Offering a wide selection of philosophical methods to the overlooked philosophical challenge of lack of awareness, this groundbreaking assortment builds on Charles Mills’s declare that racism includes an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of lack of understanding. members discover how diversified sorts of lack of knowledge associated with race are produced and sustained and what position they play in selling racism and white privilege. They argue that the lack of awareness that underpins racism isn't an easy hole in wisdom, the unintended results of an epistemological oversight. on the subject of racial oppression, lack of know-how frequently is actively produced for reasons of domination and exploitation. yet as those essays exhibit, lack of expertise isn't really easily a device of oppression wielded by way of the strong. it could actually even be a method for survival, a tremendous instrument for individuals of colour to wield opposed to white privilege and white supremacy. The ebook concludes that figuring out lack of expertise and the politics of such lack of understanding might be a key component of epistemological and social/political analyses, for it has the capability to bare the function of strength within the building of what's recognized and supply a lens for the political values at paintings in wisdom practices.

“This anthology brings jointly a few very favorite philosophers to handle the most embarrassing and blatantly neglected elephants in philosophy: lack of awareness. whereas philosophers declare to be kids of Socrates, who on my own was once virtuous and brave sufficient to acknowledge the fecundity of lack of knowledge, few have relatively addressed it with the verve and originality displayed within the contributions to this quantity. I examine it a must have for libraries, school, and graduate students.” — Eduardo Mendieta, editor of The Frankfurt tuition on faith: Key Writings through the main Thinkers

At Penn nation at college Park, Shannon Sullivan is affiliate Professor of Philosophy and Women’s experiences, and Nancy Tuana is DuPont/Class of 1949 Professor of Philosophy and Women’s reports. Sullivan is the writer of showing Whiteness: The subconscious conduct of Racial Privilege, and Tuana is coeditor (with Sandra Morgen) of Engendering Rationalities, additionally released by way of SUNY Press.