Contract, Cognition & Ideology: Understanding the Foundations of Charles W.

Mills’s White ignorance

Zara BainPhD Student

University of Reading (Politics)/University of Bristol (Philosophy)

@zaranosaur / z.i.d.bain@pgr.reading.ac.uk 1

The project

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• Preliminary sketch of plural basis of white ignorance via contract theory, social epistemology, and ideology

• Textual teasers – an incitement to delve into Mills’s overall body of work to understand this concept

What’s going on?• Many versus one foundation?

• What does each supply to the concept that the others don’t?

• Why not just “white racist ideology”?

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An aside: project context

• Mills’s white ignorance as starting point for “one-dimensional structural privileged-group ignorance”

• What about multi-dimensional structural privileged-group ignorance (+disability, +trans, +queer, +LGBT) – i.e. intersectionality?

• White ignorance = “one-dimensional white blindness” inadequate to capture “simultaneous insight and sightlessness” of intersecting oppressions & privileges (see ‘Intersecting Contracts’ in C&D)

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Understanding Charles Mills on white ignorance

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The standard model

White ignorance as central to understanding white supremacy

“one of the most important, though most subtle and elusive, aspects of white supremacy is the barriers it erects to a fair hearing…people of colour… are…handicapped…by having to operate within a white discursive field…biased by dominant white cognitive patterns of structured ignorance, an overt or hidden white normativity, and a conceptual recalcitrance to accommodating certain realities.”

-- From Class to Race (2003), 216 (henceforth FCTR)

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Understanding Charles Mills on white ignorance 2.0

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… and the rest!

(RC)

(FCTR)

(C&D)

(WI)

(WIHI)

Contract• The Racial Contract

(1997)• Contract & domination

(2007)

Cognition• ‘White ignorance’ (2007)

Ideology• From Class to Race (2003)

• ‘White Ignorance & Hermeneutical Injustice’ (2013)

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White ignorance: basic definition

• Historicised cognitive phenomenon

• False but functional “structural group miscognition”

• Cognitive tendency on part of whites, as a group -- but not only whites -- toward “self-deception, bad faith, evasion and misrepresentation” (WI, 17)

• On matters of race, racism, racial domination, and the history of European imperialism and settler-colonialism central to the construction of contemporary racial realities.

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ContractMills draws attention to epistemological dimension of social contract theory generally:

• An “idealized consensus about cognitive norms”

• An epistemic “agreement or ‘contract’… an understanding about what counts as a correct, objective interpretation of the world”

• In return for agreement, “one is… is granted full cognitive standing in the polity, the official epistemic community” (RC, 17-18)

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For the Racial Contract (RC) specifically:

• “an agreement to misinterpret the world…

• to learn to see the world wrongly, but with the assurance that this set of mistaken perceptions will be validated by white epistemic authority.”

• It “prescribes for its signatories an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance” (18)

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Contract

“Part of what it means to be… ‘white’… is a cognitive model that precludes self-transparency and a genuine understanding of [racialized] social realities.” (RC, 18)

I.e., the ‘price of admission’ to the white political community is an epistemic ‘buy-in’ to white understanding of racial realities, i.e. self-deception, evasion, denial, even as they appear within the social contract itself.

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Contract

Cognition‘White ignorance’ (2007) (WI) as:

• “structural group-based miscognition” (13), “group-based cognitive handicap” (15)

• ‘mapping’ epistemology of ignorance via…

• Social epistemology: “social… routes to knowledge [or error] … as contrasted with private or asocial routes to belief acquisition” (Goldman 1999,4; in WI, 17)

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CognitionVeritistic, realist commitment to “truth, falsity, facts, reality”, where epistemology of ignorance implies contrasting “’knowledge’… that would be lost if all claims to truth were equally spurious” (15)

Note: “miscognition” not possible under accounts that relativize or eschew truth altogether

Even if Mills is a social constructivist with regard to race, he isn’t with regard to knowledge of the consequences of the social construction.

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Cognition• Mercator projection world map• Inextricability from conceptionPerception

• Myth of the “savage”• Colour-blind ideologyConception• Collective memory, collective amnesia• “[S]ocial memory made marble & concrete”

Memory

• Systematic presumption against, erasure of, testimony from people of colour in general

Testimony• Generates & sustains white ignorance• Existing lit. on individual interest & cognition

Motivated group-interest

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Ideology• Obvious choice given

– Mills’s work on Marxism, ideology (see especially From Class to Race (2003))

– focus on sociality of belief & significance of dominator-group-interest for cognition.

• Runs in background of overall account– Passing references: RC, WI– Load-lifting: FCTR, C&D, WIHI

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IdeologyDemystification of white ignorance in response to Fricker:

white ignorance as “white racist ideology”, “a set of misleading views that distort social realities in ways that serve to create, perpetuate, and justify racial domination and unfair racial advantage … [such that] race will doxastically and conceptually affect [cognizers] in multiple ways”

(‘White Ignorance & Hermeneutical Injustice’ (WIHI), 39)

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IdeologyBackground picture of political ontology of inter-group relations of oppression:

For any social groups G1 and G2, where G1 is structurally socio-politically, economically, juridically and thus, cognitively dominant over G2, “G1 ideology is pervasive and justifies and obfuscates G1 domination”, even for members of G2, who are “cognitively influenced by G1 ideology” and who, despite resistance, “are likely to have less access to the tools of intellectual development and may internalize the G1 view of them as inferior cognizers” (WIHI, 38-9)

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IdeologyVirtue of ideology? Non-volitional socialization of knowledge in contingent (but involving domination/oppression) material contexts.

Hence, in ‘Ideal Theory as Ideology’, ideology:

“not… thought of in terms of conscious conspiratorial manipulation, but rather in terms of social privilege and resulting differential experience, a non-representative phenomenological life-world (mis)taken for the world” (172)

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Why (not just) ideology?

• (Non-volitional) Sociality of belief: social production/reproduction of belief, knowledge, error (but not necessarily truth) all the way down

• Social ontology: groups in relations of oppression & domination (not just class)

• But a marginalized concept: “just ideology” (& what do we mean by that anyway?)

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Why cognition?• Methodology: standard (respectable?!) epistemological methods, extended to…

• Social doxastic causation: social routes to belief formation; scope for future analysis of individual/group/systems of belief formation

• Truth & Error: even if race socially constructed, facts about social consequences of race are not. Realism matters.

• Discursive intervention: getting discourse going here in relation to race (WIHI)

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Why contract?• Volitionality: ‘agreement’, ‘signatories’ – (some) cognizers ‘buy in’ to racist or colour-blind thinking, tacitly or explicitly

• Political participation as contingent on cognitive participation: white ignorance as price of entry to polity & its norms, privileges

• Plus: significance of contract as part of the white ignorance of mainstream (liberal) political philosophy and fetishization of Rawls

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Contract• Volitionality• Cognitive gate-keeping

• Complicity

Cognition• Methodology• (Social) doxastic causation

• Truth & Error

Ideology• Sociality of belief

• Social ontology

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Mills’s strategic motives

1.Discursive interventions: talking about race in domains where race/racism significant but ignored.

2.Choice between which white ignorant political philosophical worldview to engage – unpopular Marxism vs popular Liberalism.

3.Servicing deep philosophical commitments & goals

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Mills’s philosophical commitments

• Revisionist liberalism, radical social contract – black radical liberalism over white marxism

• Realism

• Scope requirement for (white-centered?) white ignorance & implications for responsibility: “white supremacist” vs “white ignorant” vs “white ally cookie-seeker”

• Revisionist ideology with different ontology (groups), metaphysics (realism), logic (intersectionality)

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Challenges for Mills• Intersectionality – beyond race, gender and class, especially disability (extended pejorative metaphors & denial of disability as a social oppression in C&D)

• Finer-grained analysis of causal routes to white ignorance – Racial Contract sufficient, but not necessary (esp. if contract claims rejected)

• Greater excavation of logic, metaphysics presupposed by the account

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Challenges to project• Much bigger than anticipated: needs systematic analysis across whole of Mills’s work; epistemological, metaphysical, moral and political components

• White-centered white-ignorance (avoiding “the Fricker fallacy”)

• Does ignorance = miscognition?

• Getting intersectionality right

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Thanks for listening!

Draft paper forthcoming via academia.edu - https://reading.academia.edu/ZaraBain

Comments & suggestions welcome – Twitter: @zaranosaur Email: z.i.d.bain@pgr.reading.ac.uk 28