ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses systemic ignorance and its management as a way to frame Trump’s policies and discourse. It focuses on the scholarship around epistemic injustice. The study of epistemologies of ignorance exposes the ways that power works through knowing and unknowing to maintain systems of social injustice. Contributory injustice expands the notion of willful ignorance in that the injustice involves not only the willful dismissal of epistemic resources developed by the marginalized but also the continued insistence on employing dominant epistemic resources that distort the experience of the marginalized. Systemic ignorance has built-in epistemic resources to protect the system that normalizes bias and, even when bias is recognized, it does not necessarily lead to acknowledging the value of marginalized knowledge. Critical consciousness, a concept attributed to the educator Paulo Freire, involves the ability to know the social world and to take action against the systemic oppression illuminated by that understanding.
