Who Should We Be Online? by Karen Frost-Arnold;

Author:Karen Frost-Arnold;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

While mainstream Anglo-American epistemology has wrestled for centuries with the problems of individual miscognition caused by hallucinations, illusions, and dreams, it had, prior to Mills’s work, never systematically addressed sources of miscognition grounded in systemic white racism and white supremacy (Mills 2007). Part of the reason for this gaping hole is that mainstream social epistemologists had taken a generic “S-knows-that-p” approach. As Mills puts it, the social world imagined by many social epistemologists consists of “a societal population essentially generated by simple iteration of that originally solitary Cartesian cognizer” (Mills 2007, 15). To fill this gap, and to recognize that the race of cognizers and the racial hierarchies of their communities make an epistemic difference, Mills argues that there exists a phenomenon of white ignorance, which is a structural, group-based form of miscognition. White ignorance is a non-knowing that has its causal origins in white racism or white racial domination (Mills 2007, 20). Mills defines this non-knowing as including both false belief and the absence of true belief (Mills 2007, 16).7 Mills outlines several causal mechanisms linking white racism or white racial domination to the acquisition and dissemination of false beliefs, as well as showing how white racism/domination has been causally responsible for agents failing to form any beliefs at all about certain topics. I will focus on his analysis of how white racism in our collective social memory and testimonial practices produces ignorance.

Social memory determines which historical events and figures are remembered, and this memory shapes social identities and subjectivities. Our sense of who we are as a social group is determined, in part, by what we collectively recollect. Social memory is “inscribed in textbooks, generated and regenerated in ceremonies and official holidays, concretized in statues, parks, and monuments” (Mills 2007, 29).8 White racism has had a profound effect on what, and whom, people remember and celebrate. Mills cites several cases where white racism clearly shaped efforts to produce a forgetting and the absence of true beliefs about historical events. For example, official records of King Leopold II’s colonial regime in the Belgian Congo were burned, and exhibition galleries in Brussels fail to commemorate the 10 million people who died in the brutal regime (Mills 2007). Adam Hochschild describes the “deliberate forgetting” as so effective that in the 1970s a Belgian ambassador to West Africa was surprised to learn of the genocide from a newspaper: “I learned that there had been this huge campaign, in the international press, from 1900 to 1910; millions of people had died, but we Belgians knew absolutely nothing about it” (qtd. in Mills 2007, 30). Absence of true beliefs about historical events is also caused by white racist suppression (and discrediting) of testimony of the victims of white racial domination. Witnesses to racist crimes were often terrorized into silence or denied the ability to testify in court. For example, a Black woman from the Jim Crow era describes an environment of suppression: “My problems started when I began to comment on what I saw. .

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