As the Reverend Wright controversy broke, I was teaching a philosophy course about race. In one of those great moments when curriculum and current events perfectly coincide, we had just been reading Charles Mills's book, The Racial Contract. In it, he argues that, alongside the 'social contract' of early modernity, there was a "Racial Contract" in which white men essentially decided to establish themselves as "human" and exclude all others as "subhuman" and therefore not of equal moral worth. (White men made the contract, but all whites benefited, and continue to benefit, in varying degrees, from the race privilege it set out to construct. It is worth mentioning at this point that Mills does not deny that there are significant forms of oppression other than racism). While the Social Contract is often read as hypothetical, Mills argues that the Racial Contract can be seen as the underlying structure linking a range of historical phenomena, from legal decisions in support of slavery and colonization to the rise of 'race science' and the project of Enlightenment humanism (which, he argues, assumed that the only humans that counted were whites, and some of those more than others, clearly). If the inhabitants of the colonies, or the slaves that were brought in chains to Europe and America, weren't really human, then their appalling treatment did not disturb the celebrations of humanism and human rights that flowed from the pens and mouths of the perpetrators. White men agreed to organize society, culture, and morality on the basis of the lie that they were morally superior and therefore deserved the spoils of their conquests: in the end, Mills observes, whites themselves have come to believe it, at least at some level. The Racial Contract is, he says, epistemological as well as moral and political: it creates an "epistemology of ignorance" (9) that systematically encourages whites to refuse knowledge of the race system that has created and now maintains their position of privilege. Why else are whites-- even "liberals" (such a muddy term)-- so reluctant to consider the question of reparations, to see that the unjust system of global trade is a continuation of racist imperialism, or to acknowledge that they (we; I am white) directly and materially benefit from racism and race privilege as it operates in the global market and on New York City streets? (Discomfitingly, this is true whether or not one is personally racist, which gives rise to interesting questions of agency and responsibility that I will be addressing in a forthcoming Intervention).
Could it be that the extraordinary response of most white commentators to Reverend Wright's remarks about US foreign policy and the racism of US society is an example of the epistemology of ignorance in action? How quickly they all agreed that OF COURSE his comments were outrageous, appalling, and offensive. When the "scandal" broke in the corporate media-- or rather was manufactured by it, I looked up his sermons online, and having watched the now-famous clips, I honestly wondered whether I had failed to find the correct clip, the one where he said outrageous, appalling, and offensive things. I said this to my students at our next meeting and many of them, especially students of color, were far more shocked that anyone was shocked by the remarks than they were by the remarks themselves, which seemed to some at least a statement of the blatantly obvious. Although I don't have time to pursue this further here, it is worth recalling that Wright's post-9/11 sermon was, in fact, an extended critique of "the cycle of violence" that, he says, includes the 9/11 attacks. It was hardly, as corporate media distortion has suggested, a justification of those attacks. Would that everyone in the US had watched the entire sermon. I'm not religious, but I found it interesting and impressive.
It was as though, at a family gathering, an errant cousin had blurted out the scandalous secret about which everyone had for years quietly gossiped, and the powerful members of the family had rushed to silence her and restore order. Why the panic? Why the closing of the ranks behind the accepted consensus that dismissed Wright as a crazy radical? (Note how "radical" has become a pejorative term in corporate news-media speak). Quite simply, there is a lot to lose if whites in the United States and elsewhere acknowledge that their superior wealth, income, social status, and political power is directly related to the past and present oppression of people of color, and that their unspoken but real conviction that they are perfectly entitled to (and maybe even deserve) these goods is based on the racist claim of white superiority upon which the Racial Contract was built. Every day I reap the benefits of the Racial Contract, and, dear reader, if you are white, you do, too. It is an ugly thing to think about, certainly.
What to do? One might protest: "But I don't WANT to reap those benefits; I think it is utterly wrong that I should reap such benefits based on my race". First, as I mentioned earlier, this does not make it any less true that, if one is white, one unavoidably does. Second, the utterer of the protest should think clearly about what giving up those benefits really means. Can I confidently say that I would definitely have got this university education, traveled so freely, avoided ever having been subject to police harassment, and experienced a world in which I could safely assume that my race would rarely, if ever, disadvantage me, if I were not designated "white"? Would I have the material wealth that I do-- modest as it seems to me as a CUNY adjunct-- were it not for a global capitalist system that protects rich economies against poor ones in a continuation of racist imperialism?
No wonder that the commentators want to exile Wright to officially-stamped loony land post haste: what he is saying, if taken seriously, calls more or less all of their basic political assumptions into question.
The important claim here is that it is not that white America has accidentally failed to really see how race and racism works in the world; rather, white America, from its beginnings, has depended for its very survival on an agreement to ignore it.
Sunday, June 1, 2008
The Reverend Wright controversy and the epistemology of ignoranceby Ornaith O'dowd, NYC
Posted by Ornaith O'Dowd at 9:58 PM
Labels: an essay, an intervention, Charles Mills, epistemology of ignorance, race, Wright
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2 Comments:
[Warning: the following comment utilizes the language of academic philosophy, so those who despise this sort of thing should go no further.]
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This was an interesting post. I have many questions, but I'll limit them to a couple. I should state a couple of things to start. First, I don't know much about Mill's work, so anything I say about it is speculative and really a call for clarification. Secondly, I am equally puzzled by the Wright 'controversy' as I've said here (here). I wonder, however, if it mightn't be better explained by a more transparent reference to individual ignorance and individual vice as opposed to, as you and Mills seem to prefer, a large scale and collective mechanism. That is, many people are lazy, quick to judge and stupid, and that's all we really need to explain the lazy, quick and stupid condemnation of Wright's views (as if many of the judgmental knew anything about what his actual views are).
At any rate, the first question I have about Mills is his use of the concept of contract. I understand that he is not referring to an actual contract, as he doesn't want to imply that whites somehow, somewhere, and at some time got together to draw up a formal document declaring their collective commitments. Nevertheless, the notion of a contract must be doing some sort of theoretical work.
In the most recent and powerful expression of the social contract tradition, John Rawls asserts that the idea of a social contract can be employed as a device for thinking about our concept of justice. It's what we would say is justice if we reasoned appropriately about what justice is. Appropriate reasoning is given, in Rawls' theory, by certain constraints on the deliberation for the contract. Since justice is a concept which can appeal and apply to anyone capable of such reasoning, this implies that, as Rawls repeated asserts, if any one of us were to deliberate based on the constraints given by the contract situation, we would arrive at the same principles. Rawls' use of the contract notion is relatively straightforward then. It models the principles we would endorse if we deliberated appropriately. This use has normative and descriptive explanatory powers. It explains why the principles so chosen bind us and thus can be used to evaluate existing political structures. And, it is offers a descriptive explanation, not of current political practices, but of our moral psychology.
As I understand it, Mills cannot utilize this understanding of contract. He cannot because it's manifestly false that (most?) whites would endorse the racial contract: it cannot be a conclusion that they could reach, for if its terms were presented to them as a conclusion, they would reject it. This is further evidenced, it seems, by the employment of the 'epistemology of ignorance'. I don't suppose I genuinely understand what that is, but it involves (just form reading your post) a denial of the unjust terms on which whites reap the benefits they do. If so, then they must be also ignorant of the contract that expresses those terms. Transparency would imply rejection.
So, my question is: how do you (or Mills) resolve the tension between the idea of a contract and the ignorance which you postulate.
One type of answer immediately jumps to mind, but it resorts to unconscious processes which are, by themselves, difficult to understand and, to say the least, contentious. More importantly, such an answer would belie the demands of accountability which you and Mills seem to want to ground. So, if my endorsement of the Racial Contract is to be understood in terms of an unconscious habit (say), on standard accounts of responsibility, I would not be responsible for this 'endorsement'. Moreover, if we want to distinguish being responsible for X from being accountable for X (as I believe we should), then any retributive claims (calls for reparations) would be even more difficult to establish. I believe that ambiguities in the concept of accountability offer a more straightforward (although not necessarily better) explanation for why, as you put it, we fail to consider the question of reparations.
My second question is: how are we to understand responsibility such that whites are responsible for the racial contract even though they are, by hypothesis, unconscious of it?; and, on what basis could anyone (or they themselves) hold whites (themselves) accountable for supporting institutions which perpetuate white supremacy when they are, by hypothesis, unconscious of this?
You referred to a future post in which you would take up questions of agency and responsibility, so if you plan on addressing my second question then, then I eagerly await it.
The tension between contract and ignorance in Mills's theory looks, indeed, a lot like a paradox. Nonetheless, I think he has hit on something. Mills describes the epistemology of ignorance as involving "local and global cognitive dysfunctions". There are lots of everyday ways in which we may fall victim to 'epistemologies of ignorance', for example, when we immediately discount the arguments of people we dislike, or when we ignore (or are tempted to ignore!) objections to or problems with a theory or position that we find congenial or to which we are committed in some sense. We often fail to pay attention to things that would make us uncomfortable. None of this quite dispels the air of paradox, but it does suggest that this sort of thing is a common enough feature of our lives. Perhaps an emphasis on 'paying attention' helps to make the link with responsibility more plausible. Philosophers, especially feminist epistemologists, have begun doing some interesting work on ignorance (claiming that it is more complex than just a lack of knowledge). I'm not remotely an expert in that field, but it seems to me potentially fruitful. What can we say morally about a refusal to know? Complicating our understanding of ignorance seems helpful in this endeavor. Being ignorant of something-- e.g. privilege-- may just be more complex than knowing/ not knowing, or being 'unconscious' of something. A variety of bad faith, perhaps. This is also not just a matter of individual responsibility, but of structural, systemic factors that nurture it (and these are to some degree self-perpetuating systems, but these are in turn created and maintained through human agency, too).
I'll probably say more about responsibility in this connection in my next intervention, so I'll leave it at that for the moment.
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