Hierarchies of White ADVANTAGE and Reciprist Epistemology
LINSEY McGOEY
University of Essex, UNITED KINGDOM
Abstract
This article critically examines the legacy of Charles Mills’ concept of ‘white ignorance,’ raising concerns about the monolithic ways it frames white consciousness and advantage. I also examine conceptual problems with the wider field of ignorance studies. I suggest that critical engagement with the notion of ‘white ignorance’ helps to avoid re-fetishising racialized categories. It also helps to illuminate sometimes invisibilised cross-racial commonalities and reciprism among immiserated people of colour and immiserated white people across the world.
Keywords
Ignorance studies, reciprism, anti-binarism, economic inequality
Introduction
Charles Mills’ landmark text The Racial Contract, first published in 1997, is a short book with a strong legacy. It is one of the first major texts in political theory to theorize ignorance and unknowing as sources of political domination.
Today, the phrase ‘ignorance studies’ is increasingly used across sociology, anthropology, and the humanities – as well as disciplines such as economics and theories of professional practice like accountancy and nursing. My co-author Matthias Gross and I first coined the phrase ‘ignorance studies’ in our 2015 volume, the Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies, now in its 2nd edition (2022). Mills was a contributor to that volume, writing a well-cited chapter titled ‘Global White Ignorance’ (Mills, 2015; 2022).
Before the rise of ignorance studies, even the most path-breaking scholars of the relationship between knowledge and power still tended to elevate knowledge above ignorance at the linguistic level, something visible in the phrasing of notions like tacit knowledge (Polanyi, 1966), situated knowledges (Haraway, 1988), and subjugated knowledges (Foucault, 1980). In each of these terms, knowledge is the key linguistic focus, the privileged site within the knowledge/power nexus. A subjugated knowledge is still a ‘knowledge’. Later scholars shifted the lens, identifying ignorance as a fundamental source of power in itself, conceptualized through new terms such as elite ignorance, micro-ignorance, macro-ignorance, hostile ignorance, and male ignorance (c.f. Gross, 2010; McGoey, 2007; 2012; 2019; Ferguson and Lareau, 2021; O’Neill, 2022; Peels, 2023; Proctor and Schiebinger, 2007; Sullivan and Tuana, 2007).
A pioneer of this field, Mills makes an important point: that white supremacy has often been sustained through the avoidance of naming it for what it is. ‘Ironically, the most important political system of recent global history – the system of domination by which white people have historically ruled over and, in certain important ways, continue to rule over nonwhite people – is not seen as a political system at all’ (Mills, 2007[1997]: 1-2). He created a phrase for this absence, ‘white ignorance’, a term cited in a myriad of studies since.
Has this effort been worth it? Has the ‘triumph’ of ignorance studies as a recognized subfield helped to advance one of Mills’ own explicit goals, which was to galvanize people to resist to racialized categories of human worth – to challenge the racial contract?
In important ways, the answer may be no. I argue that Mills’s core concept – ‘white ignorance’ – can be a pyrrhic one, especially when it is misused in blanket ways that ignore Mills’ own qualifications attached to it. When it comes to ignorance studies more broadly, I suggest that the pairing of ignorance with monolith categories such as ‘male’ or ‘white’ can be overly epistemologically fatalistic, undermining the cross-racial, cross-class emancipatory movements that Mills advocated for.
This is not to suggest monolithic concepts should be abandoned – that’s not desirable or even possible. But concepts should not be deified either. Academic concepts and disciplines should morph and shift like franken-fields, refusing the tidiness of disciplinary boundaries. Why expect concepts to stay rigid like flowers in frost when metamorphosis leads to new growth?
I wish to hold a flame below the notion of ‘white ignorance’ and see how it looks in different lights. I want to explore its usefulness if you murmur the phrase to Donna Mae, an immiserated white woman in South Florida who works as a bartender and cleaner, who is 74 and can’t get by on her social security.
I want to distinguish her ignorance from powerful white men such as Donald Rumsfeld who exploited lies during the Iraq invasion and who in a bestselling memoir obfuscated his own role in facilitating the torture of political prisoners on a mass scale at Guantanamo Bay (Gittleman, 2011; Wolffe, 2021). There is clear evidence that Rumsfeld violated national and international laws by approving torture methods that were not authorized by the US Army Field Manual (see Gittleman, 2011; Stampnitzky, 2016). Less than a decade after the Iraq war, Rumsfeld then used his bestselling 2011 memoir to whitewash his role, attributing abusive behaviour such as the Abu Ghraib photos, which showed male and female guards yanking prisoners by collars like dogs, to some bad apples who ‘ran amok’ rather than acknowledge his complicity (see Wolffe, 2021).
Building on distinctions such as this – between an impoverished white woman who I interviewed in a veterans’ club in Fort Myers, Florida, in February 2024 and Donald Rumsfeld, one of the most powerful men in recent US history – I posit three chief problems with the concept of ‘white ignorance’:
- It can homogenize different forms of white privilege and obscure attention to different forms of class entitlement and class domination.
- It can impede robust theorizing of new forms of non-white dominator privilege, undermining the study of multi-racial nationalism movements and far-right support among minority groups.
- Ironically, it can flatter whites, perpetuating spurious assumptions of epistemic supremacy that important anti-racist scholarship seeks to dismantle.
Methodologically, I draw on qualitative interviews I am carrying out across eastern and southern regions in the US with wealthy, middle-income, and low-income voters living in the American rust belt and southern states including Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Florida. This is an ongoing project, with 65 semi-structured interviews completed to date. Vignettes from my interviews help me to extrapolate upon and defend my three core points above on the limits of Mills’ concept.
The structure is two-fold. In the first half, I summarize Mills’ notion. In the second half, I explain my critique, building on earlier scholarship that also calls for fluid, anti-monolithic treatments of whiteness. I conclude by arguing that in contrast to binary epistemology, we need something that shall be termed reciprist epistemology, defined as anti-monolithic thought that embraces the hybridity of racialized, classed identities.
The racial contract and white ignorance: A concept hardens
Mills introduced the notion of ‘epistemology of ignorance’ in The Racial Contract – although in that book he offers only brief attention to ignorance. He expands on it much more in his later work, including ‘White Ignorance’ (2007); ‘Global White Ignorance’ (2015; 2022), and his book Black Rights/White Wrongs (2017), to list the main places where he develops the concept.
In The Racial Contract, the sections where he first develops a theory of white ignorance are arresting and memorable: ‘on matters related to race,’ Mills writes, ‘the Racial Contract prescribes for its signatories an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance, a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions (which are psychologically and socially functional), producing the ironic outcome that whites will in general be unable to understand the world they have made’ (Mills, 2023[1997]: 18).
This is a compelling framing in many ways – I have cited it extensively over the years and used it to explore structural forms of ignorance and cognitive forms of unknowing (McGoey, 2019; 2020). But there are also problems with it, particularly with the second half of the passage above, where he suggests that ‘whites will in general be unable to understand the world they have made’. It’s a general claim that diverges from his main thesis in The Racial Contract, which is to point out the racial blindness and omissions within the academic study of social contract theory, particularly within analytical philosophy. His main aim, as philosopher Tommie Shelby writes, is to charge academia and political philosophy in particular ‘with being conceptually “white” and evasive about racial subjugation’ (Shelby, 2023: xxi).
The problems arise when Mills extrapolates from an empirical site that is comparably bounded, that of political philosophy, to then making causal claims about the motivations, subjectivity, and importantly the agency of all whites in general and the world ‘they have made.’ Even though Mills brings nuance to his theorizing about white consciousness, I suggest that his own conceptual language drowns his call for nuance – especially when applied by later interlocuters who largely ignore Mills’ own demand to pay attention to status differences among white people.
White theorists might have difficulty understanding a world that is gazed at with blinkered vision. And what’s more, scholars have influence when it comes to changing narrow definitions of how power struggles have been conceptualized since the early Enlightenment onwards. Academics are both interpellated subjects and the one doing the interpellating. Donna Mae, 74, is not.[1] She is not an interpellating force – or at least not with the same reach or power as a John Rawls or, indeed, a Charles Mills.
Donna Mae longed to study, as she explained to me over a three-hour interview in a veterans’ club, any ‘ology’ – geology, psychology, sociology – but she never made it to college and ended up bartending and cleaning instead, while raising two children. Donna Mae, whose father was in the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s and 1950s, was not as powerful, as a girl in the misogynistic, racist south, as her white father was.
Rightly or wrongly, honestly or in self-delusion, Donna Mae sees a progression of (unfinished) enlightenment across the generations of her family. She suggests of her father that ‘he wasn’t a strong member…though he had the membership – he knew it was wrong.’ Her father and her mother tried to teach her more respect than they had learned growing up. Donna Mae’s mother once hushed her fiercely, when Donna Mae was four or five, for pointing at a black man and saying, ‘Momma, there’s a black man!’ – it was hurtful and rude to point at him and to single him out and her mother wanted her to know it, to realize the rudeness in a way young white girls were rarely taught in the American South when her mother was young. Donna Mae believes in reincarnation. She acknowledges that it’s the reason why she tries hard, consciously, to fight any lingering bigotry she worries she still has – because one day she may be that black man, and how would she feel? Donna Mae, who tried to pass to her two children her mother’s regrets and good faith efforts to fight racism and not the hateful bigotry her father upheld, even if he did so half-heartedly – is not an interpellating force in the same way that academic grandees, Klan leaders, her father, state authorities, religious institutions, or media barons are.
There are different degrees of complicity in white supremacy. Donna Mae is not her father or her mother or her son or daughter and Donna Mae knows this even if the ‘ologies’ that she still dreams of learning tend to objectify her as a classed and racialized category. She is not her father or mother or her children, but she is her mother and father and her children. She knows this too.
I am making a banal point – the fact that a poor white woman in Fort Myers in 2024 is different subjectively and educationally than her parents in the 1950s or the wealthier people she cleans for now. It’s obvious, but it’s also overlooked. What’s more, the homogenizing language of ‘white ignorance’ makes it hard to see despite the obviousness. Mills’ much quoted passage above, his claim that the Racial Contract ends up ‘producing the ironic outcome that whites will in general be unable to understand the world they have made’ has produced its own irony – the failure to acknowledge that not all whites made the modern world or continue to make it in equal measure. There are hierarchies of white power. There are hierarchies of white ignorance. To attribute equivalent agency for world-making to a Donna Mae as a Donald Rumsfeld or a Donald Trump is to obliterate the concept of power itself.
In his earliest work on the epistemology of ignorance, Mills discusses the stratification of ignorance among different racialized groups. He makes important points about the problem of culpability, such as at the end of The Racial Contract, where he writes: ‘The “Racial Contract” thus places itself within the sensible mainstream of moral theory by not holding people responsible for what they cannot help…it distinguishes between whiteness as a phenotype/genealogy and Whiteness as a political commitment to white supremacy, thus making conceptual room for “white renegades” and “race traitors”’ (Mills, 2023[1997]: 126-127; see also Bain, 2023).
But in a shift away from his earlier nuance, and indeed in contrast to what he decries in The Racial Contract as the ‘unsophisticated undifferentiated denunciatory vocabulary’ inherent within the word ‘white’ (Mills, 2023[1997]: 126), he opts for an ever-more monolithic conceptual framing by applying the terminology at the world level through the term ‘global white ignorance,’ the title of his influential 2015 book chapter. And while he consistently offers important conceptual qualifications around what ‘white ignorance’ is, I suggest these caveats are so major they don’t necessarily mitigate the problems with the notion, but rather illuminate its limits in clearer relief.
Take the difficulty in defining ‘white ignorance.’ When he tries to it leads to contradiction. ‘Obviously,’ Mills writes, ‘white ignorance is not best theorized as an aggregate of individual mistaken white beliefs…Rather, it should be seen as a particular optic, a prism of perception and interpretation, a worldview’ (Mills, 2015: 218). He adds a further qualification – he writes that: ‘to speak of a ‘global’ white ignorance should not be taken to imply that it is uniform either in space or in time…the nature of white ignorance – what whites characteristically get wrong – changes all the time’ (Mills, 2015: 218).
His first statement, that white ignorance is not an aggregate of individual beliefs, conflicts with the last point – ‘what whites characteristically get wrong’ – implying it can be seen as an aggregate of mistaken individual perceptions. But the bigger problem is that the concept itself obscures hierarchies of power and status within white groups. It not only thwarts attention to intra-race differences, it makes the differences less speakable, as if to contest the conceptual value of ‘white ignorance’ is to deny that ongoing racism insists. It’s not. Rather, it’s to insist that a homogenizing language makes it harder to parse how racisms both harden and morph – and at times do soften and improve – in different ways, for different regional, classed, economic, and gendered reasons.
This is my main argument. Not simply that Mills’ later work loses some of his earlier nuance, but that his call for nuance disappears because ofhis chosen conceptual arsenal. Occasionally he states in his later work, for example, that ‘white ignorance’ should not be treated in a monolithic way. But achieving this is difficult due to the rhetorical weight and homogenizing nature of the notion. The problem is most acute not with Mills’ work, but with how others have drawn on him. I expand below, clarifying my critique through elaborating upon the three-fold framework introduced above.
Three chief problems with the notion of ‘white ignorance’
To recap, I see three main problems with the notion: 1) It homogenizes different forms of white privilege and advantage; 2) It impedes attention to different types of non-white racism and dominator privilege; and 3) It inadvertently flatters white groups by imputing to them an almost superhuman capacity for epistemic calculation and autonomy.
The first problem – that the notion homogenizes different forms of stratified white experience – is discussed above through the example of Donna Mae, and to stress again, it’s both obvious and yet weirdly taboo to state. Of course not all white individuals are equally advantaged when it comes to economic, national or familial assets. As mentioned, Mills never asserts otherwise. But the problem with the term ‘white ignorance’ becomes clear when it is applied empirically, such as when it’s used to analyse perceptions of wealth differences, an example I turn to now.
In Black Rights/White Wrongs, and in his work on white ignorance more generally, Mills makes important and sometimes overlooked points about causality and belief. He suggests that we need to differentiate between white ignorance, on the one hand, and general patterns of ignorance, on the other hand, where ‘race has played no determining role.’ To quote a long but instructive passage from him:
there will be many facts about the natural and social worlds on which people, including white people, have no opinion, or a mistaken opinion, but race is not directly or indirectly responsible. For instance, the exact temperature in the earth’s crust twenty miles down right now, the precise income distribution in the United States, and so forth. But we would not want to call this white ignorance, even when it is shared by whites, because race has not been responsible for these non-knowings; other factors have (2017: 56).
What’s remarkable about the passage above is Mills’ inclusion of a crucial economic and sociological matter – people’s perceptions of what the precise income distribution is – and the fact that he deliberately excludes it as a type of ‘white ignorance’ because, as he puts it, race ‘has not been responsible’ for this type of perception. He rightly acknowledges that a range of factors have contributed to people having little knowledge of what the actual wealth gap is in the United States. But Mills’ academic followers have not been as cautious when it comes to pointing to one’s racial identity as the determining factor contributing to factual errors about wealth divides.
Take a recent article by Trip Glazer and Nabina Liebow, ‘Confronting White Ignorance’ (2021). They point to US survey data indicating that white people in the nation believe ‘that the average black family has 80% of the wealth of the average white family, when in fact the figure is 7% and shrinking’ (Glazer and Liebow, 2021: 1). Citing Mills – but ignoring his caveat that multiple factors are responsible for public misunderstandings about income and wealth distributions – Glazer and Liebow then label this non-knowledge of wealth gaps a type of ‘white ignorance’ in Mills’ sense. They add that: ‘White Americans remain ignorant of the persistence of racism because this ignorance serves their psychological and material interests’ (2021: 1).
On the one hand, Glazer and Liebow are right. It is important and necessary to stress that white groups have a clear economic incentive to dismiss the legacy of centuries of wealth drain from black Americans. As Mills puts it in Black Rights/White Wrongs: ‘Vested white group interest in the racial status quo – “the income-bearing value of race prejudice,” in the words of Du Bois – needs to be recognized as a major factor in encouraging white cognitive distortions of various kinds’ (Mills, 2017: 71).
On the other hand, there are two flaws or at least omissions with Glazer and Liebow’s suggestion that white people’s ignorance of the severity of black-white wealth gaps persists because it serves the ‘psychological and material interests’ of whites.
This reality – the fact that top-tail white wealth gains are compounding dramatic and worsening within-white inequality – is at once an obvious but also a curiously underdiscussed point. One reason why may be because of the justified and urgent need to call attention to the black-white gaps – where average differences in wealth are severe and growing.
This leads to an empirical conundrum. On the one hand, there is a vital, urgent need to raise consciousness about the deep and growing problem of hugely unjust wealth gaps between average white wealth and average black wealth in the US today. It’s important to say loudly and clearly: racial wealth gaps are egregious and require rectification through policies like reparations. To reach that goal, it is useful and indeed advisable and necessary for advocates to present factual evidence about white-black wealth and income disparities.
On the other hand, when listing such data, a type of statistical elision of the immiseration of poor white groups also occurs. The data proves, factually, that white Americans are rich in general, but the averages are pulled upwards by very rich beneficiaries at the top who have little in common with low-income whites and who indeed often prey financially on all poor groups. In short, the averages obscure an internal split: between very rich white and very poor white people.
The impoverishment of America’s white poor – which is the largest group living in poverty due to the demography of the nation – thus faces statistical obfuscation. For poor whites, comparing racial wealth levels becomes something that I term a ‘cruel average.’ They appear to be in the favourable category, and in ways they are, but for them it’s a cruel number, because it conceals just how immiserated white people in the bottom 20 percent really are. Researchers are increasingly aware of the problem. ‘For years,’ as Elliott and Shanks write, ‘research on wealth inequality in the United States has focused on the black/white gap in a way that may have unintentionally ignored, or at least minimized, the plight of poor and middle-class white Americans’ (Elliott and Shanks, 2019). Elliott and Shanks are based in the University of Michigan. They are at the forefront of a small group of economists calling attention the ways that income and wealth statistics in the US and other dominant white nations tend to obscure white immiseration. William Elliott and Trina Shanks are Black Americans themselves. They have written about their belief that achieving economic justice for American minorities is contingent on building more consciousness about the way the American systems harm poor and middle-class white groups too (Elliott and Shanks, 2019). Somewhat ironically, the survival of the current, brutalizing economic system depends on ‘good liberals’ refusing to see this (Cotter, 2024).
Which leads to the second flaw with Glazer and Leibow’s analysis of white misperceptions of income and wealth divides. They ignore the fact that all groups in the US tend to underestimate just how unfair and exploitative the current system is.
As Mills himself stressed, public misunderstandings over just how bad wealth inequality is in the US is a general problem of economic false consciousness – one that can’t and should not be attributed to white people alone. See, for example, a recent study from Davidai and Walker, where ‘misperceptions about economic mobility are common among both White and Black respondents’ (2022). Vestiges of the American dream, the lingering Horatio Alger myth of a bootstrap culture, lead most people in the nation to misunderstand the structural weight of wealth inheritances and income and tax policies that benefit rich Americans.
Why does this matter? Because Glazer and Leibow’s implication that whites are uniquely prone to misperceiving wealth gaps diverts attention from cross-racial ideological faith in the elusive American dream.
This links to what I suggest is the second core problem with the notion of white ignorance – the fact that it can’t account for why there is growing love and membership by low-income minorities participating in nationalist movements. Nor can it account for new types of non-white dominator privilege in a world of multiracial global elites. Terms such as ‘white ignorance’ or ‘global white ignorance’ are not particularly useful in theorizing Hindu authoritarianism and anti-Muslim policies under Modi in India. Nor helpful for understanding what Jo Littler calls ‘model minority authoritarianism’ (Littler, 2025), the positioning and heralding of people of colour in powerful government or corporate roles to legitimate austerity policies and structural attacks on low-income groups.
Scholars have, of course, tried to wedge analysis of minority support for Trump, Modi and other nationalist movements into a ‘whiteness’ paradigm, suggesting that any person of colour who supports a leader like Trump is deluded by the reach of whiteness. Cristina Beltrán, for example, has theorized Latino support for Donald Trump through the phrase ‘multi-racial whiteness,’ which she defines as the promise that multi-ethnic groups can reap the benefits of a white ‘politics of aggression, exclusion and domination’ (Beltran, 2021).
In many ways, Beltran makes a very good point – it is important to emphasize the link between growing white nationalist movements and the desire among white supporters to retain advantages over minority groups in America. But it’s also true that to shoehorn different, hugely varied types of racisms and ethnic and religious conflict into a master ‘white supremacy’ theoretical framework is misguided. It infantilizes non-white groups, letting them ‘off the hook’ for any wilful participation in harms against other minorities by implying that a white dominant ideology has seduced them into ‘white ignorance’ against their better judgement. Their agency is denied as a type of agency, which is itself a demotion of the perceived intellect and autonomy of non-white groups. It’s patronizing. A sure way to push more people to the far-right is to assert that due to the pervasive reach of white domination no people of colour have the aptitude or the power to think for themselves.
This leads to the third pillar of my critique of ‘white ignorance’. I suggest that it inadvertently flatters white people and ‘white thought’. It does so in two key ways: 1) as suggested above, by upholding white ignorance as all-pervasive, the notion denies the agency of non-white groups to think beyond ‘whiteness’; and 2) in a converse way, while non-white racists tend to be excessively forgiven due to their purported non-agency, whites are presumed to ‘know better’ – as if the non-white person is always mentally weakened by false ideology, while the white is always empowered and all-knowing.
This assumption – that the white voter inevitably sees clearly and if they don’t, they should have, was rife across liberal media outlets and on Twitter in the aftermath of the twin upsets of 2016 – the UK vote to exit the EU in June 2016, and a few months later, the election of Donald Trump. In 2021, for example, the UK media covered the story of a contrite elderly Brexit supporter who works as the owner of a fish exporting company in Devon as he expressed regret for voting to leave the EU. ‘If I could turn the clock back, would I have voted leave? Of course not…I think me and many others have perhaps made a mistake.’ ‘Progressive’ twitter erupted with denunciation. The political theorist Cas Mudde, for example, tweeted derisorily: ‘I see the UK media has found the same narrative that US media has used to whitewash regretful Trump voters: ‘Simple pure white man was brainwashed by evil populist.’ Mudde goes on, tweeting: ‘He knew what he was voting for. He just thought the populist would only hurt ‘Others,’ not ‘us.’’
This declaration – ‘he knew what he doing’ – ignores the reality of how much propaganda and media manipulation paved the way for the Brexit outcome. It’s to imply that the white Brexit voter is too wilful and independently minded not to have known.
It also ignores and denigrates the importance of minority groups of colour who support Trump or Brexit. With Brexit, for example, there was considerable migrant support for the Leave vote. Nearly 40% of British Indians voted Leave, for example. And yet, as Taj Ali writes, this reality ‘was largely lost in political analysis in the aftermath of the EU referendum’ (Ali, 2024).
The person of colour voting Trump or Leave is oddly written off as negligible or undeserving of media comment, especially in the Leave case (there has been comparably a lot more attention to Trump’s minority fanbase). But even when he or she is seen, when the Trump/Leave minority voter is grudgingly admitted to exist, they are cast aside as obviously deluded by false ideology and media manipulation, by the reach of ‘whiteness’, while white Brexiteers are treated differently – like obviously self-calculating thinkers whose tears are always a false performance, their regret always a veneer, hiding a cunning intent to harm.
Could the Devon man really have foreseen the future? No, not entirely – no one can. And to insist that he did know, or at least that he could have and should have seen through the propaganda is to impute a cognitive superiority, a type of epistemic resilience and farsightedness to the white voter. It’s to entrench the very type of epistemic supremacy that critical race theorists have long sought to supplant.
Also, this assumption of ‘he knew’ is, quite ironically, a complete reversal of the genius of Du Bois’ ‘double consciousness’ which was to see the white man as more prone to epistemic fallibility than the people he oppresses. Over 100 years later this logic is reversed. The legacy of wilful white ignorance – the idea that white errors and white ignorance is typically calculated rather than genuine ignorance – becomes, quite ironically, a component of the epistemic supremacy that Du Bois tried to dislodge.
Conclusion: To salvage concepts or to burn them or both
Mills’ landmark book The Racial Contract was first published in the 1990s, a time of massive expansion in the subgenre of ‘whiteness studies.’ As soon as the field emerged, scholars developed, as Sara Ahmed writes, ‘almost habitual anxiety about what it means to take up the category of ‘whiteness’ as a primary object of knowledge’ (2007: 149).
This anxiety led to important demands for nuance (c.f. Gilroy, 2001; 2004; Hartigan, 2004), to the call to avoid monolithic approaches to whiteness, to avoid seeing ‘whiteness’ as both a master explanatory trope and an inert, unmalleable category: timeless and thus convenient for whites – a type of fatalism that demands no real hope for change. Vron Ware identified the problem well: ‘The growing interest in theoretical whiteness risks producing an indifferent cultural pluralism, which does little to engage with the changing formations of local and global racisms’ (Ware, 2001: 29).
And yet today, the popularity of terms like ‘white ignorance’ has not reversed but rather deepened the problem of monolith thinking warned about in early whiteness studies literature. Only a handful of scholars have acknowledged this problem. Alana Lentin, for example, has voiced similar concern as mine in this article, expressing the worry that ‘white ignorance’ could lead some people to ‘argue ahistorically that ‘white privilege’ is endemic and that there is nothing to be done about it’ (Lentin, 2021).
But Lentin also adopts a problematic binary approach to pity and generosity when it comes to different types of group ignorance. Lentin writes: ‘we should not pity the ignorant here. White ignorance is structural and wilful. It is what allows TRC [the Racial Contract] to persist. As Mills notes, the luxury of ignorance is not open to Black people and people of colour’ (Lentin, 2021).
I disagree on two aspects, both on the assumption that ‘we should not pity the ignorant,’ and on the claim that the ‘luxury of ignorance’ is not open to non-white groups. For one thing, Mills writes about black ignorance too. For example, he writes critically about theological racial hierarchies popular in the 1960s in the United States that reversed biblical narratives to insist black men will and should one day rule ‘white devils’. He decries this type of false black consciousness and insists it’s not attributable to white ideology alone. In other words, Mills refused to infantilise people of colour or deny their capacity to create destructive domination narratives of their own making (see Mills, 2007: 22; 2017: 58).
Nor does Mills insist, as Lentin claims, that white individuals must be denied pity. Mills writes explicitly that we should avoid ‘holding people responsible for what they cannot help.’ To recognize that people are all ensnared in structural conditions they can’t help is to offer empathy and pity for the universality of human dependency on social structures. Some groups do have more power to structure the structures, but that does not the negate the universal fact: structure shapes agency.
There’s an analytical path out of this impasse, and Mills’ work helps to lead to it. But first it’s necessary to challenge any hagiographic, pyrrhic treatments of terms like ‘white ignorance.’ I use the word ‘pyrrhic’ intentionally. Sometimes a seductive concept can be a self-eating matchstick, burning up nuance. A spark was needed, and it lit the room – but we risk ashes where empirical analysis is needed. Ignorance is like a chain-link ladder; sometimes monolith concepts cloak the gaps from sight.
A pathway out is to embrace reciprist epistemology over fatalistic epistemology.
Mills cites the work of James Baldwin. Writing in the early 1960s, Baldwin charged his white countrymen with the crime of false innocence – ‘it is the innocence which constitutes the crime’ (2017[1963]: 14). They protected their innocence through strategies of ignorance. This type of protectionism still exists, but it shifts too – in ways that a monolithic framing of black or white experience don’t reflect (Reed, 1999).
Baldwin was not a fatalist when it came to different forms of group ignorance. He wrote about a type of reconciliation through reciprocity. He preached the need for constant vigilant efforts for different racialized groups to seek to know each other deeply, to reciprocally co-create a new consciousness together:
If we – and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create the consciousness of the others – do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world (Baldwin, 2017[1963]: 89).
The racial nightmare that Baldwin dreamed of ending still endures. And as long as it does, so too does the duty he called upon white groups and black ones to embrace – the duty to co-create the consciousness of the others. One node of such duty is to take seriously Baldwin’s emphasis on ‘relatively conscious’ – a seemingly benign phrase – and treat it like the analytical knife that it is. It’s a knife severing binarism.
An interest in reciprocity is also at the heart of work by anti-Afropessimism thinkers like Paul Gilroy who has studied resistance and re-education efforts by those who cultivate cross-racial conviviality against the odds – not because racism has died but because people insist on new ways to live (c.f. Gilroy, 2001; 2004; see also Reed, 1999).
Building on important work by Gilroy, Reed, Ware and others, we need new concepts that help to mobilize at the levels of theory and practice in the face of new forms of reactionary essentialism on the political and economic right. We need vocabulary that encapsulates anti-binarism in positive, agentic ways – through phrases that are meliorist in orientation, and don’t have ‘anti’ or ‘pessimism’ in them.
I propose the terms ‘reciprist epistemology’ or ‘reciprism’ for short. Reciprist and reciprism are not yet words – but they should be. To be reciprist is to insist on the need for analytical and practical checks against binarism across multiple registers, from class binaries to racialized classificatory systems, calling attention instead to the reality of reciprocal, interdependent subjectivities and materialities that shape co-consciousness.
Is ignorance like a soul – can it be reincarnated as knowledge? In 2024, an election year in America, I met Donna Mae, a 74-year-old woman living in south Florida. Donna Mae would have been a 12-year-old girl when Baldwin wrote his plea for conscious people to co-create each other’s awakening. I’d say Donna Mae does want to know – how her father was wrong, and her mother, and herself. She told me she wanted to learn everything, to study all the ‘ologies’, as she put it – but she never got the chance.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Maitrayee Deka, Kuldip Kaur and Jo Littler for comments.
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Notes
[1] Donna Mae is a pseudonym used to protect the privacy of informants. Ethical approval from the University of Essex to carry out qualitative data collection was granted in May 2023.
Linsey McGoey is professor of sociology at the University of Essex, and the author of No Such Thing as a Free Gift, Verso, and The Unknowers, Bloomsbury. Her forthcoming book is titled Judgment Machines: Oracular Power and the Making of Truth.
Email: lmcgoey@essex.ac.uk
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