White Ignorance Is Bliss--and Power

[Celerity]

The people demanding legally mandated ignorance now are probably ignorant of the long, racist tradition they’re a part of.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/in-fight-over-1619-project-and-nikole-hannah-jones-white-ignorance-has-been-blissand-power



Hell hath no fury like a white conservative confronted with the unvarnished history of slavery and racism in America. For nearly two solid years, right-wing reactionaries have been apoplectic over the 1619 Project, a journalistic exploration of the indelible impact of Black enslavement on these United States put together by New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones. The same angry mob has also attacked a heretofore obscure, four-decades-old analytical methodology for understanding the institutionalism of white supremacy and anti-Black racism called Critical Race Theory. The white conservative rage has been prolific, producing two House bills seeking to ban CRT and other “anti-American and racist theories” along with legislation in about a dozen states. The Trump administration put out its own 1776 Report, meant to “correct” the 1619 Project—which the American Historical Association called “simplistic” and full of “falsehoods, inaccuracies, omissions, and misleading statements.” Now the mob is vilifying Pulitzer Prize-winner Hannah-Jones, getting the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill to cravenly retract a tenured position offer, replacing it with a five-year professor of practice contract.

All of these efforts obviously aim to re-center the white supremacist historical fable that roughly 350 years of slavery and Jim Crow were unfortunate—but inconsequential—events in an America of full equality of opportunity, where any difference between the races could only be a result of Black laziness and white superiority. That fairy tale speaks volumes about how desperately reliant white supremacy is on maintaining white ignorance. You just can’t have one without the other. It’s that embrace of ignorance that lets these racists ignore the long tradition of mandated white ignorance they’re now trying to extend into the future. “White ignorance,” according to NYU philosopher Charles W. Mills, is an “inverted epistemology,” a deep dedication to and investment in non-knowing that explains white supremacy’s highly curatorial (and often oppositional) approach to memory, history and the truth. While white ignorance is related to the anti-intellectualism that defines the white Republican brand, it should be regarded as yet more specific. According to Mills, white ignorance demands a purposeful misunderstanding of reality—both present and historical—and then treats that fictitious world-view as the singular, de-politicized, unbiased, “objective” truth. “One has to learn to see the world wrongly,” under the terms of white ignorance, Mills writes, “but with the assurance that this set of mistaken perceptions will be validated by white epistemic authority.”

To challenge that epistemic authority with uncomfortable but verifiable facts about race and racism guarantees the wrath of those who are otherwise quick to claim “facts don’t care about your feelings.” The 1619 Project has required tweaks and corrections. But the wholesale discounting of the initiative by white conservatives, who ignored the sloppy, error-filled 1776 Report, is more than a classic display of hypocrisy. It’s a testament to how deeply critical white ignorance is to white supremacy. In reality—not the manicured “reality” of white supremacist historical delusion, but bonafide existence—historical fact has always hurt the feelings of white supremacists. In response, they have consistently used self-serving lies of omission to make themselves feel better. Were they less averse to historical truth, today’s white conservatives might already know this. They’d perhaps be aware that the United Daughters of the Confederacy—the white Southern ladies group that put up most Confederate monuments, including one explicitly lauding the Ku Klux Klan—released a 1919 manifesto in all but name demanding “all authorities charged with the selection of textbooks for colleges, schools and all scholastic institutions” across the South only accept books depicting the Confederacy glowingly.

Conversely, those books that correctly identified Confederate soldiers as traitors or rebels, rightly located slavery as the central cause of the Civil War, depicted the figure of the “slaveholder as cruel or unjust to his slaves,” or “glories Lincoln and vilifies Jefferson Davis,” were to be rejected. The UDC ordered school librarians to deface books that were insufficiently praiseful of the Confederacy by scrawling "Unjust to the South” on the title page. Well into the 1970s, these rules dictated the history lessons taught to Southern children, both Black and white. The group’s rewriting of history to make slavery benign, Black resistance invisible, and white terror no biggie—also known as the ahistorical Lost Cause myth—is being re-engineered for this moment. Modern complaints about so-called “cancel culture” and political correctness are also linked to white ignorance, allowing the know-nothings who wield it to deny the harms of whiteness while turning themselves into victims of overly aggressive Black declarations of personhood. Across the 1940s and ’50s, the NAACP campaigned to purge racist language from history books, targeting passages that extolled the KKK and references to enslaved Black folks as happy “Sambos.” In response, the Washington Post dismissed their concerns as “humorless touchiness,” an old-timey way of calling them snowflakes. One WaPo editorial stated that to “insist that Negroes be given equal rights with other citizens is one thing. To insist that their particular sensibilities entitle them to exercise a kind of censorship is quite another."

snip

[Faux pas]

1. ...

To read later

[Solly Mack]

2. K&R

[malaise]

3. Get thee to the greatest page

RFN!

Must Read

[Celerity]

6. lol, my posts rarely go anywhere near the greatest page, too many have me on ignore (or so they say)

That, and many do not like what I have to say and/or my manner of saying it.

[StarfishSaver]

4. This is a good piece. But this attitude is not limited to the right

Many on the left - including some folks on DU - feel and speak the same way.

Many progressives can be very sanctimonious about looking down their noses at right wingers for their attitudes about race when, in reality, some of their own views are virtually indistinguishable from those of the people they're pointing fingers at.

[Celerity]

7. the topic of white fragility would be exhibit #1 for me in regards to that

I have actually seen people here claim they have never once, not one time, even had a racist thought in their entire lives.

Nice to know we are sowing seed in the same electronic garden as beings of such pure essence they might well be mistaken at times for demigods.

[StarfishSaver]

8. Here's an example of what we're talking about ...

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100215452098

[Celerity]

9. I saw that thread, some of the replies are just maddening, but so illustrative of why I am so

pessimistic for the future of racial justice in the US. The electoral system is so gamed out by the Rethugs (thus forcing us to run far too many 'do not rock the boat' types in swing districts), and the collective zeitgeist (on balance) of the vox populi so skewed artificially to the right and to the white that I see no truly effective government-based legislative solutions at present. Hopefully the older, far more racist gens die off fast enough (and do not transmit the hate intergenerationally as effectively as it was transmitted to them, although social media is aiding this in a horrific manner) that foundational, taproot level change can come as time marches onward.

[StarfishSaver]

13. I'm less concerned about the older out-and-out racists than the progressives with blind spots

We can see the former for what and who they are. But progressives who are so sure they are pure as the driven snow on all issues of race, have nothing left to learn, much less do, believe they are experts on when racism does and doesn't exist, and deign to tell people of color when, where and how we should talk about it, and insist that any discussions about it that make them in any way uncomfortable are inappropriate, "divisive," and prone to "drive away allies" are far more toxic and damaging than blatant white supremacists, in my view.

[Celerity]

14. I think we are on the same page, more or less. I was just saying that there is this tendency, due to

skewed, gerrymandered electoral map, that only 'do not rock the boat on racial (and other) issues' types and that mindset of defensiveness and cautiousness is the ONLY path forward, and all else (both candidates and philosophy) is automatically suspect and must be beaten down and discredited. It is a conundrum, as just playing along means no truly fundamental change is likely to come, BUT also, if you do push too hard, then, due to the skewed, corrupt nature of the districts and the states (and yes, the very culture of white nationalist thinking being ever more deeply engrained), you might lose even more seats. We have a rare AF opportunity NOW to do some truly massive reparative and preventative heavy lifting, and yet we have Manchin and Sinema leading the blockage, with both not even up for re-election for 3 and half more years, yet setting the party and the nation up for a potential disastrous outcome (if they do not cave) NOW, at a multiplicity of levels, and then moving into in 2022, 2024, and beyond.

As for the older racists, those fuckers VOTE, a lot, and vote in the here and now, so are a clear and present danger. Plus, as I said, I truly worry about the inter-generational transference of that detestable antihuman white nationalist overarching pathology, with it being passed on in far too many cases, and to a far too great degree.

[Solly Mack]

12. That thread. Damn. That sad, sad thread.

And there is another one; an OP - I will not link to it - that could have gained a comment of support from me (not that I'm special, not saying that) except for it going on to embrace a lie or obtuse interpretation (depends on motive) or something someone told them that's what it meant and they never bothered to find out for sure. A lie that conservatives love using to explain why they can't support equity measures.

Everything up to that point - but that one comment, that one statement - ruined it. Changed the entire dynamic.

But the lie is so positive sounding some people embrace it without ever - and I mean ever - fact-checking it.

[brush]

5. Thanks for this post. We have to keep up the fight as the white supremacists...

Last edited Mon May 24, 2021, 06:53 PM - Edit history (1)

are determined to keep up their myths that white skin makes them superior when we're all human beings as so-called racial characteristics are only adaptations to climate.

[StarfishSaver]

10. True, but progressives need to recognize they're not perfect on this

And many - as evidenced here on DU - are only slightly more evolved than the white supremacists they sneer at.

[brush]

11. No argument there. White privilege, a side effect of growing up in a country...

founded on white supremacy, is hard to recognize in oneself, and sometimes even harder to let go of, or better yet, use for good in helping POC allies.