Abstract
Unequal societies have sparked scholars across disciplines to take an interest in the mechanisms that allow their social cleavages to persist. This book is one such effort, where Hannah Jones examines violent ignorance and strategies to unsettle it. Ignorance can entail thoughtlessness or a willful not knowing, facilitated by existing structures and political powers, and it is violent in the consequences of this ignorance. To build her conceptual framework, Jones draws on social theorists such as Hannah Arendt, Charles W. Mills, and W.E.B. Du Bois. She connects this framework to ignorance studies more generally, which she contributes to by bringing a focus on race and racism, which often goes unaddressed in that area of study. The consequences of violent ignorance are experienced differently along dimensions of structural inequality. To shed light on the way violent ignorance operates, its effects, and strategies to address it, Jones analyzes a range of current and historical world events that have drawn international attention.
Jones begins by discussing the murder of Jo Cox, a British politician. Her assassination triggered outrage and national mourning and garnered significant media attention. However, the media focused, by and large, on her personality and her personal life, but rarely interrogated deeper societal issues that contributed to the climate in which she was murdered. While the emphasis on Jo Cox herself may have helped those who knew her grieve, it ignores the context that produced such a political murder. For Jones, this is violent ignorance in operation. It reveals an impulse to come together after disturbing or unsettling events, effectively papering over divisions and masking the mechanisms that produced the event. Not only does this mean that the causes and consequences of a particular event are ignored; they continue to fester and ultimately produce more pain and violence.
There are intermittent ruptures that make visible violent ignorance or willing unknowledge of injustice. Jones turns to two such instances: the fire at Grenfell Tower and the death of Alan Kurdi. Grenfell Tower was social housing where a malfunctioning refrigerator caught fire and spread throughout the building, resulting in 72 deaths and thousands of people displaced. Alan Kurdi was a three-year-old Syrian refugee traveling with his parents and brother by sea to Europe. All but his father died on the trip, and Alan Kurdi’s body washed up on a Turkish beach and was captured in a photograph that gained international media attention. These were moments where the ignorance we manage to maintain in most instances is unsettled or “punctured.” However, this skin of ignorance can scab over, and calls for change are often short-lived. Such calls need to be sustained over years to be effective, but this fights against an impulse to heal, even if it is only a superficial healing that ignores deeper issues. Thus, when there are instances that manage to shake people from their ignorance, it is imperative that these punctures remain open through concerted and consistent efforts for change. In other circumstances, events and structures of extreme violence can be ignored or seem unexceptional. One way this happens is using numbers to quantify a problem and depersonalize it such that the human stories are no longer visible. Another is to number human bodies themselves and effectively dehumanize them. In this respect, Jones echoes a legacy of scholars who call our attention to the problematic results of the quantification of people and points to its role in violent ignorance.
Violent ignorance also operates in processes of remembering (and what we choose not to remember). This can be seen operating historically at a national level. Jones draws on the actions of the English as colonizers and the efforts to first make their violence mundane, and then to burn or hide evidence of this violence. This demonstrates how history, and the process through which history is constructed, is fundamentally implicated in violent ignorance. This process of constructing and ignoring certain aspects of history also happens at an individual level. For Jones, this is illustrated by the growing popularity of DNA testing ourselves and shows that uncover our ancestry. In undergoing such efforts, we often uncover things about ourselves we would rather not know, and individuals will sometimes take steps to hide parts of their family history they would rather ignore. History ignored nonetheless affects events today and can come back to “haunt” those seeking to ignore it, as well as those who experienced the violence of it in the first place.
Most of us are implicated in upholding violent ignorance in some way, even as we may experience its negative violence in our own lives. Given this, Jones turns to questions of responsibility for violent ignorance and how to confront it, drawing on the reflections of the immediate descendants of high-ranking Nazis. She reflects on the complexity of assigning responsibility and the danger in casting blame, which can mask the power structures that produce instances of violence. To address violent ignorance requires consistent, careful, and thorough examinations of our daily lives and organizations to it out. Furthermore, efforts to root out violent ignorance will always be a work in progress. Just as the harms of violent ignorance are unequally distributed, for Jones the weight of addressing violent ignorance is as well, resting in large part on those who are comfortable and reluctant to face the costs of their comfort.
This book engages with crucial questions about the phenomenon of violent ignorance and sheds light on many recent phenomena, from the global protests against racial inequality in 2020 to the riot in the U.S. Capitol. Future work on the subject would benefit from further clarifying and then testing a theoretical framework for the concept of violent ignorance. It will remain relevant as we continue to address violent inequality in the future.