Offering a wide variety of philosophical approaches to the neglected philosophical problem of ignorance, this groundbreaking collection builds on Charles Mills's claim that racism involves an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance. Contributors explore how different forms of ignorance linked to race are produced and sustained and what role they play in promoting racism and white privilege. They argue that the ignorance that underpins racism is not a simple gap in knowledge, the accidental result of an epistemological oversight. In the case of racial oppression, ignorance often is actively produced for purposes of domination and exploitation. But as these essays demonstrate, ignorance is not simply a tool of oppression wielded by the powerful. It can also be a strategy for survival, an important tool for people of color to wield against white privilege and white supremacy. The book concludes that understanding ignorance and the politics of such ignorance should be a key element of epistemological and social/political analyses, for it has the potential to reveal the role of power in the construction of what is known and provide a lens for the political values at work in knowledge practices.

Introduction Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana Part I: Theorizing Ignorance 1. White Ignorance Charles W. Mills 2. Epistemologies of Ignorance: Three Types Linda Martín Alcoff 3. Ever Not Quite: Unfinished Theories, Unfinished Societies, and Pragmatism Harvey Cormier 4. Strategic Ignorance Alison Bailey 5. Denying Relationality: Epistemology and Ethics and Ignorance Sarah Lucia Hoagland 6. Managing Ignorance Elizabeth V. Spelman Part II: Situating Ignorance 7. Race Problems, Unknown Publics, Paralysis, and Faith Paul C. Taylor 8. White Ignorance and Colonial Oppression: Or, Why I Know So Little about Puerto Rico Shannon Sullivan 9. John Dewey, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Alain Locke: A Case Study in White Ignorance and Intellectual Segregation Frank Margonis 10. Social Ordering and the Systematic Production of Ignorance Lucius T. Outlaw (Jr.) 11. The Power of Ignorance Lorraine Code 12. On Needing Not to Know and Forgetting What One Never Knew: The Epistemology of Ignorance in Fanon's Critique of Sartre Robert Bernasconi 13. On the Absence of Biology in Philosophical Considerations of Race Stephanie Malia Fullerton List of Contributors Index