Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (SUNY series, Philosophy and Race) by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-04-15T01:54:00+00:00

I

This chapter has given me no end of trouble. It is perhaps fitting for a discussion about ignorance that the source of this trouble remained opaque to me for quite some time. It is perhaps as fitting that it eventually revealed itself as a kind of ignorance-ignorance of the unexcavated deposits that certain deep and, I had thought, uprooted commitments had left in me.

Despite this difficulty, I was eventually able to do most of the work that I had planned. I was able to highlight the epistemic dimensions of a pragmatic or radical constructionist account of race and indicate the role that such an account might play in banishing a kind of social ignorance in and around the United States. Those thoughts will take up the next three sections of this chapter, which we might think of (but will have no further occasion to refer to) as a postpositivist realist theory of racial identity (Moya and Hames-Garcia 2000).

The remainder of the chapter will explore the thoughts that came to me as I tried, and failed, to carry further the opening argument about racial identity. Certain steps in the argument led me into impasses that I had not anticipated. I will try to find these moments of blockage and hesitation instructive, principally by tracking them to their affective and existential sources and by tracing out their impact on the production and maintenance of social ignorance. I do not expect to say anything radically new in these sections; I hope only to offer a series of interconnected reminders and warnings about the various challenges that complicate the task of social inquiry.

II

Contemporary U.S. society systematically promotes social ignorance. That is, it encourages its citizens and other participants-on whose behalf I will henceforth speak of "we" and "us"-not to know things that are profoundly important for the ethics, politics, and administration of social life. (I repeat: It encourages us not to know. Many of us nevertheless find out, in displays of determination that I will have no further occasion to credit, for reasons of expository convenience, in my references to "our" ignorance.) All sorts of institutions and agents invite or pressure us to accept doubtful propositions as true, to ignore the actual effects and conditions of our conjoint conduct, to neglect the institutions by means of which we might conduct meaningful social inquiry, and to act on the basis of tendentious pictures of the social world.

As a student of Dewey and Du Bois, which is to say, as a pragmatist and a race theorist, I am particularly interested in certain cases of social ignorance. These are the ones, very broadly speaking, in which race thinking encourages its in our will not to know, thereby blinding its to the suffering that results or may result from certain policy choices. Here, in no particular order, are some examples:

We act as if race serves as an adequate proxy for criminal dangerousness. Under certain circumstances we call this racial profiling. But we can reasonably indulge in this practice

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