Race and

Epistemologies
of Ignorance

Edited by
Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana
 CHAPTER 1
White Ignorance

Charles W. Mills

White ignorance . . .
It’s a big subject. How much time do you have?
It’s not enough.
Ignorance is usually thought of as the passive obverse to knowledge,
the darkness retreating before the spread of Enlightenment.
But . . .
Imagine an ignorance that resists.
Imagine an ignorance that fights back.
Imagine an ignorance militant, aggressive, not to be intimidated,
an ignorance that is active, dynamic, that refuses to go quietly—
not at all confined to the illiterate and uneducated but propagated
at the highest levels of the land, indeed presenting itself unblushingly
as knowledge.

I
Classically individualist, indeed sometimes—self-parodically—to the verge
of solipsism, blithely indifferent to the possible cognitive consequences of
class, racial, or gender situatedness (or, perhaps more accurately, taking a
propertied white male standpoint as given), modern mainstream Anglo-
American epistemology was for hundreds of years from its Cartesian ori-
gins profoundly inimical terrain for the development of any concept of
structural group-based miscognition. The paradigm exemplars of phe-
nomena likely to foster mistaken belief—optical illusions, hallucinations,
phantom limbs, dreams—were by their very banality universal to the
human condition and the epistemic remedies prescribed—for example,
rejecting all but the indubitable—correspondingly abstract and general.

13
14 Charles W. Mills

Nineteenth-century Marxism, with its theoretical insistence on locating

the individual agent and the individual cognizer in group (basically class)
structures of domination, and its concepts of ideology, fetishism, societal
“appearance,” and divergent group (basically class) perspectives on the
social order, offered a potential corrective to this epistemological individ-
ualism. But to the extent that there was a mainstream twentieth-century
appropriation of these ideas, in the form of Wissenssoziologie, the sociology
of knowledge, it drew its genealogy from Karl Mannheim rather than Karl
Marx, was frequently (despite terminological hedges such as Mannheim’s
“relationism”) relativistic, and was in any case confined to sociology (Cur-
tis and Petras 1970). So though some figures, such as Max Scheler and
Mannheim himself, explicitly argued for the epistemological implications
of their work, these claims were not engaged with by philosophers in the
analytic tradition. A seemingly straightforward and clear-cut division of
conceptual and disciplinary labor was presumed: descriptive issues of
recording and explaining what and why people actually believed could be
delegated to sociology, but evaluative issues of articulating cognitive
norms would be reserved for (individualist) epistemology, which was
philosophical territory.
But though mainstream philosophy and analytic epistemology con-
tinued to develop in splendid isolation for many decades, W. V. Quine’s
naturalizing of epistemology would initiate a sequence of events with un-
suspectedly subversive long-term theoretical repercussions for the field
(Quine 1969b; Kornblith 1994b). If articulating the norms for ideal cog-
nition required taking into account (in some way) the practices of actual
cognition, if the prescriptive needed to pay attention (in some way) to the
descriptive, then on what principled basis could cognitive realities of a
supra-individual kind continue to be excluded from the ambit of episte-
mology? For it then meant that the cognitive agent needed to be located
in her specificity—as a member of certain social groups, within a given so-
cial milieu, in a society at a particular time period. Whatever Quine’s own
sympathies (or lack thereof), his work had opened Pandora’s box. A nat-
uralized epistemology had, perforce, also to be a socialized epistemology;
this was “a straightforward extension of the naturalistic approach” (Korn-
blith 1994a, 93). What had originally been a specifically Marxist concept,
“standpoint theory,” was adopted and developed to its most sophisticated
form in the work of feminist theorists (Harding 2004), and it became pos-
sible for books with titles such as Social Epistemology (Fuller 2002) and So-
cializing Epistemology (Schmitt 1994) and journals called Social Epistemology
to be published and seen (at least by some) as a legitimate part of philos-
ophy. The Marxist challenge thrown down a century before could now
finally be taken up.
 White Ignorance 15

Obviously, then, for those interested in pursuing such questions this

is a far more welcoming environment than that of a few decades ago.
Nonetheless, I think it is obvious that the potential of these developments
for transforming mainstream epistemology is far from being fully real-
ized. And at least one major reason for this failure is that the conceptions
of society in the literature too often presuppose a degree of consent and
inclusion that does not exist outside the imagination of mainstream schol-
ars—in a sense, a societal population essentially generated by simple iter-
ation of that originally solitary Cartesian cognizer. As Linda Martín Alcoff
has ironically observed, the “society” about which these philosophers are
writing often seems to be composed exclusively of white males (Alcoff
1996, 2, n. 1), so that one wonders how it reproduces itself. The Marxist
critique is seemingly discredited, the feminist critique is marginalized,
and the racial critique does not even exist. The concepts of domination,
hegemony, ideology, mystification, exploitation, and so on that are part of
the lingua franca of radicals find little or no place here. In particular, the
analysis of the implications for social cognition of the legacy of white su-
premacy has barely been initiated. The sole reference to race that I could
find in the Schmitt (1994) collection, for example, was a single cautious
sentence by Philip Kitcher (1994, 125), which I here reproduce in full:
“Membership of a particular ethnic group within a particular society may
interfere with one’s ability to acquire true beliefs about the distribution of
characteristics that are believed to be important to human worth (witness
the history of nineteenth-century craniometry).”
I sketch out in this chapter some of the features and the dynamic of
what I see as a particularly pervasive—though hardly theorized—form of
ignorance, what could be called white ignorance, linked to white su-
premacy. (This chapter is thus an elaboration of one of the key themes of
my 1997 book, The Racial Contract [Mills 1997].) The idea of group-based
cognitive handicap is not an alien one to the radical tradition, if not nor-
mally couched in terms of “ignorance.” Indeed, it is, on the contrary, a
straightforward corollary of standpoint theory: if one group is privileged,
after all, it must be by comparison with another group that is handi-
capped. In addition, the term has for me the virtue of signaling my theo-
retical sympathies with what I know will seem to many a deplorably
old-fashioned, “conservative,” realist, intellectual framework, one in
which truth, falsity, facts, reality, and so forth are not enclosed with ironic
scare quotes. The phrase “white ignorance” implies the possibility of a
contrasting “knowledge,” a contrast that would be lost if all claims to
truth were equally spurious, or just a matter of competing discourses. In
the same way The Racial Contract was not meant as a trashing of contrac-
tarianism, as such, but rather the demystification of a contractarianism
16 Charles W. Mills

that ignored racial subordination, so similarly, mapping an epistemology

of ignorance is for me a preliminary to reformulating an epistemology
that will give us genuine knowledge.
The metatheoretical approach I find most congenial is that recently
outlined by Alvin Goldman in his book Knowledge in a Social World (Gold-
man 1999; see also Kornblith 1994a; Kitcher 1994). Goldman describes
his project as “an essay in social veritistic epistemology,” oriented “toward
truth determination,” as against contemporary poststructuralist or Kuhn-
Feyerabend-Bloor-Barnes-inspired approaches that relativize truth (5).
So though the focus is social rather than individual, the traditional con-
cerns and assumptions of mainstream epistemology have been retained:

Traditional epistemology, especially in the Cartesian tradition, was

highly individualistic, focusing on mental operations of cognitive
agents in isolation or abstraction from other persons. . . . [This] indi-
vidual epistemology needs a social counterpart: social epistemology. . . . In
what respects is social epistemology social? First, it focuses on social
paths or routes to knowledge. That is, considering believers taken one
at a time, it looks at the many routes to belief that feature interactions
with other agents, as contrasted with private or asocial routes to belief
acquisition. . . . Second, social epistemology does not restrict itself to
believers taken singly. It often focuses on some sort of group entity . . .
and examines the spread of information or misinformation across that
group’s membership. Rather than concentrate on a single knower, as
did Cartesian epistemology, it addresses the distribution of knowledge
or error within the larger social cluster. . . . Veritistic epistemology
(whether individual or social) is concerned with the production of
knowledge, where knowledge is here understood in the “weak” sense
of true belief. More precisely, it is concerned with both knowledge and
its contraries: error (false belief) and ignorance (the absence of true be-
lief). The main question for veritistic epistemology is: Which practices
have a comparatively favorable impact on knowledge as contrasted
with error and ignorance? Individual veritistic epistemology asks this
question for nonsocial practices; social veritistic epistemology asks it
for social practices. (Goldman 1999, 4–5, emphasis in original)

Unlike Goldman, I will use ignorance to cover both false belief and
the absence of true belief. But with this minor terminological variation,
this is basically the project I am trying to undertake: looking at the
“spread of misinformation,” the “distribution of error” (including the
possibility of “massive error” [Kornblith 1994a, 97]), within the “larger
social cluster,” the “group entity,” of whites, and the “social practices”
(some “wholly pernicious” [Kornblith 1994a, 97]) that encourage it.
Goldman makes glancing reference to some of the feminist and race lit-
erature (there is a grand total of a single index entry for racism), but in
 White Ignorance 17

general the implications of systemic social oppression for his project are
not addressed. The picture of “society” he is working with is one that—
with perhaps a few unfortunate exceptions—is inclusive and harmo-
nious. Thus his account offers the equivalent in social epistemology of
the mainstream theorizing in political science that frames American sex-
ism and racism as “anomalies”: U.S. political culture is conceptualized as
essentially egalitarian and inclusive, with the long actual history of sys-
temic gender and racial subordination being relegated to the status of a
minor “deviation” from the norm (Smith 1997). Obviously such a start-
ing point crucially handicaps any realistic social epistemology, since in ef-
fect it turns things upside down. Sexism and racism, patriarchy and white
supremacy, have not been the exception but the norm. So though his book
is valuable in terms of conceptual clarification, and some illuminating
discussions of particular topics, the basic framework is flawed insofar as it
marginalizes domination and its consequences. A less naïve understand-
ing of how society actually works requires drawing on the radical tradi-
tion of social theory, in which various factors he does not consider play a
crucial role in obstructing the mission of veritistic epistemology.

II
Let me turn now to race. As I pointed out in an article more than fifteen
years ago (Mills 1998), and as has unfortunately hardly changed since
then, there is no academic philosophical literature on racial epistemology
that remotely compares in volume to that on gender epistemology. (Race
and gender are not, of course, mutually exclusive, but usually in gender
theory it is the perspective of white women that is explored.) However,
one needs to distinguish academic from lay treatments. I would suggest
that “white ignorance” has, whether centrally or secondarily, been a
theme of many of the classic fictional and nonfictional works of the
African American experience, and also that of other people of color. In
his introduction to a collection of black writers’ perspectives on white-
ness, David Roediger (1998) underlines the fundamental epistemic asym-
metry between typical white views of blacks and typical black views of
whites: these are not cognizers linked by a reciprocal ignorance but rather
groups whose respective privilege and subordination tend to produce self-
deception, bad faith, evasion, and misrepresentation, on the one hand,
and more veridical perceptions, on the other hand. Thus he cites James
Weldon Johnson’s remark “colored people of this country know and un-
derstand the white people better than the white people know and under-
stand them” (5). Often for their very survival, blacks have been forced to
become lay anthropologists, studying the strange culture, customs, and
mind-set of the “white tribe” that has such frightening power over them,
18 Charles W. Mills

that in certain time periods can even determine their life or death on a
whim. (In particular circumstances, then, white ignorance may need to be
actively encouraged, thus the black American folk poem, “Got one mind for
white folks to see/Another for what I know is me,” or, in James Baldwin’s
brutally candid assessment, “I have spent most of my life, after all, watch-
ing white people and outwitting them, so that I might survive” [Baldwin
1993, 217].) What people of color quickly come to see—in a sense, the
primary epistemic principle of the racialized social epistemology of which
they are the object—is that they are not seen at all. Thus the “central
metaphor” of W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk is the image of the
“veil” (Gibson 1989, xi), and the black American cognitive equivalent of
the shocking moment of Cartesian realization of the uncertainty of every-
thing one had taken to be knowledge is the moment when, for Du Bois, as
a child in New England, “It dawned upon me with a certain suddenness
that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and
longing, but shut out from their [white] world by a vast veil” (Du Bois
1989, 4).
Similarly, Ralph Ellison’s classic Invisible Man (1995), generally
regarded as the most important twentieth-century novel of the black expe-
rience, is arguably, in key respects—while a multidimensional and multi-
layered work of great depth and complexity, not to be reduced to a single
theme—an epistemological novel. For what it recounts is the protagonist’s
quest to determine what norms of belief are the right ones in a crazy look-
ing-glass world where he is an invisible man “simply because [white] peo-
ple refuse to see me. . . . When they approach me they see only my
surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed,
everything and anything except me.” And this systematic misperception is
not, of course, due to biology, the intrinsic properties of his epidermis or
physical deficiencies in the white eye but rather to “the construction of
their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical
eyes upon reality” (3). The images of light and darkness, sight and blind-
ness, that run through the novel, from the blindfolded black fighters in
the grotesque battle royal at the start to the climactic discovery that the
Brotherhood’s (read: American Communist Party) leader has a glass eye,
repeatedly raise, in context after context, the question of how one can de-
marcate what is genuine from only apparent insight, real from only appar-
ent truth, even in the worldview of those whose historical materialist
“science” supposedly gave them “super vision.”
Nor is it only black writers who have explored the theme of white ig-
norance. One of the consequences of the development of critical white
studies has been a renewed appreciation of the pioneering work of Her-
man Melville, with Moby Dick (2000) now being read by some critics as an
early nineteenth-century indictment of the national obsession with white-
 White Ignorance 19

ness, Ahab’s pathological determination to pursue the white whale re-

gardless of its imperilment of his multiracial crew. But it is in the 1856
short novel Benito Cereno (1986)—used as the source of one of the two
epigraphs to Invisible Man by Ellison—that one finds the most focused in-
vestigation of the unnerving possibilities of white blindness. Boarding a
slave ship—the San Dominick, a reference to the Haitian Revolution—
which, unknown to the protagonist, Amasa Delano, has been taken over
by its human cargo, with the white crew being held hostage, Delano has
all around him the evidence for black insurrection, from the terror in
the eyes of the nominal white captain, the eponymous Benito Cereno, as
his black barber Babo puts the razor to his throat, to the Africans clash-
ing their hatchets ominously in the background. But so unthinkable is
the idea that the inferior blacks could have accomplished such a thing
that Delano searches for every possible alternative explanation for the
seemingly strange behavior of the imprisoned whites, no matter how far-
fetched. In Eric Sundquist’s summary (1993):

Melville’s account of the “enchantment” of Delano, then, is also a means

to examine the mystifications by which slavery was maintained. . . .
Minstrelsy—in effect, the complete show of the tale’s action staged for
Delano—is a product, as it were, of his mind, of his willingness to accept
Babo’s Sambo-like performance. . . . Paradoxically, Delano watches Babo’s
performance without ever seeing it. . . . Delano participates in a continued
act of suppressed revolt against belief in the appearances presented to
him . . . [a] self-regulation by racist assumptions and blind “innocence.”
(151–55, 171)

The white delusion of racial superiority insulates itself against refuta-

tion. Correspondingly, on the positive epistemic side, the route to black
knowledge is the self-conscious recognition of white ignorance (including
its black-faced manifestation in black consciousness itself). Du Bois’s
(1989) famous and oft-cited figure of “double consciousness” has been var-
iously interpreted, but certainly one plausible way of reading it is as a pre-
scription for a critical cognitive distancing from “a world which yields [the
Negro] no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through
the revelation of the other world,” a “sense of always looking at one’s self
through the eyes of others” (5). The attainment of “second sight” requires
an understanding of what it is about whites and the white situation that
motivates them to view blacks erroneously. One learns to see through iden-
tifying white blindness and avoiding the pitfalls of putting on these specta-
cles for one’s own vision.
This subject is by no means unexplored in white and black texts, but
as noted, because of the whiteness of philosophy, very little has been
done here. (One exception is Lewis Gordon’s [1995] work on bad faith,
20 Charles W. Mills

which is obviously relevant to this subject, though not itself set in a for-
mal epistemological framework.) In this chapter, accordingly, I gesture
toward some useful directions for mapping white ignorance and devel-
oping, accordingly, epistemic criteria for minimizing it.

III
What I want to pin down, then, is the idea of an ignorance, a non-know-
ing, that is not contingent, but in which race—white racism and/or white
racial domination and their ramifications—plays a crucial causal role.
Let me begin by trying to clarify and demarcate more precisely the phe-
nomenon I am addressing, as well as answering some possible objections.
To begin with, white ignorance as a cognitive phenomenon has to be
clearly historicized. I am taking for granted the truth of some variant of
social constructivism, which denies that race is biological. So the causal-
ity in the mechanisms for generating and sustaining white ignorance on
the macro level is social-structural rather than physico-biological, though
it will of course operate through the physico-biological. Assuming that
the growing consensus in critical race theory is correct—that race in gen-
eral, and whiteness in particular, is a product of the modern period
(Fredrickson 2002)—then you could not have had white ignorance in
this technical, term-of-art sense in, say, the ancient world, because whites
did not exist then. Certainly people existed who by today’s standards
would be counted as white, but they would not have been so categorized
at the time, either by themselves or others, so there would have been no
whiteness to play a causal role in their knowing or non-knowing. More-
over, even in the modern period, whiteness would not have been univer-
sally, instantly, and homogeneously instantiated; there would have been
(to borrow an image from another field of study) “uneven development”
in the processes of racialization in different countries at different times.
Indeed, even in the United States, in a sense the paradigm white su-
premacist state, Matthew Frye Jacobson (1998) argues for a periodization
of whiteness into different epochs, with some European ethnic groups
only becoming fully white at a comparatively late stage.
Second, one would obviously need to distinguish what I am calling
white ignorance from general patterns of ignorance prevalent among
people who are white but in whose doxastic states race has played no de-
termining role. For example, at all times (such as right now) there will be
many facts about the natural and social worlds on which people, includ-
ing white people, have no opinion, or a mistaken opinion, but race is not
directly or indirectly responsible, for instance, the number of planets 200
years ago, the exact temperature in the earth’s crust twenty miles down
right now, the precise income distribution in the United States, and so
 White Ignorance 21

forth. But we would not want to call this white ignorance, even when it is
shared by whites, because race has not been responsible for these non-
knowings, but other factors.
Third (complicating the foregoing), it needs to be realized that
once indirect causation and diminishing degrees of influence are ad-
mitted, it will sometimes be very difficult to adjudicate when specific
kinds of non-knowing are appropriately categorizable as white igno-
rance or not. Recourse to counterfactuals of greater or lesser distance
from the actual situation may be necessary (“what they should and
would have known if . . .”), whose evaluation may be too complex to be
resolvable. Suppose, for example, that a particular true scientific gener-
alization about human beings, P, would be easily discoverable in a soci-
ety were it not for widespread white racism, and that with additional
research in the appropriate areas, P could be shown to have further im-
plications, Q , and beyond that, R. Or, suppose that the practical appli-
cation of P in medicine would have had as a spin-off empirical findings
p1, p2, p3. Should these related principles and factual findings all be in-
cluded as examples of white ignorance as well? How far onward up the
chain? And so forth. So it will be easy to think up all kinds of tricky cases
where it will be hard to make the determination. But the existence of
such problematic cases at the borders does not undermine the import
of more central cases.
Fourth, the racialized causality I am invoking needs to be expansive
enough to include both straightforward racist motivation and more im-
personal social-structural causation, which may be operative even if the
cognizer in question is not racist. It is necessary to distinguish the two not
merely as a logical point, because they are analytically separable, but be-
cause in empirical reality they may often be found independently of each
other. You can have white racism, in particular white cognizers, in the
sense of the existence of prejudicial beliefs about people of color without
(at that time and place) white domination of those people of color having
been established; and you can also have white domination of people of
color at a particular time and place without all white cognizers at that
time and place being racist. But in both cases, racialized causality can give
rise to what I am calling white ignorance, straightforwardly for a racist
cognizer, but also indirectly for a nonracist cognizer who may form mis-
taken beliefs (e.g., that after the abolition of slavery in the United States,
blacks generally had opportunities equal to whites) because of the social
suppression of the pertinent knowledge, though without prejudice him-
self. So white ignorance need not always be based on bad faith. Obviously
from the point of view of a social epistemology, especially after the transi-
tion from de jure to de facto white supremacy, it is precisely this kind of
white ignorance that is most important.
22 Charles W. Mills

Fifth, the “white” in “white ignorance” does not mean that it has to
be confined to white people. Indeed, as the earlier Du Bois discussion
emphasized, it will often be shared by nonwhites to a greater or lesser ex-
tent because of the power relations and patterns of ideological hege-
mony involved. (This is a familiar point from the Marxist and feminist
traditions—working-class conservatives, “male-identified” women, en-
dorsing right-wing and sexist ideologies against their interests.) Provid-
ing that the causal route is appropriate, blacks can manifest white
ignorance also.
Sixth, and somewhat different, white racial ignorance can produce a
doxastic environment in which particular varieties of black racial igno-
rance flourish—so that racial causality is involved—but which one would
hesitate to subsume under the category “white ignorance” itself, at least
without significant qualification. Think, for example, of “oppositional”
African American varieties of biological and theological determinism:
whites as melanin deficient and therefore inherently physiologically and
psychologically flawed, or whites as “blue-eyed devils” created by the evil
scientist Yacub (as in early Black Muslim theology). Insofar as these theo-
ries invert claims of white racial superiority, though still accepting racial
hierarchy, they would seem to be deserving of a separate category, though
obviously they have been shaped by key assumptions of “scientific” and
theological white racism.
Seventh, though the examples I have given so far have all been fac-
tual ones, I want a concept of white ignorance broad enough to include
moral ignorance—not merely ignorance of facts with moral implications
but moral non-knowings, incorrect judgments about the rights and
wrongs of moral situations themselves. For me, the epistemic desidera-
tum is that the naturalizing and socializing of epistemology should have,
as a component, the naturalizing and socializing of moral epistemology
also (Campbell and Hunter 2000) and the study of pervasive social pat-
terns of mistaken moral cognition. Thus the idea is that improvements in
our cognitive practice should have a practical payoff in heightened sen-
sitivity to social oppression and the attempt to reduce and ultimately
eliminate that oppression.
Eighth, it presumably does not need to be emphasized that white ig-
norance is not the only kind of privileged, group-based ignorance. Male
ignorance could be analyzed similarly and clearly has a far more ancient
history and arguably a more deep-rooted ancestry in human interrela-
tions, insofar as it goes back thousands of years. I am focusing on white
ignorance because, as mentioned, it has been relatively undertheorized
in the white academy compared to the work of feminist theorists.
Ninth, speaking generally about white ignorance does not commit
one to the claim that it is uniform across the white population. Whites
 White Ignorance 23

are not a monolith, and if the analysis of white ignorance is to be part of

a social epistemology, then the obvious needs to be remembered—that
people have other identities beside racial ones, so that whites will be di-
visible by class, gender, nationality, religion, and so forth, and these fac-
tors will modify, by differential socialization and experience, the bodies
of belief and the cognitive patterns of the subpopulations concerned.
But this is, of course, true for all sociological generalizations, which has
never been a reason for abandoning them but of employing them cau-
tiously. White ignorance is not indefeasible (even if it sometimes seems
that way!), and some people who are white will, because of their particu-
lar histories (and/or the intersection of whiteness with other identities),
overcome it and have true beliefs on what their fellow whites get wrong.
So white ignorance is best thought of as a cognitive tendency—an incli-
nation, a doxastic disposition—which is not insuperable. If there is a so-
ciology of knowledge, then there should also be a sociology of ignorance.
Tenth, and finally, the point of trying to understand white ignorance
is, of course, normative and not merely sociological—hence the emphasis
on the continuity with classic epistemology—the goal of trying to reduce
or eliminate it. In classic individualist epistemology, one seeks not merely
to eliminate false belief but to develop an understanding, wariness, and
avoidance of the cognitive processes that typically produce false belief.
For a social epistemology, where the focus is on supra-individual processes,
and the individual’s interaction with them, the aim is to understand
how certain social structures tend to promote these crucially flawed
processes, how to personally extricate oneself from them (insofar as that
is possible), and to do one’s part in undermining them in the broader cog-
nitive sphere. So the idea is that there are typical ways of going wrong that
need to be adverted to in light of the social structure and specific group
characteristics, and one has a better chance of getting things right through
a self-conscious recognition of their existence, and corresponding self-
distancing from them.

IV
Let us turn now to the processes of cognition, individual and social, and
the examination of the ways in which race may affect some of their cru-
cial components. As examples, I will look at perception, conception,
memory, testimony, and motivational group interest (in a longer treat-
ment, differential group experience should also be included). Separat-
ing these various components is difficult because they are all constantly
in interaction with one another. For example, when the individual cog-
nizing agent is perceiving, he is doing so with eyes and ears that have
been socialized. Perception is also in part conception, the viewing of the
24 Charles W. Mills

world through a particular conceptual grid. Inference from perception

involves the overt or tacit appeal to memory, which will be not merely
individual but social. As such, it will be founded on testimony and ulti-
mately on the perceptions and conceptions of others. The background
knowledge that will guide inference and judgment, eliminating (puta-
tively) absurd alternatives and narrowing down a set of plausible con-
tenders, will also be shaped by testimony, or the lack thereof, and will
itself be embedded in various conceptual frameworks and require per-
ception and memory to access. Testimony will have been recorded, re-
quiring again perception, conception, and memory; it will have been
integrated into a framework and narrative and from the start will have in-
volved the selection of certain voices as against others, selection in and
selection out (if these others have been allowed to speak in the first
place). At all levels, interests may shape cognition, influencing what and
how we see, what we and society choose to remember, whose testimony is
solicited and whose is not, and which facts and frameworks are sought
out and accepted. Thus at any given stage it is obvious that an interaction
of great complexity is involved, in which multiple factors will be affecting
one another in intricate feedback loops of various kinds. So an analytic
separation of elements for conceptual isolation and clarification will nec-
essarily be artificial, and in a sense each element so extracted bears a
ghostly trail of all the others in its wake.
Start with perception. A central theme of the epistemology of the
past few decades has been the discrediting of the idea of a raw perceptual
“given,” completely unmediated by concepts. Perceptions are in general
simultaneously conceptions, if only at a very low level. Moreover, the so-
cial dimension of epistemology is obviously most salient here, since in-
dividuals do not in general make up these categories themselves but
inherit them from their cultural milieu. “The influence of social factors
begins at birth, for language is not reinvented by each individual in social
isolation, nor could it be. Because language acquisition is socially medi-
ated, the concepts we acquire are themselves socially mediated from the
very beginning” (Kornblith 1994a, 97). But this means that the concep-
tual array with which the cognizer approaches the world needs itself to
be scrutinized for its adequacy to the world, for how well it maps the re-
ality it claims to be describing. In addition, it is not a matter of monadic
predicates, reciprocally isolated from one another, but concepts linked
by interlocking assumptions and background belief sets into certain com-
plexes of ideation that by their very nature tend to put a certain inter-
pretation on the world. So in most cases the concepts will not be neutral
but oriented toward a certain understanding, embedded in subtheories
and larger theories about how things work.
 White Ignorance 25

In the orthodox left tradition, this set of issues is handled through

the category “ideology”; in more recent radical theory, through Fou-
cault’s “discourses.” But whatever one’s larger metatheoretical sym-
pathies, whatever approach one thinks best for investigating these
ideational matters, such concerns obviously need to be part of a social
epistemology. For if the society is one structured by relations of domina-
tion and subordination (as of course most societies in human history
have been), then in certain areas this conceptual apparatus is likely
going to be shaped and inflected in various ways by the biases of the rul-
ing group(s). So crucial concepts may well be misleading in their inner
makeup and their external relation to a larger doxastic architecture.
Moreover, what cognitive psychology has revealed is that rather than con-
tinually challenging conceptual adequacy by the test of disconfirm-
ing empirical data, we tend to do the opposite—to interpret the data
through the grid of the concepts in such a way that seemingly discon-
firming, or at least problematic, perceptions are filtered out or margin-
alized. In other words, one will tend to find the confirmation in the
world whether it is there or not.
Now apply this to race: consider the epistemic principle of what has
come to be called “white normativity,” the centering of the Euro and
later Euro-American reference group as constitutive norm. Ethnocen-
trism is, of course, a negative cognitive tendency common to all peoples,
not just Europeans. But with Europe’s gradual rise to global domination,
the European variant becomes entrenched as an overarching, virtually
unassailable framework, a conviction of exceptionalism and superiority
that seems vindicated by the facts, and thenceforth, circularly, shaping
perception of the facts. We rule the world because we are superior; we
are superior because we rule the world. In his pioneering 1950s’ essays
against Eurocentrism, world historian Marshall G. S. Hodgson (1993b)
invokes Saul Steinberg’s famous March 29, 1976, New Yorker cover car-
toon depiction of the “View of the World from 9th Avenue,” the bizarrely
foreshortened view of the United States afforded from the Upper East
Side and argues that the standard geographical representations of Eu-
rope by Europeans, as in the Mercator projection world map, are not
really that radically different:
It would be a significant story in itself to trace how modern Westerners
have managed to preserve some of the most characteristic features
of their ethnocentric medieval image of the world. Recast in modern
scientific and scholarly language, the image is still with us. . . . The point
of any ethnocentric world image is to divide the world into moieties,
ourselves and the others, ourselves forming the more important of the
two. . . . We divide the world into what we call “continents.” . . . Why is
26 Charles W. Mills

Europe one of the continents but not India? . . . Europe is still ranked as
one of the “continents” because our cultural ancestors lived there. By
making it a “continent,” we give it a rank disproportionate to its natural
size, as a subordinate part of no larger unit, but in itself one of the major
component parts of the world. . . . (I call such a world map the “Jim
Crow projection” because it shows Europe as larger than Africa.) . . .
[Mercator] confirms our predispositions. (3–5)

This geographical misrepresentation and regional inflation have

gone in tandem with a corresponding historical misrepresentation and
inflation. Criticizing the standard historical categories of Western histo-
rians, Hodgson suggests that “the very terms we allow ourselves to use fos-
ter distortion.” The “convenient result” is that Europe, an originally
peripheral region of what Hodgson calls the “Afro-Eurasian historical
complex,” is lifted out of its context and elevated into a self-creating en-
tity unto itself, “an independent division of the whole world, with a his-
tory that need not be integrated with that of the rest of mankind save on
the terms posed by European history itself” (9).
From this fatally skewed optic, of course, stem all those theories of
innate European superiority to the rest of the world that are still with us
today but in modified and subtler versions. Whiteness is originally coexten-
sive with full humanity, so that the nonwhite Other is grasped through a his-
toric array of concepts whose common denominator is their subjects’
location on a lower ontological and moral rung.
Consider, for example, the category of the “savage” and its concep-
tual role in the justification of imperialism. As Francis Jennings (1976)
points out, the word was “created for the purposes of conquest rather
than the purposes of knowledge.” “Savagery” and “civilization” were “rec-
iprocals” and were “both independent of any necessary correlation with
empirical reality.” The conceptual outcome was a “conjoined myth” that
“greatly distorted [white] Americans’ perceptions of reality,” necessarily
involving “the suppression of facts” (12, 10). In effect,

the Englishman devised the savage’s form to fit his function. The word
savage thus underwent considerable alteration of meaning as different
colonists pursued their varied ends. One aspect of the term remained
constant, however: the savage was always inferior to civilized men. . . .
The constant of Indian inferiority implied the rejection of his hu-
manity and determined the limits permitted for his participation in
the mixing of cultures. The savage was prey, cattle, pet, or vermin—he
was never citizen. Upholders of the myth denied that either savage
tyranny or savage anarchy could rightfully be called government, and
therefore there could be no justification for Indian resistance to
European invasion. (59)
 White Ignorance 27

When Thomas Jefferson excoriates the “merciless Indian Savages” in

the Declaration of Independence, then, neither he nor his readers will ex-
perience any cognitive dissonance with the earlier claims about the equal-
ity of all “men,” since savages are not “men” in the full sense. Locked in a
different temporality, incapable of self-regulation by morality and law,
they are humanoid but not human. To speak of the “equality” of the sav-
age would then be oxymoronic, since one’s very location in these cate-
gories is an indication of one’s inequality. Even a cognizer with no
antipathy or prejudice toward Native Americans will be cognitively dis-
abled trying to establish truths about them insofar as such a category and
its associated presuppositions will tend to force his conclusions in a cer-
tain direction, will constrain what he can objectively see. One will experi-
ence a strain, a cognitive tension between possible egalitarian findings
and overarching category, insofar as “savage” already has embedded in it
a narrative, a set of assumptions about innate inferiority, which will pre-
clude certain possibilities. “Savages” tend to do certain things and to be
unable to do others; these go with the conceptual territory. Thus the term
itself encourages if not quite logically determines particular conclusions.
Concepts orient us to the world, and it is a rare individual who can resist
this inherited orientation. Once established in the social mind-set, its in-
fluence is difficult to escape, since it is not a matter of seeing the phe-
nomenon with the concept discretely attached but rather of seeing things
through the concept itself. In the classic period of European expansion-
ism, it then becomes possible to speak with no sense of absurdity of
“empty” lands that are actually teeming with millions of people, of “dis-
covering” countries whose inhabitants already exist, because the non-
white Other is so located in the guiding conceptual array that different
rules apply. Even seemingly straightforward empirical perception will be
affected—the myth of a nation of hunters in contradiction to widespread
Native American agriculture that saved the English colonists’ lives, the
myth of stateless savages in contradiction to forms of government from
which the white Founders arguably learned, the myth of a pristine wilder-
ness in contradiction to a humanized landscape transformed by thou-
sands of years of labor (Jennings 1976). In all of these cases, the concept is
driving the perception, with whites aprioristically intent on denying what is before
them. So if Kant famously said that perceptions without concepts are blind,
then here it is the blindness of the concept itself that is blocking vision.
Originally, then, foundational concepts of racialized difference, and
their ramifications in all sociopolitical spheres, preclude a veridical per-
ception of nonwhites and serve as a categorical barrier against their eq-
uitable moral treatment. The transition away from old-fashioned racism
of this kind has not, however, put an end to white normativity but subtly
28 Charles W. Mills

transformed its character. If previously whites were color demarcated as

biologically and/or culturally unequal and superior, now through a
strategic “color blindness” they are assimilated as putative equals to the
status and situation of nonwhites on terms that negate the need for mea-
sures to repair the inequities of the past. So white normativity manifests
itself in a white refusal to recognize the long history of structural dis-
crimination that has left whites with the differential resources they have
today, and all of its consequent advantages in negotiating opportunity
structures. If originally whiteness was race, then now it is racelessness, an
equal status and a common history in which all have shared, with white
privilege being conceptually erased. Woody Doane (2003) suggests that

“Color-blind” ideology plays an important role in the maintenance of

white hegemony. . . . Because whites tend not to see themselves in racial
terms and not to recognize the existence of the advantages that whites
enjoy in American society, this promotes a worldview that emphasizes in-
dividualistic explanations for social and economic achievement, as if the
individualism of white privilege was a universal attribute. Whites also ex-
hibit a general inability to perceive the persistence of discrimination and
the effects of more subtle forms of institutional discrimination. In the
context of color-blind racial ideology, whites are more likely to see the
opportunity structure as open and institutions as impartial or objective
in their functioning. . . . this combination supports an interpretative
framework in which whites’ explanations for inequality focus upon the
cultural characteristics (e.g., motivation, values) of subordinate groups.
. . . Politically, this blaming of subordinate groups for their lower eco-
nomic position serves to neutralize demands for antidiscrimination ini-
tiatives or for a redistribution of resources. (13–14, emphasis in original)

Indeed, the real racists are the blacks who continue to insist on the
importance of race. In both cases white normativity underpins white priv-
ilege, in the first case by justifying differential treatment by race and in
the second case by justifying formally equal treatment by race that—in its
denial of the cumulative effects of past differential treatment—is tanta-
mount to continuing it.
What makes such denial possible, of course, is the management of
memory. (Thus as earlier emphasized it is important to appreciate the in-
terconnectedness of all of these components of knowing or non-knowing:
this concept is viable in the white mind because of the denial of crucial
facts.) Memory is not a subject one usually finds in epistemology texts, but
for social epistemology it is obviously pivotal. French sociologist Maurice
Halbwachs (1992) was one of the pioneers of the concept of a collective,
social memory, which provided the framework for individual memories.
But if we need to understand collective memory, we also need to under-
 White Ignorance 29

stand collective amnesia. Indeed, they go together insofar as memory is

necessarily selective—out of the infinite sequence of events, some trivial,
some momentous, we extract what we see as the crucial ones and organize
them into an overall narrative. Social memory is then inscribed in text-
books, generated and regenerated in ceremonies and official holidays,
concretized in statues, parks, and monuments. John Locke famously sug-
gested memory as the crucial criterion for personal identity, and social
memory plays a parallel role in social identity. Historian John Gillis
(1994b, 3) argues that “the notion of identity depends on the idea of
memory, and vice versa. . . . [But] memories and identities are not fixed
things, but representations or constructions of reality. . . . ‘[M]emory
work’ is . . . embedded in complex class, gender, and power relations that
determine what is remembered (or forgotten), by whom, and for what
end. If memory has its politics, so too does identity.” As the individual re-
presses unhappy or embarrassing memories that may also reveal a great
deal about his identity, about who he is, so in all societies, especially those
structured by domination, the socially recollecting “we” will be divided,
and the selection will be guided by different identities, with one group
suppressing precisely what another wishes to commemorate. Thus there
will be both official and counter-memory, with conflicting judgments
about what is important in the past and what is unimportant, what hap-
pened and does matter, what happened and does not matter, and what
did not happen at all. So applying this to race, there will obviously be an
intimate relationship between white identity, white memory, and white
amnesia, especially about nonwhite victims.
Hitler is supposed to have reassured his generals, apprehensive about
the launching of World War II, by asking them: “Who now remembers the
Armenians?” Because the Third Reich lost, the genocide of the Jews
(though far less the Romani) is remembered. But who now remembers the
Hereros, the Nama, the Beothuks, the Tasmanians, the Pequots? (For that
matter, who does remember the Armenians, except the Armenians them-
selves?) Who remembers the Congolese? In Adam Hochschild’s (1998,
ch. 19) chilling book on King Leopold II’s regime of rubber and extermi-
nation, which resulted in the deaths of 10 million people in the Belgian
Congo, the final chapter is titled “The Great Forgetting.” Through the sys-
tematic destruction of state archives in Brussels—“the furnaces burned for
eight days”—and the deliberate noncommemoration of the African vic-
tims—“in none of the [Brussels Royal Museum of Central Africa’s] twenty
large exhibition galleries is there the slightest hint that millions of Con-
golese met unnatural deaths”—a “deliberate forgetting” as an “active deed”
was achieved (293–95), a purging of official memory so thorough and effi-
cient that a Belgian ambassador to West Africa in the 1970s was astonished
by the “slander” on his country in a Liberian newspaper’s passing reference
30 Charles W. Mills

to the genocide: “I learned that there had been this huge campaign, in the
international press, from 1900 to 1910; millions of people had died, but we
Belgians knew absolutely nothing about it” (297).1 Similarly, and closer to
home, James Loewen’s (1996) critical study of the silences and misrepre-
sentations of standard American history textbooks points out that “The In-
dian-white wars that dominated our history from 1622 to 1815 and were of
considerable importance until 1890 have disappeared from our national
memory,” encouraging a “feel-good history for whites”: “By downplaying In-
dian wars, textbooks help us forget that we wrested the continent from Na-
tive Americans” (133). In the case of blacks, the “forgetting” takes the form
of whitewashing the atrocities of slavery—the “magnolia myth” of paternal-
istic white aristocrats and happy, singing darkies that dominated American
textbooks as late as the 1950s—and minimizing the extent to which “the pe-
culiar institution” was not a sectional problem but shaped the national
economy, polity, and psychology (137–70). Du Bois refers to “the deliber-
ately educated ignorance of white schools” (1995, 459) and devotes the cli-
mactic chapter of his massive Black Reconstruction in America (1998) to the
documentation of the sanitization of the history of slavery, the Civil War,
and Reconstruction by white Southern historians.
Moreover, the misrepresentations of national textbooks have their
counterpart in monuments and statuary: social memory made marble and
concrete, national mnemonics of the landscape itself. In his study of Civil
War monuments, Kirk Savage (1994, 130–31) argues that “Monuments
served to anchor collective remembering,” fostering “a shared and stan-
dardized program of memory,” so that “local memory earned credibility by
its assimilation to a visible national memory.” The postbellum decision to
rehabilitate Robert E. Lee, commander in chief of the Confederate Army,
thereby “eras[ing] his status as traitor,” signified a national white reconcil-
iation that required the repudiation of an alternative black memory:

The commemoration of Lee rested on a suppression of black memory,

black truth. . . . [U.S. statesman Charles Francis] Adams could not jus-
tify a monument to Lee without denying the postwar reality of racial in-
justice and its congruence with the Confederate cause. “Sectional
reconciliation” of this kind was founded on the nonconciliation of
African Americans, and on their exclusion from the legitimate arenas
of cultural representation. Black Americans did not have their own
monuments, despite the critical role they had played in swinging the
balance of power—both moral and military—to the North. . . .The com-
memoration of the Civil War in physical memorials is ultimately a story
of systematic cultural repression. . . . Public monuments . . . impose a
permanent memory on the very landscape within which we order our
lives. Inasmuch as the monuments make credible particular collectivi-
ties, they must erase others. (134–35, 143)
 White Ignorance 31

At the level of symbolism and national self-representation, then, the

denial of the extent of Native American and black victimization buttresses
the airbrushed white narrative of discovery, settlement, and building of a
shining city on the hill. But the editing of white memory has more con-
crete and practical consequences also: as earlier emphasized it enables a
self-representation in which differential white privilege, and the need to
correct for it, does not exist. In other words, the mystification of the past
underwrites a mystification of the present. The erasure of the history of
Jim Crow makes it possible to represent the playing field as historically
level, so that current black poverty just proves blacks’ unwillingness to
work. As individual memory is assisted through a larger social memory, so
individual amnesia is then assisted by a larger collective amnesia. In his re-
search on the continuing, indeed deepening, gap between white and black
Americans, Thomas Shapiro (2004, 75–76) remarks on how often white in-
terviewees seemed to “forget” what they had just told him about the ex-
tensive parental assistance they received, claiming instead that they had
worked for it: “[X’s] memory seems accurate as she catalogues all sorts
of parental wealthfare with matching dollar figures. . . . However, as soon
as the conversation turns to how she and her husband acquired assets
like their home, cars, and savings account, her attitude changes
dramatically. . . . The [Xs] describe themselves as self-made, conveniently
forgetting that they inherited much of what they own.” Thus the “taken-
for-granted sense of [white] entitlement” erases the fact that “transformative
assets,” “inherited wealth lifting a family beyond their own achievements,”
have been crucial to their white success (76, 10, emphasis in original) and
that blacks do not in general have such advantages because of the history
of discrimination against them. Thomas McCarthy (2002, 2004) points out
the importance of a politics of memory for closing the “peculiar gap be-
tween academic historical scholarship and public historical consciousness
that marks our own situation” (2002, 641) and emphasizes that the even-
tual achievement of racial justice can only be accomplished through a
systematic national re-education on the historic extent of black racial sub-
ordination in the United States and how it continues to shape our racial
fates differentially today.
But forgetting, whether individual or social, will not even be neces-
sary if there is nothing to remember in the first place. C. A. J. Coady’s
(1994) now classic book on testimony has made it irrefutably clear how
dependent we are on others for so much of what we know, and is thus
crucial to the elaboration of a social epistemology. Yet if one group, or a
specific group, of potential witnesses is discredited in advance as being
epistemically suspect, then testimony from the group will tend to be dis-
missed or never solicited to begin with. Kant’s (1960, 113, emphasis in
original) infamous line about a “Negro carpenter’s” views has often been
32 Charles W. Mills

quoted, but never stales: “And it might be, that there were something in
this which perhaps deserved to be considered; but in short, this fellow
was quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he said was
stupid.” Nonwhite inferiority necessarily has cognitive ramifications, un-
dermining nonwhite claims to knowledge that are not backed up by Eu-
ropean epistemic authority. In an 1840 letter, Daniel Butrick, a
missionary to the Cherokees, gives a long list of the reasons “how whites
try and fail to find out what Indians know because they refuse to recog-
nize the humanity or intelligence of Native peoples,” the result being
“that such persons may spend all their days among the Indians and yet
die as ignorant of their true character almost as if they had never been
born” (Konkle 2004, 90, 92). During slavery, blacks were generally de-
nied the right to testify against whites, because they were not seen as
credible witnesses, so when the only (willing) witnesses to white crimes
were black, these crimes would not be brought to light. At one point in
German South-West Africa, white settlers demanded “that in court only
the testimony of seven African witnesses could outweigh evidence pre-
sented by a single white person” (Cocker 1998, 317). Similarly, slave nar-
ratives often had to have white authenticators, for example, white
abolitionists, with the racially based epistemic authority to write a preface
or appear on stage with the author to confirm that what this worthy
Negro said was indeed true.
Moreover, in many cases, even if witnesses would have been given
some kind of grudging hearing, they were terrorized into silence by the
fear of white retaliation. A black woman recalls the world of Jim Crow
and the dangers of describing it for what it was: “My problems started
when I began to comment on what I saw. . . . I insisted on being accurate.
But the world I was born into didn’t want that. Indeed, its very survival
depended on not knowing, not seeing—and certainly, not saying any-
thing at all about what it was really like” (cited in Litwack [1998, 34]). If
black testimony could be aprioristically rejected because it was likely to
be false, it could also be aprioristically rejected because it was likely to be
true. Testimony about white atrocities—lynchings, police killings, race
riots—would often have to be passed down through segregated informa-
tional channels, black to black, too explosive to be allowed exposure to
white cognition. The memory of the 1921 Tulsa race riot, the worst
American race riot of the twentieth century, with a possible death toll of
300 people, was kept alive for decades in the black community long after
whites had erased it from the official record. Ed Wheeler, a white re-
searcher trying in 1970 to locate documentation on the riot, found that
the official Tulsa records had mysteriously vanished, and he was only
able, with great difficulty, to persuade black survivors to come forward
 White Ignorance 33

with their photographs of the event: “The blacks allowed Wheeler to take
the pictures only if he promised not to reveal their names, and they all
spoke only on the condition of anonymity. Though fifty years had passed,
they still feared retribution if they spoke out” (Hirsch 2002, 201).
Even when such fears are not a factor, and blacks do feel free to
speak, the epistemic presumption against their credibility remains in a
way that it does not for white witnesses. Black countertestimony against
white mythology has always existed but would originally have been hand-
icapped by the lack of material and cultural capital investment available
for its production—oral testimony from illiterate slaves, ephemeral pam-
phlets with small print runs, and self-published works such as those by au-
todidact J. A. Rogers (1985), laboriously documenting the achievements
of men and women of color to contest the white lie of black inferiority.
But even when propagated in more respectable venues—for example,
the Negro scholarly journals founded in the early twentieth century—
they were epistemically ghettoized by the Jim Crow intellectual practices
of the white academy. As Stephen Steinberg (1995) points out, the
United States and its white social sciences have “played ostrich” on the is-
sues of race and racial division (ix), so that—in Du Bois’s famous image
of blacks in a cave trying desperately to communicate to white passersby,
before gradually realizing that they are silenced behind the updated ver-
sion of the veil, “some thick sheet of invisible but horribly tangible plate
glass”—“[black critics] of whatever political stripe . . . were simply met
with a deaf ear.” The testimony of Negro scholars saying the wrong thing
(almost an analytic statement!) would not be registered. “[T]he margin-
alization of black voices in academia was facilitated by an ‘invisible but
horribly tangible’ color line that relegated all but a few black scholars to
teach in black colleges far removed from the academic mainstream”
(51). Consider, for example, an anthropology founded on the “obvious”
truth of racial hierarchy. Or a sociology failing to confront the central so-
cial fact of structural white domination. Or a history sanitizing the record
of aboriginal conquest and black exploitation. Or a political science rep-
resenting racism as an anomaly to a basically inclusive and egalitarian
polity. Or, finally—in our own discipline—a political philosophy thriving
for thirty years and supposedly dedicated to the elucidation of justice
that makes next to no mention of the centrality of racial injustice to the
“basic structure” of the United States and assumes instead that it will be
more theoretically appropriate to start from the “ideal theory” assump-
tion that society is the product of a mutually agreed upon, nonexploita-
tive enterprise to divide benefits and burdens in an equitable way—and
that this is somehow going to illuminate the distinctive moral problems
of a society based on exploitative white settlement. In whatever discipline
34 Charles W. Mills

that is affected by race, the “testimony” of the black perspective and its
distinctive conceptual and theoretical insights will tend to be whited out.
Whites will cite other whites in a closed circuit of epistemic authority that
reproduces white delusions.
Finally, the dynamic role of white group interests needs to be recog-
nized and acknowledged as a central causal factor in generating and sus-
taining white ignorance. Cognitive psychologists standardly distinguish
between “cold” and “hot” mechanisms of cognitive distortion, those at-
tributable to intrinsic processing difficulties and those involving motiva-
tional factors, and in analytic philosophy of mind and philosophical
psychology there is a large and well-established body of work on self-
deception and motivated irrationality, though located within an individ-
ualistic framework (McLaughlin and Rorty 1988; Mele 2001). So claim-
ing a link between interest and cognition is not at all unheard of in this
field. But because of its framing individualism, and of course the aprior-
istic exclusion in any case of the realities of white group domination, the
generalization to racial interests has not been carried out.
What needs to be done, I suggest, is to extrapolate some of this lit-
erature to a social context—one informed by the realities of race. Be-
cause of its marginalization of social oppression, the existing social
epistemology literature tends to ignore or downplay such factors. In
contrast, in the left tradition this was precisely the classic thesis: (class)
domination and exploitation were the foundation of the social order,
and as such they produced not merely material differentials of wealth in
the economic sphere but deleterious cognitive consequences in the
ideational sphere. Marxism’s particular analysis of exploitation, resting
as it does on the labor theory of value, has proven to be fatally vulnera-
ble. But obviously this does not negate the value of the concept itself,
suitably refurbished,2 nor undercut the prima facie plausibility of the
claim that if exploitative socioeconomic relations are indeed founda-
tional to the social order, then this is likely to have a fundamental shap-
ing effect on social ideation. In other words, one can detach from a class
framework a Marxist “materialist” claim about the interaction between
exploitation, group interest, and social cognition and apply it with far
more plausibility within a race framework. I have argued elsewhere that
racial exploitation (as determined by conventional liberal standards) has
usually been quite clear and unequivocal (think of Native American ex-
propriation, African slavery, Jim Crow), requiring—unlike exploitation
in the technical Marxist sense—no elaborate theoretical apparatus to
discern, and that it can easily be shown to have been central to U.S. his-
tory (Mills 2004). So vested white group interest in the racial status
quo—the “wages of whiteness” in David Roediger’s (1999) adaptation of
 White Ignorance 35

Du Bois’s famous phrase from Black Reconstruction (1998)—needs to be

recognized as a major factor in encouraging white cognitive distortions
of various kinds.
Nor is such “motivated irrationality” confined to the period of overt
racism and de jure segregation. Recent attitudinal research by Donald
Kinder and Lynn Sanders on public policy matters linked to race reveals
“a deep and perhaps widening racial divide [that] makes the discovery of
commonality and agreement between the races a dim prospect,” and
central to the shaping of white opinion, it turns out, is their perception
of their group interests: “the threats blacks appear to pose to whites’ col-
lective well-being, not their personal welfare” (Kinder and Sanders 1996,
33, 85). Race is the primary social division in the United States, these two
political scientists conclude, and whites generally see black interests as
opposed to their own. Inevitably, then, this will affect white social cogni-
tion—the concepts favored (e.g., today’s “color blindness”), the refusal
to perceive systemic discrimination, the convenient amnesia about the
past and its legacy in the present, and the hostility to black testimony on
continuing white privilege and the need to eliminate it to achieve racial
justice. As emphasized at the start, then, these analytically distinguishable
cognitive components are in reality all interlocked with and reciprocally
determining one another, jointly contributing to the blindness of the
white eye.
In his wonderfully titled States of Denial, Stanley Cohen (2001) argues
that “[w]hole societies may slip into collective modes of denial”:

Besides collective denials of the past (such as brutalities against indige-

nous peoples), people may be encouraged to act as if they don’t know
about the present. Whole societies are based on forms of cruelty, dis-
crimination, repression or exclusion which are “known” about but
never openly acknowledged. . . . Indeed, distortions and self-delusions
are most often synchronized. . . . Whole societies have mentioned and
unmentionable rules about what should not be openly talked about.
You are subject to a rule about obeying these rules, but bound also by a
meta-rule which dictates that you deny your knowledge of the original
rule. (10–11, 45)

White ignorance has been able to flourish all of these years because a
white epistemology of ignorance has safeguarded it against the dangers of
an illuminating blackness or redness, protecting those who for “racial”
reasons have needed not to know. Only by starting to break these rules
and meta-rules can we begin the long process that will lead to the eventual
overcoming of this white darkness and the achievement of an enlighten-
ment that is genuinely multiracial.
36 Charles W. Mills

Notes
1. However, Hochschild’s book initiated a debate in Belgium that has now
led to a Royal Museum of Central Africa show on the issue: “Memory of Congo:
The Colonial Era.” Belgian historians dispute his figures and reject the charge
of genocide. See the New York Times, February 9, 2005, B3.
2. See Ruth J. Sample (2003) for a recent Kantian updating of the concept
and an argument for bringing it back to the center of our concerns.

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