Analysis Of White Ignorance By Charles White Mills

In his extensive work, “White Ignorance” the Caribbean born social philosopher Charles W. Mills postulates a political theory oppositional to Classical American Academia which cites race, in particular the dominant white race, as the dynamic force behind the ignorance which plagues the gap between multiracial equality. Mills elucidates his argument through a platform of laws from which any individual case may or may not be reputed as resulting from white ignorance. While all races to some degree exhibit a natural tendency judge others customs based on criterion that glorifies their own ways, otherwise known as Ethnocentrism, it is the white man’s variant which has laid the framework for the modern condition of all peoples on Earth. The author …show more content…
Europe’s peoples perceived their success as an example of their superiority and their superiority to be exemplified in their success. From this malignant viewpoint, Mills contends the whites elevated themselves into a separate entity whose history was both more important and determinant over the fate of all other peoples considered lesser. If not white, the nonwhite Other is predisposed as inferior and unable to possess moral prowess. It is this blindness of the concept itself that hinders the white cognizer from seeing what is before them. He connects past overt racist behavior into the present day by developing the theory that current efforts to promote “color blindness” refuse to recognize the structures of oppression that allow consequent privileges for white individuals throughout all levels of society and corroborate a fundamental denial of the interconnectedness which the components of knowing and non-knowing depend upon. The author highlights the collective social memory of white society, comprised of countless individual doxastic cognitions being just as much alive as the individual cognizers who experience these occurrences. Therefore, promoting racelessness does not strengthen our common memory; instead selecting to forget past atrocities committed against peoples of color fosters a social amnesia in which people of all ethnic groups are directly conflicted by epistemic ignorance of one another. Mills concludes his argument on page 35 when he adduces the active process of knowing by which whites use as a tool to safeguard the ignorance which for so long has protected the masses from the true struggles of people of color whom for racially inspired reasons are discriminated against whether or not our society chooses to recognize