K. Bailey Thomas is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at Dartmouth College (2022-2024) and is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Louisville. They are currently at work on two manuscripts—one on the oppressive nature of ignorance using a concept they have called “insidious ignorance” and the second on Black American feminist politics and ethics of care and caring.
A post by K. Bailey Thomas
In this post I provide a brief account of imaginative resistance that is rooted in ignorance. To be clear: here, and throughout the piece, I am referring to ignorance as ideology unless otherwise specified. This means I am considering facets and manifestations of ignorance that are not accidental or blameless but are manufactured specifically to harm others. This thought piece is inspired by my current manuscript-in-progress wherein I am exploring how ignorance is an essential building block in the construction of oppressive resistant imaginations. I am particularly interested in examining how our current understanding of ignorance relies too heavily on presumptions of innocence on behalf of epistemic agents, which allows an immediate association of ignorance with one being not at fault or responsible for their actions. By the end of this piece, I hope to provide a generative account of how what I call “Insidious Ignorance” remains a core component in both the construction and maintenance of resistant imaginations, resulting in various social, ethical, and epistemic harms.
While many may associate the concept of imaginative resistance with José Medina’s 2012 text The Epistemology of Resistance, early notions of the concept posited it as type of cognitive failure. There has been (and remains) much debate about what causes this deficit, however, and some have taken this failure to stem from a psychological desire (or necessity) for our beliefs to be morally true. When faced with the possibility—or even the suggestion—that our beliefs are not grounded in sort of reality, this can lead to great discomfort and even mental distress in individuals (Driver 2008). As a college student during the 2016 U.S. presidential election and first portion of Trump’s term, I can vividly remember the heated arguments I had with classmates, dormmates, and friends about “fake news” and “alternative facts”. Aside from their unwillingness to concede to empirical facts and historical accounts, I was endlessly fascinated by the conviction with which they uttered their beliefs. To be clear, this fascination was not one rooted in admiration, but a sense of abjection. It seemed to be that the resistance expressed by Trump supporters was not just an expression of an alternative social view, but the very denial of the existence of any view that countered their own. It would be remiss to just refer to this phenomenon as gaslighting because the subjects in this case seemingly do truly believe their convictions. At the very least they seem intent on following through with these convictions despite any negative repercussions, like serving time in federal prison for attempting to stop a constitutional democratic process. The failed insurrection on January 6, 2021 demonstrated the extent to which people are committed to fight to make their delusional worldviews a reality. I call these perspectives delusional as opposed to misguided or misaligned given that the subjects involved in these activities are active participants in the creation of these delusions.
Over the past several years my research has been heavily focused on studying and tracing various themes of ignorance in philosophical thought, including those outside of academic philosophy. This interest in ignorance, surprisingly, existed long before former U.S. President Donald J. Trump uttered the words “fake news” (even though this phrase existed before Trump’s attack on the media; see Wendling 2018 for a short history of this phrase). Our imaginations are powerful and at times conflicting—in one instance they are mighty, liberatory forces that shatter hegemonic epistemic frameworks, and in another instance, they reify structures and systems of oppression that wreak havoc in our societies. Ignorance can be weaponized in both instances; Alison Bailey’s work on what she calls “strategic ignorance” is exemplary of the former (Bailey 2007), but admittedly my philosophical and personal interest lies in the latter.
It is very easy to associate these attitudes and ways of non-knowing with Trump, but this seems to me to be an inaccurate, albeit understandable, association. Moral ways of non-knowing, also known as “epistemologies of ignorance,” have been examined in scholarship long before 2016. Most readers are probably familiar with the term as it was popularized in Charles Mills’ work, beginning in The Racial Contract. Mills defines “epistemologies of ignorance” as an “inverted epistemology” (Mills 1997, 18). This inverted epistemology enables white people to misinterpret the world of their own creation not by mere accident, but through the enforcement of the Racial Contract (ibid, 18-19). The manner of resistance displayed by subjects weaponizing epistemic ignorance, especially white ignorance, appears to be quite similar to that of epistemic imaginative resistance.[i] In both instances subjects have cultivated a worldview that supports deluded beliefs, and in the case of epistemic imaginative resistance, some have gone as far as to rewrite historical narratives to support these delusions.
The kinds of resistant imaginations I am interested in are certainly strategic, although not in the liberatory sense as what Bailey describes. What I call “insidious ignorance” cultivates resistant imaginations through a parasitic relationship between the willfully ignorant and socially powerful hegemonic groups. Maintaining a sense of social power and capital is pivotal for hegemonic groups to take full advantage of the willfully ignorant and their resources. Those who are willfully ignorant may be so for a variety of reasons, although this kind of ignorance is most popularly understood as the result of an emotional response to knowledge that makes us uncomfortable and ill-at-ease. I want to make a slight distinction between this group and those who intentionally choose to close their minds to alternative epistemologies because they are aware these ways of knowing could alter the power differentials that allow them to oppress socially marginalized groups. Hegemonic groups specifically target certain groups of willfully ignorant subjects who are vulnerable to accepting lies and/or mistruths of a certain kind. Think in this instance of white supremacist leaders who target poor white populations and expose them to racist rhetoric against racial minorities. Even if the poor whites have an inkling that these ‘truths’ may be false, there is nevertheless the earnest desire to believe them because these beliefs are core components of their social identity and their understanding of social hierarchy in their communities. Insidious Ignorance is the relationship that is formed between the willfully ignorant and oppressive hegemonic groups as they feed off each other to gain social power and capital. The resistant imaginations that result from this symbiotic relationship, I argue, are precisely why phenomena like white supremacy, patriarchy, ableism, etc. continue to persist despite their identification.
Most recently I have been researching how our imaginations operate in the social political sphere, particularly when it comes to racialized and gendered violence in the United States. Poet Claudia Rankine comments on this when she writes in Citizen: An American Lyric, “Because white men can’t/ police their imagination/ black men are dying,” (Rankine 2014, 135). This line struck me immediately when I first read Citizen in 2015 and has occupied the recesses of my mind ever since. Resistant imaginations are essential to the sustainment of any oppressive or liberatory ideology. Many of us want to believe another world besides the one we currently inhabit is possible to create, the difference is that for some of us those worlds are more deadly than others. These oppressive resistant imaginations often become entangled in other ideologies which can, at times, make it difficult to diagnose insidious ignorance. It is not uncommon for these imaginations to become rooted in our conceptual frameworks, which I wager is one reason why for some people it is so easy to dismiss any evidence that is counterfactual to their world view.
In my manuscript I unravel the puzzling nature of insidious ignorance, particularly when it pertains to how it impacts our ways of knowing, which (of course) includes our imaginations. If left unchecked our imaginations can create monsters out of socially marginalized subjects, and as Toni Morrison notes, this results in the death of those deemed “Other” (Morrison 2017). The violence that is used to subjugate non-whites has a long history in this country, one that cannot be simply undone by changing civic codes or federal policies. The question remains which method(s) are best to go about changing the mindset of hegemonic groups, especially if they personally benefit from the oppression of others.[ii] If ignorance is indeed a means of knowing, then it seems prudent to consider the implications of ignorance, particularly manufactured ignorance, on our social and individual imaginations.
Notes:
[i] At the risk of sounding redundant, I say “epistemic imaginative resistance” to distinguish the form of imaginative resistance to those depicted in non-philosophical texts and discussions.
[ii] I realize that concepts such as white privilege state that all white people and those who are white passing/racialized as white in certain spaces benefit from white supremacy. I am not disagreeing with this but noting that a common rebuttal to this theory is that poor whites, for example, do not benefit from white privilege because many white people who explicitly do are often wealthy and benefitting from other systems of domination, such as patriarchy. The resistant imaginations of poor whites, which has constructed their world view and understanding of history, rejects the suggestion of any potential—or impactful—benefits of white privilege. That said, we are going to need to be more creative in our approaches to dismantling the imaginations and false social memories that have resulted from this inverted epistemology.
References:
Bailey, A. 2007 ‘Strategic Ignorance’, in S. Sullivan and N. Tuana (eds) Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, New York: State University of New York Press, 77– 95.
Driver, Julia, 2008, “Imaginative Resistance and Psychological Necessity”, Social Philosophy and Policy, 25(1): 301–313.
Morrison, Toni. The Origin of Others. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 2017.
Rankine, Claudia. (2014). Citizen. Penguin Books.
Wendling, Mike. “The (almost) complete history of ‘fake news’”. BBC News, January 22, 2018, https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-42724320.