Racism produces the ignorance that is blamed for generating it

Evidence

It is often taken consequently that across Latin America, as more generally, racism is the product of ignorance. Not knowing better, whether on the part of individuals or institutions, leads to discriminatory expression, to derogatory reference, to failing to address social issues, to the all too easy possibility of ignoring problems because they aren’t identified to begin with. But racism also makes possible the not asking, the failure to collect data, the grounds for ignoring the invisible, and by extension the refusal to address deep social inequities which aren’t recognized as iniquitous precisely because they aren’t recognized at all. Racism, in short, is as much cause as effect. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1222

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Dense causal inversion: racism both causes and is blamed-on-ignorance that is itself an effect of racism’s erasure of data and visibility. Bears sustained unpacking.
• XREF: Resonates with the author’s earlier argument about data-absence and enforced invisibility maintaining racial inequity. — connects to: Agnotology studies manufactured ignorance, distinct from necessarily unknowable things. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 2147; Political ignorance functions as an effect of cultural discouragement, not merely its cause — Nina Eliasoph, “Close to home”: The work of avoiding…, 150; Anti-Muslim racism’s power lies in unexamined assumptions presented as fact. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 264