The Responsibility to Know : Race, Ignorance and White Supremacy

Charles Mills has outlined racialized ways of knowing which he identifies as an epistemology of ignorance, necessary to maintain white privilege in the context of commitments to formal equality. Ignorance is maintained both through racist systems of knowing as well as through systematized unknowing and indifference. The en-visioning of black subjectivity is a product of the white gaze, a gaze which works to secure the authority of whites to know the black experience. Race is visible, objectifiable and knowable in a way that assumes the irrelevance of the identity of the viewer. Feminist epistemologist as well as more recent work in feminist ethics suggests the problem of failing to take subjectivity into account. Drawing on the work of Lorraine Code and Margaret Urban Walker, we suggest that a more responsible racial politics, one that addresses both white ignorance and white privilege, requires locating subjects within a set of expressive-collaborative practices (Walker) in which the testimonial practices of non-whites are encouraged in a practice of silent yielding on the part of whites. Taken together testimony and silent yielding create the space for alternative accounts of race, revealing while simultaneously challenging white privilege