In his chapter “White Ignorance” Richard W Mills seeks to examine and expound on the interwoven nature of white supremacy and white ignorance. In his argument, Mills describes how white people can afford the luxury of not having to educate themselves on the contextual and cultural influences or background of the world that they live in as their privilege supervenes so as to allow for a significant level of insulation from the accountability for those outcomes. Meanwhile, other minorities (racial, gender and sexual) are forced to assimilate and espouse the values, morals, norms and social practices of these “whites” in a quest to survive. Mills argues that “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, that in certain time periods can even determine their life or death on a whim.” In essence, Mills allows for the reader to move beyond the term “ignorance” and seeks to highlight that fact that, had white ignorance been solely a problem due to asymmetric knowledge, generations of Black would not have had to deal with the phenomenon of racism. If perception can be loosely defined as our ability to become aware of something through the sense and conception can be broadly understood as the mental image of symbols as well describe abstract ideas, this paper, will examine how the “Foundational concepts of racialized differences…preclude a veridical perception of non-whites” through the ways that Mills ties in the theories of perception and conception to highlight how whites intentionally disremember, alter the world according to their understanding and change the rules of engagement for the rest of population.
Mills begins his chapter on White Ignorance by explaining that, as a phenomenon, White Ignorance is by no means an extra-ordinary circumstance. In fact, Mills can be seen to define it as a cognitive tendency that has characterized modern mainstream…epistemology. In noting the commonality of its occurrence, Mills argues that this flaw is detrimental. His argument can be seen to centre around the fact that at its core, white ignorance is harmful because it centres itself around a knowledge system which affects the perception, or the ability of individuals to become aware of an aspect through their senses. It is particularly problematic given that these perceptions are arbitrary and have no biologoical or sociological basis. In affecting the perception, Mills furthers the harm caused by white ignorance by highlighting the effects it can play in the preceding conceptions that white people form about people of color and its problematic nature when these conceptions effect social practices that have now become engrained into society’s way of living. With these social practices and their apparently seamless integration into society, it can be seen that white people have no motivation to amend or correct the imbalances that exist which result in people of color being placed in a perpetual state of disadvantage that forces them to a lesser societal standing. Furthermore, it can be seen that these perceptions translate into the policies that we form and thus the “foundational concepts of racialized differences preclude a veridical perception of non-whites”
For Mills, while white ignorance’s predominance in Wissenssoziologie is complex, he further its devasting impact by highlighting how it can serve to problematically allow for whites to alter perception, conception and ultimately the world according to their understanding. The result of these changes is that it allows for the elimination of an avenue for reconciliation and change to administer to the disadvantages that people of color experience. According Mills, when knowledge starts to inform perception, there is a direct impact on the conceptions that white people form about people of color. Examples of this misinformation hallmark history and can seen to range from the discreditation of the American genocide to the perception of Native Americans as savages. And given our understanding of Butler’s stance on humanity’s affinity with self-deception in order to protect a positive self image, with these misconstrued conceptions, white people fail to recognize the illusion of knowledge and begin to feel that their supposedly superior perspective is more informed than that of those formed by people of color creating a slave-master dilemma. In this issue, the informed knowledge that people of color create as a result of their experiences is discounted to the knowledge created by white people through their lens of ignorance. And while this problematic in it of itself, Mills argues that it the real issue arises when history as a whole is altered. With this altered history, the perceptions that society creates is inherently one sided and biased in nature. However, in tying this back to the intertwining of perception, conception and white ignorance, it can be argued that the most devastation occurs when altered history serves to create a superiority between the races that leads to institutional disempowerment and thus a racist foundation for “concepts of racialized differences preclude a veridical perception of non-whites”
Furthering the argument of the intersection of white privilege with perception and conception, in a modern day context and white people can be seen to discredit a racist system while replacing it with a “race neutral” status quo that inadvertently serves to freeze the past impacts of racism instead of ameliorating them. The perpetuation of the hegemony of a raceeless attitude currently leads many whites to think that most blacks are in fact racist given the predominance of race in their activism. Going back in history, white ignorance can be seen to affect conceptions and perceptions to such large degrees that black slaves were animalized and savages were considered to be humanoids or “less human”. And while today’s society perhaps does not conform to such extreme standards, a similar level of denial persists in that the race problems of people of color are diminished and given the persistence of white ignorance, efforts aimed at race-related problems are side-lined given advantage that they may provide. However, it always for whites to forget the disadvantaged position that people of color begin with.