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Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (review)

Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance is collaborative philosophy at its very best. The essays that the editors have assembled constitute a very successful critical intervention in philosophy through a set of challenging dialogues on race and epistemic practices. This critical intervention raises exciting questions for future generations of scholars in epistemology, race theory, political philosophy, and philosophy more generally. Drawing on the pioneering work of Charles Mills and standpoint epistemologists (e.g., Marilyn Frye and Sandra Harding), the essays in this volume identify problematic limitations and assumptions in traditional ways of philosophizing that have been pervasive. They delineate the contours of blind spots that operate both in academia and in the social world outside it, tracing their origins and their consequences. They identify questions that have gone not only unanswered but unasked for too long. The critical work that this volume does is innovative and at the same time fi rmly grounded in rich theoretical traditions that have been marginalized by the philosophical establishment (race theory, feminist theory, and—more recently—queer theory). In this sense, Lorraine Code calls attention to the philosophical excavations of Michèle Le Doeuff, who uncovers a forgotten critical tradition of women philosophers (such as Gabrielle Suchon in the seventeenth century) who offered critical refl ections on the exclusions and distortions of masculine knowledge, providing critical tools to develop alternative epistemic practices. On the other hand, in African American philosophy there has been a long and important tradition of critical discourses that identify and diagnose racially motivated forms of ignorance. From DuBois to contemporary race theorists, racial ignorance has been shown to involve entrenched habits and attitudes that go well beyond a mere absence of true belief or a mere presence of false belief; racial ignorance has been shown to be based on a lack of interest to know and a lack of opportunities to explore social realities pertaining to race. As Elizabeth Spelman points out, this is the centerpiece of James Baldwin’s powerful indictment of white America: “that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it” (119). This ignorance is based on a deeply seated epistemic resistance to know. It is a very active and resilient form of not-knowing, not a mere unwillingness to believe, not a mere casual neglect or a simple form of self-deception. It is an ignorance that requires a carefully orchestrated and laboriously maintained form of epistemic neglect, an unknowingness carefully