Race and Epistemologies of IgnoranceShannon Sullivan, Nancy Tuana Offering a wide variety of philosophical approaches to the neglected philosophical problem of ignorance, this groundbreaking collection builds on Charles Mills's claim that racism involves an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance. Contributors explore how different forms of ignorance linked to race are produced and sustained and what role they play in promoting racism and white privilege. They argue that the ignorance that underpins racism is not a simple gap in knowledge, the accidental result of an epistemological oversight. In the case of racial oppression, ignorance often is actively produced for purposes of domination and exploitation. But as these essays demonstrate, ignorance is not simply a tool of oppression wielded by the powerful. It can also be a strategy for survival, an important tool for people of color to wield against white privilege and white supremacy. The book concludes that understanding ignorance and the politics of such ignorance should be a key element of epistemological and social/political analyses, for it has the potential to reveal the role of power in the construction of what is known and provide a lens for the political values at work in knowledge practices. |
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African American Alain Locke Appiah argued argument Baldwin believe that g biological Bois and Locke claim cognitive colonial color concept critical critique cultural curdled democracy democratic Dessa Rose Dewey Dewey’s dominant engage epistemic epistemology of ignorance European American example Fanon Feminist g is false gender genetic groups Haiti Hoagland Horkheimer human igno ignorance/knowledge Indian individual intellectual knowers knowledge lesbian lives logic of oppression logic of purity Mills Mills’s moral narrative nation negritude nonwhite norance norms one’s ontology philosophers political population population genetic practices pragmatism pragmatists privilege problem production Puerto Rico race Racial Contract racism radical rance reality reason relationality relations resistance Ricans role Rorty Sartre scientific segregation sense social epistemology society strategic structural theory tion truth Tuana understanding University Press W. E. B. Du Bois white Americans white ignorance white philosophers white racial white supremacy women York