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Ignorance is strength [1]

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Date: 2023-05-21  

Two weeks ago, I watched an episode of the Michael Steele Show where he had Mary L. Trump on as a guest, and they braved the conversation of today’s ills of society going back to our very entrenched racial disparities. The topic of whitewashing history came up: Michael Steele brought up the fact that critical race theory and similar conversations were basically being outlawed, which makes it impossible for us to engage the past but also ensures that the next generation [of whites] is unprepared to do the work, either, because they won’t have the foundation. And that’s when I realized:

That’s one of the mechanisms.

White privilege and white supremacy have many interlocking mechanisms, where one might be able to be dislodged during a single conversation but then others, hidden, snap into place and lock the conversation again, so that no real progress can be made—always it resets to zero.

This is one of those mechanisms: planted ignorance. And even this mechanism is covered by or couched in another: the demand that (White) children cannot feel guilt over whiteness, which of course is equated immediately with white skin (when in reality those things can and should be disentangled). That appeal to emotion provides cover, a shield around the next generation in the name of innocence, another form of purity.

But, of course, nonwhite children must confront racism at an early age, and their families can’t make a successful appeal to innocence and protection of their feelings. The question is asked: why? Because, in WhiteWorld, nonwhite children are not innocent. By definition. They’re seen as adults far sooner than their White counterparts. They’re seen as not feeling so much pain—that they are so poor and that life has treated them so badly that they’re insensitive—whereas White people, especially White children, are especially sensitive to pain! This is itself a form of dehumanization; and it’s a protective measure put into play so that the newest generation can continue this ignorance-based farce.

And I call it a farce because I go back to Jean-Paul Sartre and what he said about anti-Semites, that they use their bigotry for sport:

I mentioned a while back some remarks by anti-Semites, all of them absurd: “I hate Jews because they make servants insubordinate, because a Jewish furrier robbed me, etc.” Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words.

— Anti-Semite and Jew, p. 13 (my emphasis)

The White parents who insist that their George or their Susanna isn’t to feel guilt over slavery or any of its legacy, that they weren’t the ones responsible for the Native American genocide, these parents must know on some level that their demand is ridiculous, that in fact it’s outsourcing the pain of that legacy, dealing a double helping on those who already suffer from that legacy itself. On some level, they have to know. But they make their unearned demand nonetheless. They do it when their neighbors voice the same thing—there’s strength in numbers, even with the wrong cause.

People on the left think these slaver apologists do this so that their children won’t grow up and find out that their parents were racists. This isn’t quite right. It’s by this very mechanism that those children will grow up to be racists themselves—and then that racism becomes an heirloom, handed down from generation to generation. That ignorance becomes part of the culture intentionally reproduced.

As it turns out, I am not the only one pondering along these lines. Just yesterday Jamelle Bouie opined at the New York Times about Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ extraordinary crusade to strip certain concepts from our shared history:

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/5/21/2170553/-Ignorance-is-strength

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