Powerblindness

Abstract

In the land of the blind, the one‐eyed man may be king. But positions of power may produce their own forms of blindness. This paper reviews multiple theoretical approaches to the concept of powerblindness and categorizes these literatures into five forms through which powerblindness operates: powerblind identity (failure to notice that one belongs to a privileged group), powerblind egalitarianism (belief that all groups are equal in power), powerblind hierarchy (emphasis on one's own subordinate position), powerblind exception (the claim that one is less privileged than others in one's group), and powerblind justification (belief that present‐day hierarchy is merited or inevitable). The paper identifies studies offering evidence for each, drawing on social‐psychological experiments, survey data, and qualitative research, suggesting that power and knowledge do not necessarily go hand in hand – some forms of knowledge about the social order may be more visible to people with less power than to people with more.

Advancing a sociology of ignorance in the study of racism and racial non‐knowing

“…For instance, Van Ausdale and Feagin () find that adults project many ideas about naïve or passive racial ignorance onto children, eschewing the considerable knowledge children hold about race and racism in ways that abdicate adults' responsibility to intervene. Moreover, epistemologies of ignorance appear particularly driven toward “powerblindness,” encouraging strong dis attention to the ways power shapes relations between groups, access to resources, and one's elevated status(es) (Kurzman et al, , p. 718). Thus, while it is problematically assumed that White people's ignorance represents a sincere, if troubling lack of racial knowledge (Leonardo, ), we need far more investigation that clarifies how White racial actors learn the “unconscious habits of whiteness” (Sullivan, )‐habits which facilitate “forgetting whiteness” (Moon, ) and dis‐attending to the social and political significance of White identity (Frye, ; Lewis, ; Perry, ) and social milieu (Lavelle, ; Steyn, ), particularly amid plentiful evidence of racial inequality, White dominance, and people of color's counter‐discourse and suffering (Feagin, ; Jung, ; Mueller, ; Swan, ).…”