Nancy McHugh. Telling Her Own Truth

“Charles Mills first coined the term “epistemology of ignorance” in his 1997 book The Racial Contract. Mills argues that the Racial Contract is an agreement to not know, an agreement to “misinterpret the world” that is underlined by the assurance that this misinterpretation will count as the true account of the world by the beneficiaries/signatories of the account, Whites.”

Epistemology of ignorance/Racial contract,

• An agreement not to know – there are certain things that simply aren’t talked about—it is considered impolite among wealthy people to talk about money – well, poor people talk about money all the time. If the wealthy people talked about it, they might feel guilty about having so much of it, so it is never mentioned.
• An agreement to misinterpret the world. To ignore or discredit knowledge that would cause us to face hard truths about the system that we live in.
• Comparing to ignoring anomalies in paradigms – Kuhn
• Compare to human capacities to focus on things that agree with what we believe and not notice or ignore things that conflict with what we believe --popper
• This misinterpretation will count as true to the people who benefit by the account, white people. It fits into or coheres with a social system/paradigm in which whites have power and have a stake in maintaining white privilege.
• “A pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions (which are psychologically and socially functional), producing the ironic outcome that white will in general be unable to understanding the world they themselves have made.”
• Ignorance feels liking knowing (to whites) because it fits into a paradigm that whites have created.
• Ignorance is not an accident, but is prescribed by the racial contract which requires a certain schedule of structured blindness and opacities in order to establish the white polity.”

Example we believe that we have a fair justice system, but, we can’t put that together with the fact that African Americans are more often caught, charged and convicted and are given more severe sentences than white people, so white people have to either ignore or discredit this knowledge, or admit that the system is not fair.

At the end of last class I asked you what you think could be done to improve the system, and there was a long silence, and then I floated the possibility that white people don’t like to answer that question because then they may feel like they have to give something up.

If that is what happened, then it is a perfect example of the epistemology of ignorance and the racial contract in action.

Marilyn Frye, The Politics of Reality, 1984

Ignorance plays a role in maintaining power.

Ignorance is as active a state as knowing is.

In order to know something you have to choose to pay attention to it and so not knowing something is the result of choosing not to pay attention to it.

There are two ways not to pay attention

1) you are focusing on something else – in professional groups, people tend to focus on men. Birth control research has focuses on women’s bodies

2) because you refuse to see what is right in front of you – white people’s complicity in racism.

Because the racial contract claims to present truth, it has the power to maintain itself. If you disagree with it, you are discredited as a knower and hence people can justify not paying attention to you.

Jordan

Develops two senses of an epistemology of ignorance both having to do with mandating the use of Standard English.

1) the loss of knlg that results when one is forced to speak in a voice that does not express or represent their experiences.

2) The role of the passive voice in Standard English (we did not cover this in class and you are not responsible for it on the exam)

Black English...

Stony Brook, class The invisible black woman

Students respond to Alice Walker’s book the color purple. They don’t like the way that Celie speaks -- she is speaking in Black English and they express their dislike of that vernacular in the same language in which they are criticizing it.

Jordan doesn’t tell them what she noticed because she sees this as a case of the students not liking the way that they speak too and she thinks that there is something complicated going on that she needs to think about before she teaches it to them.

• “With the loss of Black English comes the loss, the forgetting, of Black experience, individually and collectively”
• “irreplaceable system of community intelligence”
• “Black English represents a way of being in the world and a way of knowing the world – it represents an epistemology.” It represents a structure of consciousness

Identity

Language represents both collective and individual identity

Collective – language develops in response to the needs of a culture and is used to represent the experiences of people in a particular culture.

Individual – people identity as a member of a particular cultural group. Sharing that language then becomes a way that people exist in the world and in relation to other people.

Jordan’s students have to decide if they want to write a letter protesting Reggie Jordan’s death in Standard English or in Black English.

This is a serious catch-22

If they write in Standard English they will be heard, but they will be unable to express what they want and need to express. If they write in Black English, they can express what they need to say, but they will be ignored.

They decide to write in Clack English because to do otherwise would be to commit metaphysical suicide. This means that they would have to negate their own sense of their individual and cultural identity. They would in fact have to become different persons.

Here is what McHugh has to say about this:

When one speaks in a different syntax, in a voice that they don’t embody, their experiences can’t be account for. In other words, if we follow Jordan’s line of thinking that syntax reflects the very structure of consciousness, the values one holds and one’s experiences, when a Black person is forced to voice themselves in Standard English, not only is Standard English not equipped to account for their experiences because it is structured on a radically different experiential basis, the person re-expressing themselves experiences a loss of self and a loss of knowing in the process of re-expression. In a sense, they come to not know of which they speak and from where they speak. Furthermore because there is an intimacy between syntax and values, forcing a speaker of Black English to speak in Standard English results in metaphysical suicide. The values that structure, perpetuate and sustain a culture are lost with the loss of the language.

It is your job to relate what we have said about Black English and metaphysical suicide to the Epistemology of Ignorance.