Willful Ignorance

Social Justice Usage

Source: Tuana, Nancy. “The Speculum of Ignorance: The Women’s Health Movement and Epistemologies of Ignorance.” Hypatia, 21(3), 2016: 1–19, p. 11.

Willful ignorance is a deception that we impose upon ourselves, but it is not an isolated lie we consciously tell ourselves, a belief we know to be false but insist on repeating. Rather, willful ignorance is a systematic process of self-deception, a willful embrace of ignorance that infects those who are in positions of privilege, an active ignoring of the oppression of others and one’s role in that exploitation.

New Discourses Commentary

Willful ignorance is a fairly common concept that most of us understand to mean not knowing and not wanting to know. This is, in fact, also and for the most part how Critical Social Justice understands the concept, although what it believes people to be willfully ignorant about includes ideas—like racism and white supremacy—that many outside the ideology might not agree with. It also employs a rather expansive understanding of the operative term, “willful” (see also, complicity, white complicity, and white ignorance).

In brief, in most applicative contexts, Critical Social Justice Theorizes willful ignorance to be the reason for just about any disagreement with the claims of Critical Social Justice, especially if a member of some “dominant” social group (e.g., white, male, straight, able-bodied, etc.). Because of ideas in critical whiteness studies like “white comfort” and “white equilibrium,” white people do not know and don’t want to know about the realities of race, racism, whiteness, privilege, or white supremacy, and they don’t have to know because of other ideas like “white complicity,” “white innocence,” “white solidarity,” the “racial contract,” and being a “good white” who engages in “aversive racism,” “colortalk,” and “white talk.” Such people are also Theorized to suffer “white fragility” which is a lack of “racial stamina” and “racial humility” through which any “racial stress” becomes intolerable (see also, white woman tears). Because one’s privilege is Theorized to seek to maintain itself and includes the idea of not having to understand oppression (see also, internalized dominance), they will also resist any attempt to introduce “epistemic friction” (see also, pedagogy of discomfort) through “discursive strategies” like “privilege-preserving epistemic pushback” and generating “shadow texts” that prevent authentic engagement with Critical Social Justice ideas (i.e., positive agreement with them). All of this is Theorized in one way or another to be connected to willful ignorance (see also, active ignorance and pernicious ignorance).

This sounds crazy (because it mostly is), but within the context of Critical Social Justice, it is at least comprehensible. What Critical Social Justice means by being willfully ignorant is, in many cases, not having adopted a critical consciousness, i.e., wokeness, with regard to the “realities” (as it sees them) of systemic power dynamics and politics in society. As one would engage completely differently with these claims if one had that mindset, and most people who don’t have one “don’t know it and don’t want to know it” (because it’s not a great way to think about things), not possessing a critical consciousness and not being a critical theorist interested in the objectives of “Social Justice” as an ideology must be willfully ignorant of what the woke are talking about.

This explains the rather expansive view of “willful” taken in the Critical Social Justice understanding of willful ignorance, but how expansive this idea is bears some mentioning. As can be read below in the example from Barbara Applebaum, some effort has been taken in the philosophical Critical Social Justice and critical whiteness literature to expand the meaning of “willful” in a deliberate effort to include that which isn’t actually willful at all. Indeed, this problem presented something of a low hurdle for Theorists until Applebaum developed her concept of white complicity in a sufficiently expansive way to explain how benefiting from white privilege and viewing whiteness as the default racial position (and its alleged social dominance as normal) creates moral culpability for the beneficiaries of whiteness whether they intend it or not. Thus, white ignorance becomes a form of willful ignorance, and the concept of “willful” expands as necessary.

More formally, willful ignorance is Theorized in similar fashion as in characterizing white ignorance—a type of willful ignorance—as an “epistemology of ignorance.” That is, willful ignorance is characterized as a way of knowing with the explicit purpose of not knowing, or, rather, knowing other (allegedly false) things that stand in place of learning or otherwise prevent learning what Theory teaches (see also, racial humility and cultural humility). It is therefore considered a way of marginalizing alternative knowledge(s), especially those with Critical Social Justice relevance (see also, epistemic injustice, epistemic oppression, and epistemic violence; nb, these are usually Theorized under “pernicious ignorance” instead of willful ignorance).

As can be read below, a rather alarming set of behaviors (at least from a position of liberalism and science) are considered to be willful ignorance by Critical Social Justice. These include requesting evidence of the claims being made about systemic bigotries (see also, epistemic exploitation), feeling qualified to discuss (read: disagree with) Critical Social Justice points raised by member of minoritized or oppressed groups (see also, shut up and listen and lived experience), providing counterexamples to the claims of Critical Social Justice (see also, privilege-preserving epistemic pushback and shadow text), and reacting emotionally to either the (often incendiary) claims or (often bullying) approach of proponents of Critical Social Justice (see also, white fragility).

Related Terms

Active ignorance; Authentic; Colortalk; Complicity; Critical; Critical consciousness; Critical theory; Cultural humility; Discourse; Dominance; Engagement; Epistemic exploitation; Epistemic friction; Epistemic injustice; Epistemic oppression; Epistemic violence; Good white; Ideology; Internalized dominance; Knowledge(s); Liberalism; Marginalization; Normal; Oppression; Pedagogy of discomfort; Pernicious ignorance; Position; Privilege; Privilege-preserving epistemic pushback; Race; Racial contract; Racial humility; Racial stamina; Racial stress; Racism (systemic); Science; Shadow text; Social Justice; Systemic power; Theory; Ways of knowing; White; White complicity; White equilibrium; White fragility; White ignorance; White innocence; White solidarity; White supremacy; White talk; White woman tears; Whiteness; Whiteness studies

Additional Examples

Source: Tuana, Nancy. “The Speculum of Ignorance: The Women’s Health Movement and Epistemologies of Ignorance.” Hypatia, 21(3), 2016: 1–19, p. 11.

In her essay “Managing Ignorance,” Elizabeth Spelman turns to a passage from the writings of James Baldwin to unpack the nature of such willful ignorance. Baldwin asserted in The Fire Next Time: “This is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it” (Baldwin 1963, 15, quoted in Spelman forthcoming, emphasis added).

Spelman argues that the ignorance at work in instances of systematic racism is not a simple “not knowing,” but rather an achievement that must be managed. She claims that this ignorance to which Baldwin refers—the harms caused by slavery currently being perpetuated by systematic racism—is not a simple lack of knowledge of the ongoing oppression of blacks or even a belief that the claim that there is such oppression is false. Spelman contends that it is rather a desire to have the facts on which Baldwin bases his accusation be false, coupled by a fear that they are not, but where the consequences of their being true are so high, it is better to cultivate ignorance. In the words of Spelman,

W [White Americans] ignores g [the claim that Black America’s grievances are real], avoids as much as he can thinking about g. He wants g to be false, but if he treats g as something that could be false, then he would also have to regard it as something that could be true. Better to ignore g all together, given the fearful consequences of its being true. Better not to have thought at all, than to have thought and lost…ignoring g, not thinking about it, allows W to stand by g’s being false, to be committed to gs being false, without believing g is false. (Spelman forthcoming)

Willful ignorance is a deception that we impose upon ourselves, but it is not an isolated lie we consciously tell ourselves, a belief we know to be false but insist on repeating. Rather, willful ignorance is a systematic process of self-deception, a willful embrace of ignorance that infects those who are in positions of privilege, an active ignoring of the oppression of others and one’s role in that exploitation.

…

Source: Bailey, Alison. “Tracking Privilege-Preserving Epistemic Pushback in Feminist and Critical Race Philosophy Classes.” Hypatia, 32(4), 2017: 876–892, p. 879.

Epistemic home terrains must be constantly and vigilantly guarded and defended. Broadly speaking, privilege-preserving epistemic pushback is a form of worldview protection: a willful resistance to knowing that occurs predictably in discussions that threaten a social group’s epistemic home terrain. Defending that terrain is one way for dominant groups to resist “new material that deeply unsettles the paradigms through which they make sense of the world. When ideologies like the myth of meritocracy or their sense of who they are as a person, are deeply unsettled, students will often fall back on various defense mechanisms to try to maintain order.” In practice, privilege-preserving epistemic pushback is a family of cognitive, affective, nonverbal, and discursive tactics that are used habitually to avoid engaging ideas that threaten us. This resistance, as José Medina argues, offers a form of “cognitive self-protection.” When our sense of self, group identity, core beliefs, and privileged place in the social order is challenged, we adopt defensive postures to resist what we perceive to be destabilizing. Protecting our epistemic terrain requires that we put up barriers made of opinions and prejudices, which are fortified by anger, shame, guilt, indifference, arrogance, jealously, pride, and sometimes silence. These feelings sit in our bodies: our hearts beat faster, our muscles tighten, we scowl, and our minds chatter. Sometimes we shut down completely.

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Source: Bailey, Alison. “Tracking Privilege-Preserving Epistemic Pushback in Feminist and Critical Race Philosophy Classes.” Hypatia, 32(4), 2017: 876–892, p. 885.

Good teaching must track simultaneously the social production of knowledge and ignorance. As Nancy Tuana explains, “if we are to fully understand the complex practices of knowledge production and the variety of factors that account for why something is known, we must also understand the practices that account for not knowing, that is, for our lack of knowledge about a phenomenon” (Tuana 2006, 9–10). Willful ignorance circulates in even the most progressive spaces. We can make these spaces of ignorance mindful, but never ignorance-free. If privilege-preserving epistemic pushback is an expression of ignorance, then we need a critical philosophical practice for making it visible and tracking it productively. To this end I’m recommending that we work toward becoming attentive to privilege-preserving epistemic pushback and to use these episodes as points of traction to explore how we cling to ignorance in the service of dodging discomfort.

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Source: Sensoy, Ozlem, and Robin DiAngelo. Is Everyone Really Equal?: An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education, first edition. Teacher’s College Press: New York, 2012, pp. 73–74.

The invisibility of privilege for the dominant group member [is a way oppression is maintained]. While many of the dynamics discussed above make privilege invisible to the dominant group, there is also a phenomenon that scholars describe as “sanctioned not-knowing” or “willful ignorance.” These terms attempt to describe dynamics that help dominant group members remain ignorant to the overwhelming evidence of injustice in society. While many dominant group members claim that they simply don’t know about the minoritized group, invoking a sense of innocence, the information is easily available. Thus we use the phrase “willful ignorance” because minoritized groups have always tried to get dominant groups to see and understand their experiences, but dominant group members often aggressively resist this information. These forms of denial and resistance include:

• Demanding more data to “prove” the injustice (“When were these statistics published? I think things have changed in the last 10 years.”)
• Feeling qualified, without any study of the issue, to argue with people who experience the oppression and with experts in the field (“I disagree that disability is socially constructed.”)
• Giving counter examples or exceptions to the rule (“But Roosevelt had a disability and he was president!”)
• Channel switching (“The true oppression is class. If you eliminate classism all other oppressions will disappear.”)
• Intimidation (“You might advance more if you were a team player.”)
• Defensiveness (“Are you calling me ableist? I have an aunt with a disability!”)
• Negating research and explaining away injustice by giving personal and anecdotal stories (“There was a kid in a wheelchair in our class. Everybody loved him and no one even noticed his wheelchair.”)

All of the dominant ideologies in society support willful ignorance. The ideologies of meritocracy, equal opportunity, individualism, and human nature we described above play a powerful role in denying the “current” and insisting that society is just.

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Source: Applebaum, Barbara. Being White, Being Good: White Complicity, White Moral Responsibility, and Social Justice Pedagogy. Lexington Books, 2010, pp. 38–39.

White ignorance may be but is not always the result of a deliberate and conscious decision. Yet, as already noted, often such ignorance does not seem willful in the sense of intentional but rather the product of a socially induced tendency to ignore that involves being unaware that one does not know. Why categorize white ignorance as willful?

I suggest that white ignorance might be understood to be a form of willful ignorance because willful ignorance is culpable ignorance. Interesting and complex questions about culpable ignorance can be found in the ethical debates around moral responsibility and will be addressed in Chapter 5. Briefly, involuntary ignorance is often thought to excuse one from moral culpability unless one knowingly contrives one’s own ignorance. Then one is culpable even if one is ignorant.

White ignorance may be a type of willful ignorance because there is a sense in which white people deliberately contrive their own ignorance. But white ignorance might also be willful not necessarily because the ignorance is consciously or deliberately manufactured but instead willful because such ignorance benefits the person or the social group the person is a member of. Members of the dominant group, for instance, have a vested interest in not knowing. Linda Alcoff emphasizes that white people not only have less interest in understanding their complicity in social injustice than those who are victimized by such systems but also that white people have a positive interest in remaining ignorant. The point is that even if one does not deliberately manufacture such ignorance, white ignorance does not release one from moral responsibility and might be willful in the sense that it is something that someone would want. One of the types of vested interests that such ignorance serves is the sustaining of one’s moral self-image.

Revision date: 2/24/20

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