Systemic racism is often reinforced through a structural, learned ignorance that allows dominant groups to misunderstand the world they inhabit. It is an intentional refusal to recognize the historical and ongoing structural advantages of one group over another due to the sociopolitical construct of race.
Unlike white silence, wherein persons intentionally withhold input during discussions of issues involving race to preserve the systemic advantages and psychic comforts of whiteness, white ignorance is supported by systems of white-body supremacy, which encourage people racialized as white to misunderstand, evade or ignore the realities of systemic racism. In short, persons learn not to know.
In the study “Learning (Not) to Know: Examining How White Ignorance Manifests and Functions in White Adolescents’ Racial Identity Narratives,” the writers “identified three manifestations of accommodation to white ignorance: constructing white as disadvantaged, framing race(ism) as unimportant and elsewhere, and the active refusal to know or imagine racial oppression. Alongside this accommodation we also observed a less common but important thread of resistance to white ignorance: seeing (and naming) systemic racism.”
This socially ingrained refusal to acknowledge racial oppression requires breaking the habit of ignoring systemic privilege and consciously identifying the institutional structures that perpetuate racial inequality. White ignorance is not merely a lack of information, but a systematically reinforced way of (not) knowing.
The late philosopher Charles W. Mills, who coined the term white ignorance, wrote about this “non- knowing” in “Global White Ignorance.” “‘White ignorance’ was meant to denote an ignorance among whites—an absence of belief, a false belief, a set of false beliefs, a pervasively deforming outlook—that was not contingent but casually linked to their whiteness,” he pointed out.
Mills wrote later, “Obviously, white ignorance is not best theorized as an aggregate of individual mistaken white beliefs (though a sampling of such beliefs can be dramatically enlightening for bringing home the extent of white miscognition). Rather, it should be seen as a particular optic, a prism and interpretation, a worldview—in the phrase of American sociologist Joe Feagin, a ‘white racial frame’ which incorporates multiple elements into a ‘holistic and gestalt… racial construction of reality.’”
Claiming not to understand systemic racism, microaggressions, or historical disenfranchisement is a way for individuals to detach themselves from culpability without dismantling oppressive systems. This behavior ranges from vincible ignorance (i.e., lacking knowledge a person could easily acquire by stepping outside their comfort zone) to willful ignorance (i.e., actively denying the existence of racism despite overwhelming evidence). Epistemic evasion highlights how cognitive avoidance functions in maintaining societal inequities.
Vincible ignorance is a lack of knowledge that is entirely within a person’s ability to possess. However, this passive privilege allows them the comfort of not engaging with the lived realities of systemic racism.
This, of course, creates challenges for moral accountability. It is distinct from deliberate ignorance, as it operates as a comprehensive defensive strategy to avoid all circumstances that might reveal the truth.
On the other hand, willful ignorance is an active, defensive resistance to truth. In matters of justice, this is a conscious rejection of irrefutable proof. It is frequently driven by a desire to protect one’s worldview, maintain a sense of moral innocence, and/ or preserve existing power dynamics.
White ignorance is embedded in institutions and societal structures that normalize whiteness as the standard. It involves a selective memory of history, minimizing or erasing the realities of systemic oppression. It also relies on an ongoing social epistemology that avoids, distances, and downplays racial injustice, which is the point.
- About the Author
- Latest Posts
Director of The Raceless Gospel Initiative, an associate editor, host of the Good Faith Media podcast, “The Raceless Gospel” and author of Take Me to the Water: The Raceless Gospel as Baptismal Pedagogy for a Desegregated Church.