Ignorance In Ta-Nehisi Coates '' My President Was Black'

White Innocence and Ignorance

In his article, “My President was Black”, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about how Obama “Walked on ice but never fell”, regarding race issues because he “appealed to a belief in innocence – in particular a white innocence – that ascribed the country’s historical errors more to misunderstanding and the work of a small cabal than to any deliberate malevolence or widespread racism” (Coates, 10). While Coates explains that he believes this is the only way Obama could’ve been put in the white house, by appealing to this “white innocence”, it could be said that perhaps by allowing for white innocence, white ignorance was perpetuated.

What is white ignorance? Is it a good framework that can help us to understand what Coates

is saying? According to Caribbean Philosopher, Charles Mills, it is a kind of group-based cognitive handicap that is “not contingent, but in which race –white racism and/or white racial domination and their ramifications –plays a crucial causal role” (Mills, 20). Mills makes it clear that this is a kind of ignorance you have because of your race, in other words, some knowledge that you would have if you weren’t the race that you are. While white ignorance can play a causal role in racism, it itself is not inherently racist. It should also be noted that it is not confined to just white people and is not uniform across the white population. Mills explains that white ignorance often stems from privilege and “tend(s) to produce self-deception, bad faith, evasion, and misrepresentation” (Mills, 17).
Examples that Mills uses to explain white ignorance include conception, memory and testimony.

The memory example seems most prevalent in this context. In this example, Mills talks about the downplaying/forgetting of how horrific slavery was. I feel that this example in particular relates to what Coates has to say and helps to explain it. Because white Americans have the privilege of never having to had to endure or hear stories of their ancestors enduring the horrors of slavery, it is easy for them to downplay how big of a deal it actually has been in truly affecting and in shaping people’s lives who have been systemically forced to endure slavery, since for them it wasn’t as big of an ordeal and in fact they would have reason to want to forget/downplay how bad it was since they were the ones that caused it. So, a president that wanted to view everyone in the country as united, as one, a president that was in a sense promoting the forgetting of these horrors, that would appeal to the white people of the United States—and could serve as an example of the ways in which the political shape the cultural or societal. As Coates points out, “To reinforce the majoritarian dream, the nightmare endured by the minority is erased” (Coates, 13). Mills also would include the politics of colorblindness as an act of white ignorance in its deliberate forgetting. While it could seem like a good thing to see everyone as race-less, Mills argues that it does so in a way so that it is “on terms

that negate the need for measures to repair the inequities of the past” (Mills, 28) If everyone is the same, then no one needs reparations or affirmative action or any other measures that could be taken to combat the racism that has been so prevalent in the United States. This also relates to the “white innocence” Coates talks about how by trying to see the country in the light that there was “no black America, no white America, no Latino America, no Asian America, only “the United states of America”’(Coates, 9). By lumping everyone in together we forget about the past which seems to only have an advantage to those who are white and more often than not overwhelmingly dominating positions of power and authority. Based on all of this, I do feel that White ignorance is a good framework to help us understand Coates and his passionate plea.
It seems to me that Mills’ concept of white ignorance not only sheds light on what Coates has to say about white innocence, but also on knowledge and ignorance in general.

I have always thought about ignorance as (as Mills put it), “the passive obverse to knowledge.” But Mills helps us to see that ignorance can be much more powerful than that. It can be active and dynamic, like the active forgetting of a genocide or the implicit distrust of testimony of a certain race. There is a deep-set tendency which determines using white ignorance in a deeply politically calculating way because many of these upper middle class constituents are going to be willing to potentially pay a lot more in political contributions, then say a family, minority, and of a lower socioeconomic status. White ignorance contributes to keeping traditionally white dominated power hierarchies in place, not in a way that is overtly challenged. Mills also helps us to see that ignorance, can in a way, be presented as a type of knowledge and that we must be wary of this. I think Mills sheds a light on knowledge by exploring ignorance because for us to understand that we are ignorant is the first step to acquiring the true knowledge which we have been oblivious to. The more people that are aware of this cognitive handicap, the more people that will be aware of these implicit biases when consuming information and looking out for it. By realizing that not all of our beliefs are true ones, this better helps us to

realize that there is knowledge out there and we simply must go looking for the truth.