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

By a wealth of indicators, ignorance appears a bona fide if often vexing social fact. Ignorance is socially constructed, negotiated, and pervasive; ignorance is often socially inevitable, even necessary; and, without a doubt, ignorance is socially consequential. Yet, despite its significance, ignorance has appeared a largely secondary concern among sociologists. Perhaps more perplexing, while sociologists of racism, power, and domination have long focused on the ways racial ideologies distort and mystify racial understanding to sustain White supremacy over time, we have done less to elaborate ignorance than is possible and warranted. Here, I join growing calls for a fully‐fledged “sociology of ignorance” and argue that antiracist and decolonial scholars have much to gain from and contribute to such an endeavor. This article traces the historical forebears of a “sociology of ignorance” and explores ignorance as a social concept before turning to examine precedents and increasing attention to ignorance scholarship on racism, racial domination, and racialized non‐knowing. Drawing from this work, I urge race‐critical scholars take advantage of our unique position to advance theory and methodology surrounding ignorance and the social‐cultural production of non‐knowledge as a broader area of social inquiry.     

Role-reversibility, stochastic ignorance, and social cooperation

This paper studies the effect of role-reversibility and stochastic ignorance, conditions that minimize the strategic bias of individual choice, on social cooperation. Under role-reversibility, each agent maximizes her expected payoff, knowing the status quo at the time of the action as well as the ex ante probabilities about her future roles. In contrast, under stochastic ignorance, players make their choices under a Harsanyi-type veil of uncertainty. Without the role-specific context influencing the judgment of the individual, cooperative norms emerging under stochastic ignorance are more likely to be close to first-best than are norms chosen under conditions of role-reversibility.     

The logic of strategic ignorance

Ignorance and knowledge are often thought of as opposite phenomena. Knowledge is seen as a source of power, and ignorance as a barrier to consolidating authority in political and corporate arenas. This article disputes this, exploring the ways that ignorance serves as a productive asset, helping individuals and institutions to command resources, deny liability in the aftermath of crises, and to assert expertise in the face of unpredictable outcomes. Through a focus on the Food and Drug Administration's licensing of Ketek, an antibiotic drug manufactured by Sanofi-Aventis and linked to liver failure, I suggest that in drug regulation, different actors, from physicians to regulators to manufacturers, often battle over who can attest to the least knowledge of the efficacy and safety of different drugs - a finding that raises new insights about the value of ignorance as an organizational resource.     

The Devil Rejoiced: Volk,Devils and Moral Panic in White South Africa, 1978–1982

The first four years of P.W. Botha's premiership in apartheid South Africa were plagued by intra‐party politicking, renewed anti‐apartheid resistance, economic instability, and Satan. Between 1978 and 1982, the heavy political rhetoric of “total onslaught” inflected perceived “moral onslaught” in a virulent moral panic over Satanism in white, and particularly Afrikaner, South Africa. With attention to its discursive and socio‐political context, this paper seeks to explore the emergence of this distinct satanic moral panic in white South African history, arguing that it reflects the intense political and moral ambiguity of white society as the edifices of apartheid began to fracture.     

Pluralistic ignorance and hooking up

Hooking up--when two people agree to engage in sexual behavior for which there is no future commitment--has become popular on college campuses. In this study we examined the extent to which pluralistic ignorance affects hooking up. One hundred thirty-six female and 128 male college students answered questions regarding their own comfort and their perceived peers comfort in engaging in a variety of sexual behaviors while hooking up. We hypothesized and found that both women and men rated their peers as being more comfortable engaging in these behaviors than they rated themselves. Men expressed more comfort than did women in engaging in these behaviors, and both sexes overestimated the other gender s comfort with hooking up behaviors. Pluralistic ignorance appears to apply to hooking up on college campuses, and we explore some potential consequences of pluralistic ignorance in this context.     

Pluralistic ignorance and Hooking up

“Hooking up “—when two people agree to engage in sexual behavior for which there is no future commitment—has become popular on college campuses. In this study we examined the extent to which pluralistic ignorance affects hooking up. One hundred thirty‐six female and 128 male college students answered questions regarding their own comfort and their perceived peers'comfort in engaging in a variety of sexual behaviors while hooking up. We hypothesized and found that both women and men rated their peers as being more comfortable engaging in these behaviors than they rated themselves. Men expressed more comfort than did women in engaging in these behaviors, and both sexes overestimated the other gender's comfort with hooking up behaviors. Pluralistic ignorance appears to apply to hooking up on college campuses, and we explore some potential consequences of pluralistic ignorance in this context.     

Fairness,the veil of ignorance and social choice

A point of departure for this study is the recognition that various individuals may have different opinions about the exact form a social welfare function should have. To obtain some kind of amalgamation of differing individual social preferences, a modified version of the Rawlsian veil of ignorance is used and a definition of social efficiency suggested and analysed. A socially efficient state is defined by means of endogenous and individual veils of ignorance and, in addition, the Pareto principle. Efficiency may be described as a situation where individuals with similar social preferences constitute subsocieties in an optimal manner. Furthermore, a state is fair if it is (socially) efficient and equitable. An extension of the concept of fairness, called weak fairness, is also suggested. The analysis in this study does not presuppose any objective interpersonally comparable measure of utility.I would like to thank Professor Gevers, editor of this journal, and two anonymous referees for valuable comments on this paper. Support from the Swedish Council for Research in the Humanities and Tore Browaldh's foundation for Research and Education is gratefully acknowledged.     

The Race for Education: Class,White Tone,and Desegregated Schooling in South Africa

In the early 1990s, privileged “white” South African public schools began to admit “black” pupils. Drawing on interviews, ethnography, and archival sources related to formerly‐white schools in Durban, this article addresses two main questions: first, why did white parents so enthusiastically vote for schooling desegregation when apartheid was still in place?; and second, why, over time, did intense competition emerge between schools, and become so focused on improving sports results? In addressing these questions this study takes an historical‐geographical approach, paying particular attention to two areas of Durban: the middle‐class central Berea area and the more working‐class areas in Durban's south. This story begins in the 1950s, a period of major schooling expansion and urban segregation, tracing how a hierarchy of white schools developed in relation to the city's uneven geographies of race and class. It is this schooling hierarchy and the way it became contested in the 1990s that is key to understanding the schools' shift from “cooperative desegregation” to “aggressive competition.” More broadly, the article argues that education provides a window into key post‐apartheid tensions – namely between the deracialization of privilege, the continued dividend of whiteness, and efforts to redistribute resources to the poor. Finally, in an age of mass education, it argues that the actions of schools play an important role in shaping raced and classed divisions in society.     

AN ECONOMIC THEORY OF APARTHEID

Apartheid is a regulatory system designed to effect redistributions in favor of white workers and farmers at the expense of black workers and white capitalists. This paper uses a competitive interest group theory of the apartheid state to formulize a collective choice analysis of apartheid as endogenous policy. The "level" of apartheid is conceived as a continuous variable that is determined by the relative influence of competing interest groups within the white polity and by the costs of maintaining and defending apartheid institutions. Some empirical implications of this approach are explored.     

Ignorance as an under-identified social problem

This paper examines the persistence and intensification of ignorance in the ostensible knowledge society. Given the ubiquity of ignorance, it focuses on research and observations dealing with functional knowledge deficits that challenge the ideal of the well-informed citizen. These developments are traced back to the contradictory dynamics of the knowledge society, specifically information explosions in the knowledge economy and the resultant knowledge-ignorance paradox. The theoretical unfolding of this paradox in terms of entry and speech barriers suggests that pockets of observed public knowledge - rather than ignorance - are exceptional and require specific explanation. While ignorance among individuals, as well as experts and organizations, is a serious social problem with potentially deadly consequences, ignorance remains relatively unrecognized since it has major liabilities as a marketable issue. The conclusion points to the importance of future research on the cultural and institutional production of ignorance.     

Citizenship: reflections on a relevant but ambivalent concept for persons with disabilities

This article examines the significance of citizenship with respect to disability. The article first highlights the idea of citizenship as ‘social contract’. This means the possession of civil, political, economic, cultural and social rights as well as the exercise of duties in society. Due to societal barriers, many disabled persons have difficulties fulfilling citizenship roles. Further, this article draws on citizenship theories; it examines three types of citizenship participation – the social citizen, the autonomous citizen and the political citizen – and discusses their promises and ableist implications. To counterbalance the exclusionary aspects of citizenship, we argue that human rights prove important. At the same time, human rights are more easily proclaimed than enforced and citizenship remains a precondition for effectively implementing human rights. The article concludes that citizenship is a relevant but also ambivalent concept when it comes to disability; it calls for a critical understanding of citizenship in Disability Studies.     

Implanting racial ideology: Bus apartheid in Cape Town

Cape Town's buses were the last in South Africa to be segregated forcibly on racial lines. Bus apartheid was not imposed overnight however. In the hostile environment of the late 1950s, it was enforced by degrees only. Organised resistance waned gradually and was deflected. A new norm of bus travel was allowed to take root and social cleavages became accentuated. With a foot in the door, apartheid did its own work and was rewarded by a remarkable surge of white opinion in favour of even more thorough racialism as from the late 1960s. Slow racial desegregation of buses a decade later owed little, if anything, to pressure from individual Capetonians who by then were firmly under the apartheid spell.     

The complexity of ignorance

We examine the kinds of mistakes that are frequently made when the general public is asked to identify political symbols from the past half century. A particularly striking phenomenon is inversion: the event is recalled backwards, so that Rosa Parks is remembered for having given up her seat on a bus to a white person. A second type of error occurs by linking a name to the wrong person, as when John Dean is identified as a movie actor (James Dean). Still another type of mistake involves a correct substantive categorization but with temporal displacement, for example, the Tet Offensive is said to have occurred during the Korean War. In each of these cases we are able to speculate about the social and psychological processes that have led to the misremembering. However, not every error is lodged in respondents: we initially treated as incorrect all answers that did not fit our own expectations; but we were soon forced to recognize that other frames of reference could be brought to the task and lay equal claim to the truth. Names are alphabetical and authorship is equal.     

Learning as othering: narratives of learning,construction of difference and the discourse of immersion in study abroad

This article shows ethnographically the process of learning as othering in study abroad: acknowledgement of ‘learning’ through immersion – without clear structure or markers of learning – constructs cultural difference of the host society. It is because acknowledgement of learning something is necessarily the acknowledgement of the prior ignorance about it due to difference. Study abroad thus privileges particular types of difference in the name of learning them, under-appreciating domestic minorities’ cultural differences.     

Petrified life

How might we read temporality, that is, the psychical and social experience of time, as an index of the prevailing political and intersubjective impasses of the apartheid and post-apartheid eras? This paper explores three perspectives on this broad problematic. Achille Mbembe’s thoughts on repetition and nostalgia provide, firstly, a means of understanding one characteristically post-apartheid mode of temporality: that of suspended history. Crapanzano’s notion of waiting, elaborated as a means of grasping the white anxiety of the late apartheid period, allows us, secondly, to conceptualise the de-realised experience of a muted or deadened time. A third source, an unpublished text contributed to the Apartheid Archive concerning a fantasised scene of violence, enables us to sketch a third form of temporal experience common to apartheid and post-apartheid experiences alike, namely that of imagined retribution. These ostensibly separate and distinct modes of temporality can be read as interlocking forms of “petrified life,” a term I use to link temporalities of immobilisation characterised by suspension, stasis and fear.     

Moral Judgment in Chicano,Black, and White Young Adults

Abstract

The present research examines whether there is moral judgment differentiation among Chicano, black, and white young adults. Regression results indicate age, ethnicity, and social class as the best predictors of moral judgment. It is concluded that perhaps morality is located more in the structure of society than it is in the structure of human cognition.     

Nature and the international: towards a materialist understanding of societal multiplicity

ABSTRACT

The global environmental crisis requires a grasp of how human society interacts with nature, but also, simultaneously, how the world is divided into multiple societies. International Relations has a weak grasp of nature treating it as external to the international – an ‘environment’ to be managed – while environmentalism has a planetary epistemology that occludes the significance of the international. How to break this impasse? While neither Geopolitics nor ‘new materialism’ capture the complex conjuncture of socio-natural and inter-societal dynamics, I argue that Justin Rosenberg’s theorization of the international as ‘the consequences of societal multiplicity’ provides a theoretical opening. If a materialist notion of societal is adopted, ‘societal multiplicity’ allows human-natural and international dynamics to be grasped together. Thus, climate change is not a problem arising exogenously to the international, but something emerging through international dynamics, reciprocally affecting the units, structure and processes of the international system itself.     

From disability to ability: changing the phrasing of the debate

Persons with disabilities have endured discrimination and live under social apartheid. While enlightened people recognise the role that society has in disabling people with impairments, there remains a struggle to remove the negative stigma associated with this form of social diversity. There is no silver bullet that will enable persons with disabilities to exercise their human rights as full citizens. One strategy to assist in this struggle is the use of language. This paper focuses on how language can be utilised in the struggle against oppression. This paper reconsiders how disability discrimination is conceived and labelled. There is no uniformly accepted label to describe the discrimination and oppression that is explained by the social model or the non-radical social model. This paper explores how the labels of disableism and ableism have emerged to explain this concept. This paper analyses these terms and argues for the adoption of ableist nomenclature.     

Giving voice: A personal essay on the shape of sociolinguistics

From the vantage point of 21 years editing the Journal of Sociolinguistics, I survey and assess the shape of our field. I identify six strands or trends that I see in play over that time: language and society, social theorization, the centralization of style, diversification, new orthodoxies and a sense of history. I advocate in particular for a sociolinguistics of voice, especially so the voices that are unheard or muffled in society may be given an audience. In closing I pay tribute to the exceptional colleagues with whom I have worked on the Journal over these years.     

The multiplicity of iPod cultures in everyday life: uncovering the performative hybridity of the iconic object

This article looks at the Apple iPod as an iconic and hybrid music object and explores the multiplicity of iPod cultures in everyday life. It reviews the existing literature on the iPod and advances two main paradigms on iPod culture – the individual cognition enabled by the Apple object during private and mobile listening practices or the algorithmic socialization afforded by the use of the Genius recommendation system for example. Tackling these two existing paradigms, I pose the hybridity of the iPod as the basis of its iconicity. Thus, the iPod allows its users to associate its materiality with various sorts of activities in everyday life (individual mobile listening, music sharing, algorithmic connections), and with other material objects (computers, earphones) and media (music social media). As an iconic object that accompanies the various moments of users’ everyday lives, the iPod embodies the new possibilities and directions of music consumption in the digital age of technologies and entangles issues that emerge in contemporary society, such as the increasing blurry separation between individual experiences and social structures.