Zara Bain

It is easy to think of philosophy as being something abstract, something that academics study in isolation from the real world. Yet we make decisions based on philosophical debates every day--why is your money yours and not ours? Why shouldn't you lie? Or is it ever acceptable to lie? Philosophy: A Crash Course will guide you through the key concepts and theories, from logic to justice and from art to censorship. But it also tackles the philosophical side to today's essential issues, including climate change and what disability really is. Together, you will have a fresh understanding of the world around us. This accessible introduction to philosophy includes: 52 topics explaining the key ideas and concepts timelines to show how the study of philosophy has developed from the past to the pre sent biographies of key people.

Recent philosophical secondary literature on white ignorance – a concept most famously developed by the late philosopher Charles W. Mills – suggests that white ignorance is, one way or another, a non-structural phenomenon. I analyse two such readings, the agential view and the cognitivist view. I argue that they misinterpret Mills’ work by (among other things) committing a kind of structural erasure, and one which implies that Mills’ account cannot capture, for example, cases where white ignorance (and white racial domination) involves historical erasure, especially when perpetrated by sociopolitical institutions. This is particularly salient in cases such as the recent movement against anti-racist education, now widely conflated with critical race theory, in the United States and United Kingdom, which I offer as a brief case study.

What is the relation between ignorance and epistemic injustice, i.e. that body of work in philosophical social epistemology that is said to identify cases where people are harmed in virtue of their status as knowers? That there is some relation between these two concepts and the phenomena they pick out has been affirmed from the perspective of epistemic injustice (Fricker 2016; Fricker and Jenkins 2017). I offer an alternative account of this relation which begins from the perspective of what philosophers and sociologists term ‘the epistemology of ignorance’. I make a preliminary case against the de facto subsumption of ignorance within the frame and terms of epistemic injustice risked by ‘epistemic injustice-first’ analyses, while defending the claim that ‘ignorance-first’ analysis is better able to track phenomena salient to any analysis of the epistemology of domination, oppression, and injustice.

Chapter 3 looks at the work of Charles Mills, taking in a range of his scholarship including his most famous work – The Racial Contract – and his latest work, Black Rights, White Wrongs. Zara Bain applies Mills to consider how social justice applies in the UK. She looks at the interactions and co-constitutions of racism, classism, and ableism, and the role they play in the production of poverty. The chapter argues that Mills offers us a non-ideal contractarian analysis that may really offer ‘x-ray vision’ into parts of society many would readily, if not always credibly, deny precisely because it pushes us to look at the world as it really is, to learn our history and to be always on the lookout for the many ways that ignorance about matters of significant import to questions of social justice can be actively, resiliently produced.

This chapter articulates how people understand “microaggression” and offers a clarifying augmentation of that account. It attempts to define disability, and then talk through how analysis connects with the very few discussions of microaggressions within the context of disability. The chapter introduces the case of “Disabled But Not Really.” It leverages previous analysis to show how microaggressions’ mixed legibility is crucial to their role in maintaining an epistemology that polices disability in general and disabled people in particular. The chapter discusses the ramifications this has for future analysis of both microaggressions and disability. It highlights the specific challenges faced by persons at the junction of multiple oppressed identities. Ontologically, the commitment is the rejection of the medical model of disability where “disabilities are just particular kinds of bodily malfunction”. The focus within that ontological analysis is primarily concerned with the social/political consequences of disability.

I argue that political philosopher Charles W. Mills’ twin concepts of ‘the epistemology of ignorance’ and ‘white ignorance’ are useful tools for thinking through racial injustice in the British education system. While anti-racist work in British education has a long history, racism persists in British primary, secondary and tertiary education. For Mills, the production and reproduction of racism relies crucially on cognitive and epistemological processes that produce ignorance, and which promote various ways of ignoring the histories and legacies of European colonialism and imperialism, as well as the testimonies and scholarship of those who experience racism in their everyday lives. I survey these concepts within Mills’ work then marshal evidence in support of my claim that ‘the epistemology of ignorance’ and ‘white ignorance’ provide a useful framework for thinking through problems of racial injustice in British education.