Structural white ignorance and education for racial justice

Abstract

While white ignorance is primarily produced and reproduced through social-structural processes, philosophy of education scholarship has focused on agent-centered educational solutions. This article argues that agent-centered solutions are ineffective and that education for disrupting white ignorance must be structure-centered. Specifically, the article contends that (1) social-structural processes often render being in a state of white ignorance reasonable and that (2) assigning white ignorant agents individual responsibility for overcoming their ignorance is often unreasonable. Consequently, epistemic virtue-based approaches to education are insufficient and inappropriate. Instead, the author proposes prioritizing political forms of education. This includes educating students on how to participate in political action and using political action to educate the public.

"I don't think there is much racism left": A critical analysis of White adolescents' (un)awareness of white privilege.

“…More research is sorely needed to elucidate the structural and individual practices that can facilitate and nurture white youth's resistance to white supremacy (Rogers & Way, 2021). However, these findings, in conjunction with other research, suggest that a critical avenue to cultivating resistance against practices of white disconnection, not knowing, and forgetting is through acquiring critical historical knowledge that attends to one's embeddedness and responsibility within a system of racial injustice (Applebaum, 2021;de Saxe & Ker, 2023;Nikolaidis, 2023).…”