs in a cross-institutional qualitative study that used phenomenological methods. Data were collected from teacher educators across multiple institutions and included interviews, classroom artifacts, and focus groups. Findings Findings aligned to the White supremacy framework. Tensions related to the racial distribution of power focused on differentiated support for teacher candidates (TCs) of color and navigating moments of racial tension. Tensions related to White ignorance and erasure centered on responding to White students’ resistance decentering Whiteness. Finally, tensions related to dehumanization of people of color focused on challenging deficit ideologies. Recommendations The findings suggest that being open to and conscious of these tensions through critical reflection can be productive for teacher educators. More research is needed that considers the distinct needs of TCs of color and White TCs when learning about race and racism. In addition, further research can apply the logic of White supremacy in cross-institutional studies and continue to engage TEs as participants to explore linkages between interpersonal and institutional effects of White supremacy in other contexts.

What is White Ignorance?

In this paper, I identify a theoretical and political role for ‘white ignorance’, present three alternative accounts of white ignorance, and assess how well each fulfils this role. On the Willful Ignorance View, white ignorance refers to white individuals’ willful ignorance about racial injustice. On the Cognitivist View, white ignorance refers to ignorance resulting from social practices that distribute faulty cognitive resources. On the Structuralist View, white ignorance refers to ignorance that (1) results as part of a social process that systematically gives rise to racial injustice, and (2) is an active player in the process. I argue that, because of its greater power and flexibility, the Structuralist View better explains the patterns of ignorance that we observe, better illuminates the connection to white racial domination, and is overall better suited to the project of ameliorating racial injustice. As such, the Structuralist View should be preferred.

Don’t Talk to White People: On the Epistemological and Rhetorical Limitations of Conversations With White People for Anti-Racist Purposes: An Essay

Productive dialogue with white people for anti-racist purposes is precluded by the political limits prescribed by the “principle of interest convergence,” occluded by the epistemological conditions of “white ignorance,” and disincentivized by the psychological burdens of “racial battle fatigue” borne by You and me, the Black would-be interlocutors. Nevertheless, much popular effort is spent—dare I say wasted—in attempts to talk white people out of their racism; or as I will define them in this paper, following James Baldwin, “those-who-think-of-themselves-as-white.” Consequently, I propose that we stop “talking” to those-who-think-of-themselves-as-white about racism, or at least adopt an attitude of extreme wariness.