names a form of collective denial in the white community about some uncomfortable truths. It therefore typically exhibits a culpable motivated irrationality. Indeed in most cases of ‘white ignorance’ as that phenomenon is discussed it involves some self-serving epistemic fault on the part of whites—a conscious or unconscious resistance to accepting or learning about the sources of their social advantage, for instance. Such epistemic faults are generally culpable. As Rebecca Mason succinctly puts it: ‘white ignorance is a kind of epistemically culpable and morally noxious miscognition that facilitates the maintenance of the status quo’ (Mason 2011, p. 302). Mills first discussed the phenomenon in the framework of the U. S., but more recently he has made clear that he considers the issue to have global application. Referring back to his paper ‘White Ignorance’ (Mills 2007) he explains: My discussion in the essay was focused mainly on the United States, but I intended the application of the concept to be much broader. Insofar as the modern world has been created by European colonialism and imperialism, and insofar as racist assumptions/frameworks/norms were central to the theories justifying white Western conquest and domination of that world, we would expect white ignorance to be global (Mills, 2015 p. 217). We might illustrate his point with another example drawing on British colonial history, as pointed out by Mike and Trevor Phillips in their discussion of the ignorance produced by the sheer absence of black soldiers from the many British films about the war made in the post-War period: …it comes as a shock now to note the complete absence of black Caribbean or African participants in the plethora of British films about the Second World War. After all, the involvement of black colonials was a fact that was a part of our experience… Our astonishment was, and still is, to do with the extent to which they had disappeared, had been expurgated from the story, as if they had never existed (Phillips & Phillips 1998, p. 5). Let us look closely at Mills’ characterisation of white ignorance in order to see (a) whether all cases are epistemically culpable, and (b) whether any involves the paucity of concepts that is definitive of hermeneutical injustice . Mills presents two
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