Global White Ignorance

This chapter sets out—necessarily very schematically, but as a possible stimulus for research on the key features of a white ignorance conceived of as global. Obviously white ignorance is not best theorized as an aggregate of individual mistaken white beliefs (though a sampling of such beliefs can be dramatically enlightening for bringing home the extent of white miscognition). If there is a periodization and spatialization of whiteness, there also needs to be a periodization and spatialization of ignorance. The nature of white ignorance—what whites characteristically get wrong—changes over time and place. If classic white ignorance justified white advantage as the legitimate entitlements of the superior race, contemporary white ignorance generally either denies such advantage altogether or attributes it to differential white effort. White ignorance is achieved and perpetuated through varieties working in tandem: a general skepticism about nonwhite cognition and an exclusion from accepted discourse of nonwhite categories and frameworks of analysis.