In considering the importance of historical understanding and the politics of memory, we can begin by looking to Thomas McCarthy’s suggestion that there is an important difference between the former East and West Germanies in their relations to their Nazi pasts. Footnote 1 In West Germany, the historians’ debate in the 1980s compelled West Germans to engage in national discussions about the Holocaust and to consider the elements of German political culture that may have led to it. East Germany, in contrast, continued to separate itself from the Nazi past, emphasized its victory over Nazi Germany and refused to acknowledge any ties or connection to it. In the 1990s, the East was the center for protests against asylum, immigration, and “guest workers” while in the West those protesting did so against anti-foreigner violence and nativist politics. Currently, the East remains less friendly to foreigners and more sympathetic to the right-wing National Democratic Party, the members of which are often accused of lionizing Hitler. Footnote 2 Indeed, after the murders of 17 people by terrorists in Paris in early 2015, marchers at anti-immigration rallies in Dresden chanted, “We are the people,” a slogan, according to National Public Radio correspondent, Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, “very much like the sort of thing one heard during the Nazi era.” Footnote 3 In Munich, in contrast, protestors sought to stop a rally by an affiliated anti-immigrant group. Footnote 4
McCarthy does not suppose that “Germany has fully mastered its Nazi past.” The current immigration crisis in Europe and protests against it also suggest the limits of this mastery. Nevertheless, if we turn to the United States, what is surprising is the absence of any serious national reflection on its past and, particularly, on the history and experience of Americans of African descent. Well before current reports of shady mortgage instruments sold to African Americans during the financial crisis and before the wide-spread circulation of videos of police shootings of African American men, observers, historians, and journalists were already painting a damning picture of the treatment that African Americans have received from their government and fellow citizens, not only during slavery and the era of segregation but far into the twentieth century. Yet many of these observations and reports have simply been ignored and, although others received some attention for a time, none has become part of the country’s standard public history. To the contrary, a 2015 bill in Oklahoma would bar state funds for Advanced Placement history courses in public schools because the revised framework, the bill’s sponsor, Dan Fisher said, “trades an emphasis on America’s founding principles of Constitutional government in favor of robust analyses of gender and racial oppression and class, ethnicity and the lives of marginalized people.” Footnote 5
My premise is that the continued failure in the United States to incorporate such robust analyses into its standard history has a profound effect on its political culture. Discussions of the expansion of health insurance are just one example. A 2013 National Journal poll suggests that whites who oppose the Affordable Care Act do not see it as a universal benefit program such as Social Security or Medicare. Footnote 6 Rather, they view it as an income-transfer program similar to food stamps or welfare and benefitting only the poor, whom they regard as generally non-white and generally as freeloaders whose poverty is unrelated to a history of discrimination and is self-imposed.
I begin by briefly noting samples of some of the “robust analyses” from the past quarter century that focus on post-Civil War African American history and that remain marginal to the main thrust of U.S. public memory. I then consider the American antipathy to confronting this history, an antipathy I first examine in terms of epistemologies of ignorance and what Charles Mills more specifically calls “white ignorance.” Footnote 7 The idea here is that certain forms of ignorance are substantive; they are not simply absences of knowledge based on a lack of relevant experience nor can they be appropriately characterized as ideological distortions. Indeed, Mills denies that we need “elaborate theories of ideology” to grasp white ignorance. Rather he maintains that we can “detach from a class framework, a Marxist ‘materialist’ claim about the interaction between exploitation, group interest, and social cognition and apply it with far more plausibility within a race framework.” While some theorists have tried to supplement Mills’s realist framework with a more sophisticated one indebted to Critical Theory, Footnote 8 I want to move in a different direction and to draw out some implications of the distinctive approach known as philosophical hermeneutics in order to provide an alternative to Mills’s social epistemology. I want also to consider one of the possible virtues of ignorance, namely that in acknowledging it we can open ourselves to alternative accounts of our past. By developing these themes, I hope to demonstrate how a hermeneutic perspective can contribute to serious discussion among U.S. political scientists and political educators about the links between racial inequality and historical understanding and its absence.
Recent Research on Racial Discrimination
“Torn from the Land” is a 2001 report by the Associated Press that looks at some of the ways generations of post-Civil War African Americans in Southern and border states lost the lands they once owned. Footnote 9 Documenting 107 land-takings in thirteen states, a figure the AP considered simply the tip of the iceberg, the press found that 57 of the takings were violent; during Jim Crow, prosperous African American farmers were simply lynched and their lands sold off to whites. Footnote 10 Other land transfers were the result of terror and intimidation, legal chicanery, and the refusal during World War II by government agencies such as the Navy to recompense African Americans (but not European Americans) for the market value of the land it acquired through eminent domain.
Current land-takings involve partition sales that have deprived African Americans of 80 percent of the 5.5 million acres of farmland they owned in 1969. Footnote 11 Many rural African American landowners in the South lack access to legal services and often (up to 83 percent of them) die without wills. Whenever they do so their heirs inherit the estate, owning the land in common. When those heirs also die without wills, the number of people possessing the land in common multiplies and continues to multiply over generations. Any heir can sell his or her small share in the property and once someone buys it, he or she can then petition a judge to put the entire property up for sale at auction. The remaining family members are usually not in a financial position to buy their properties back and the land is lost. The AP report quotes Thomas Mitchell, a University of Wisconsin law professor: “Imagine buying one share of Coca-Cola, and being able to go to court and demand a sale of the entire company.” Footnote 12
In their comprehensive 1993 book, American Apartheid, Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton take up housing discrimination against African Americans, beginning with the early-twentieth-century hostility of whites in northern cities to the influx of African Americans fleeing Jim Crow. Footnote 13 In race riots in various cities such as New York and Chicago, African Americans were beaten, shot, and lynched; later, residential color lines made it difficult for even well-to-do African Americans to live outside of designated “black belts” or “darkytowns.” Footnote 14 Those who tried were encouraged to leave their new neighborhoods, often violently and sometimes with bombs. More organized solutions as the century continued included neighborhood improvement associations and restrictive housing covenants that enforced a residential color line and redlining. Middle class African Americans could rarely escape the ghetto because the color line moved with them: realtors would designate a neighborhood for black expansion, encourage whites to vacate, break up houses to lease to single renters, and let the neighborhood decline. To add insult to injury, the Federal Housing Authority established as part of FDR’s New Deal provided low-interest loans to white homeowners but refused mortgages to African Americans whose homes, in redlined districts, it saw as less likely to increase in value.
In When Affirmative Action Was White, Ira Katznelson details other effects of the New Deal on African American lives. Footnote 15 Provisions establishing a minimum wage, Social Security, unemployment insurance, and workmen’s compensation originally excluded agricultural and domestic work. Yet in the South, most employed African Americans were engaged in just these occupations. Likewise, the G.I. Bill helped 16 million veterans of World War II attend college, receive job training, start businesses, and purchase their first homes. However, Southern Congressmen insisted that local rather than federal officials direct the programs. The result was that in the South, African American veterans were regularly denied housing and business loans; were excluded from job training in emerging fields such as radio, mechanics and commercial photography; and were shunted into lower paying “black jobs.” By October 1946, the employment service in Mississippi had placed 6,500 veterans in non-agricultural jobs: whites held 86 percent of the skilled and semiskilled jobs; African Americans held 92 percent of the unskilled ones. Footnote 16 African Americans were, of course, also denied admission to whites-only colleges and universities. If African Americans residing in Southern states wanted to make use of this aspect of the G.I. Bill they had to attend underfinanced, badly equipped black colleges and makeshift professional schools.
Katznelson notes that the discrepancies in implementing the G.I. Bill were not limited to the South. In 1946, the University of Pennsylvania in the North enrolled 46 black students in a student body of 9,000 and most of the other Ivy Leagues universities enrolled fewer. As for home ownership, in New York and northern New Jersey “fewer than 100 of the 67,000 mortgages insured by the G.I. Bill supported home purchases by nonwhites.” Footnote 17 Ta-Nehesi Coates adds Chicago to this record: African Americans were largely excluded from the legitimate mortgage market in Chicago well into the 1960s and had to settle for buying their houses on contract. Footnote 18 Under the terms of these contracts, they acquired no equity in their homes until the contract was paid in full. Furthermore, one missed payment resulted in their losing the initial payment, all the monthly payments, and the house. Those African Americans who were able to make good on their contract mortgages remained subject to redlining and exclusion from neighborhoods where their houses might have increased in value.
Recent research notes a significant difference in the current wealth of African American and white families in the United States. White Americans accumulated wealth both in the post-World War II homes they were granted loans to buy, which African Americans were denied and in the value of their G.I.-funded education and skilled jobs, opportunities that again were largely withheld from blacks. Moreover, because the residential segregation created in the twentieth century continues to set a ceiling on home equity for African-Americans, their houses do not increase in value as much as houses in whiter neighborhoods. Tracing a set of the same households over 25 years, Thomas Shapiro, Tatjana Meschede, and Sam Osorothe found that the total wealth gap between white and African-American families nearly tripled, from $85,000 in 1984 to $236,500 in 2009. Footnote 19
The point of recalling some of this readily-available research on African American history is to ask why it is not a larger part of the U.S. public memory. To the contrary, we can contrast it to two beliefs by large numbers of white Americans. First, they think that since the end of segregation African Americans have possessed the same opportunities as whites. Hence, if African Americans continue to suffer socioeconomic disadvantages, these are largely their fault, products of black cultural pathologies or, as McCarthy puts it, of African Americans “possessing too little of the crucial economic-individualistic virtues—motivation, self-discipline, hard work, and the like—that enabled Irish, German, Italian, Jewish and other minorities to overcome prejudice and work their ways up.” Footnote 20 Second, a 2011 study found a growing perception on the part of whites, not simply that African Americans possess the same opportunities as whites, but that whites are currently more victimized than African Americans and that the latter have made gains at their expense. Footnote 21
How are we to make sense out of such beliefs and their contrast to on-going research and reporting on African American experiences? I turn next to Charles Mills’s account of “white ignorance.”
White Ignorance
Appealing to recent social epistemology, Mills begins with what he considers some of the crucial components of social cognition contributing to white ignorance: perception, conception, memory, testimony and group interest. Perception, he thinks, was already a problem for European settlers in the Americas insofar as they apparently could not see either the sheer numbers of native people who inhabited them or the houses, towns, roads, fields, and earthworks they built. Footnote 22 Instead, for Europeans, as John Locke put it, the New World was a vast empty land. Footnote 23 Later African American writers remarked on a similar invisibility. Mills quotes Ralph Ellison:
I am an invisible man. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind … I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me … When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me. Footnote 24
Ellison’s reference to figments of white imagination points to the second dimension of white ignorance for Mills: conception. In the past few decades, he maintains, epistemological research has discredited “the idea of a raw perceptual ‘given’ unmediated by concepts” and has shown, instead, that perception is concept laden. Footnote 25 Conceptions, moreover, are not simply individual creations but are rather acquired from one’s cultural milieu. What European settlers could and could not see as a town or as evidence of agriculture depended upon the ways they had been socialized within a particular time and place. To the extent that this socialization included the assumption that non-whites were nomadic savages, Mills says, it would have been difficult for Europeans to comprehend Native American activities or to see their products as forms of agriculture or government. He quotes Hilary Kornblith: “The influence of social factors begins at birth, for language is not reinvented by each individual in social isolation, nor could it be. Because language acquisition is socially mediated, the concepts we acquire are themselves socially mediated from the very beginning.” Footnote 26
They are also linked to one another in “complexes of ideation,” Mills says. The European attitude to the people of color it encountered in its colonies and empires reflected a notion of human development that situated Europe at the top and was oblivious to the exploitation of other groups that put it there. Military conquest, the labor of others in the gold and silver mines of Mexico and Peru and profits from plantation slavery played no role in the European account of its ascendency. Rather, according to Mills, in societies structured by relations of domination, complexes of ideation are “likely to be shaped and inflected in various ways by the biases of the ruling group(s).” Footnote 27 Mills maintains that the explicit racism found in older European views of people of color and in American discrimination against African Americans now takes the form of a belief in the post-racial society in which nonwhites have the same social and economic resources as whites (or, indeed, better resources, as the 2011 report found.) “If originally whiteness was race, now it is racelessness, an equal status and a common history in which all have shared, with white privilege being conceptually erased.” Footnote 28
Memory also has a role to play. Mills explains that because our complexes of ideation issue from our socialization they are related to the memory of those who socialize us. As he also points out, memory is selective and this characteristic extends to the public memory that is articulated in textbooks, expressed in ceremonies and public holidays, and embedded in memorials and monuments. Footnote 29 In societies structured by domination, what is remembered and what is forgotten will have a particular bias. In societies structured by white domination, public memory will have a white bias. A case in point, of course, is the “moonlight and magnolias” myth about American slavery promulgated not only in Hollywood films but also by academic historians well into the 1950s. Footnote 30 Given the biased nature of memory, the fourth aspect of white ignorance that Mills examines—testimony—is all the more important. Yet if certain groups are denied the right to testify or perceived as non-credible witnesses when they do, and if they are silenced or terrorized when it appears that they might speak or write, then the testimony that is taken up as the public record will be partial and skewed. Mills points to the 1921 Tulsa riots where the official Tulsa records mysteriously vanished and African Americans were still, decades later, too traumatized to give evidence. Indeed, when many finally showed researchers their photographs of the event, they did so only under the condition of anonymity.
The last feature of white ignorance that Mills considers stresses the relation of perception, conception, memory, and testimony to motivational group interest, or more precisely, a “vested white group interest in the racial status quo.” Footnote 31 The insistence that racism is a phenomenon of the past or, even more extremely, that whites are currently disadvantaged vis à vis African Americans serves white interests inasmuch as it absolves whites of any imperative to act against racial injustices or their causes. White ignorance is a motivated ignorance, one that affects “the concepts favored (e.g., today’s color blindness), the refusal to perceive systemic discrimination, the convenient amnesia about the past and its legacy in the present, and the hostility to black testimony on continuing white privilege and the need to eliminate it to achieve racial justice.” Footnote 32
The social epistemology to which Mills appeals in his analysis is surely a latecomer to the insights it presents into the concept-laden character of perception and the social aspects of conception, language, and so on. Nevertheless, before looking at the way philosophical hermeneutics expresses such insights and considering the contribution this tradition may have for questions of white ignorance and public memory, I want to look briefly at the solution to white ignorance that Mills first sketched out in 1988 and that he still largely seems to endorse. Footnote 33
Standpoint Theory
Mills’s solution follows standpoint theory as it has developed in Marxism and feminism and argues that because subordinate groups have experiences that diverge from those of the dominant group, they also possess more accurate knowledge of the dynamics of the social system of which they are a part. Footnote 34 Thus, on a Marxist view, as Mills understands it, the working class possesses a better understanding of the structure of capitalism than the bourgeoisie because the proletariat’s experience of capitalist production dissolves the semblance of equality in the buying and selling of labor power. Transferred to women and racially subordinated groups, the same logic means that both also possess a better understanding of the dynamics of their societies than dominant groups. On the basis of their experiences at work, on dates, and in public, women understand the constancy of the threat of rape and the way it serves as a mechanism of repression. On the basis of their experiences with housing, the job market, and the police, people of color understand the persistence of racism despite official claims about its demise. Different experiences produce different epistemic consequences so that, Mills says, we need to draw “internal distinctions between different varieties of social causation, according to their likelihood of producing positive or negative epistemic consequences.” Whereas dominant groups “characteristically” have experiences that foster ignorance, he claims that subordinate groups “characteristically” have experiences that “(at least potentially) give rise to more adequate conceptualizations.” Footnote 35 It follows, in his view, that we can correct for white ignorance by synthesizing the epistemic positions of the latter groups.
This correction has a number of limitations. Mills suggests that positive epistemic consequences are disillusioning and penetrate the myths a society tells about itself. Yet what about the disillusioning experiences white working-class men can have of affirmative-action policies that may cause disillusionment about the United States as a meritocratic society, but also might lead to white working-class racism? How, moreover, are we to synthesize the standpoints of all subordinated groups? Mills is aware of the complications posed by intersections of race, class, gender, and the like, complications that require acknowledging the different experiences that different groups of women, of African Americans, and so on, can have. He knows, for example, that American women of European descent may not experience the same sort of discrimination and marginalization that American women of African descent do, for example. Nevertheless, if not, do the former still have epistemic privilege as women or, as European Americans, are their insights rather marked by white ignorance? What about African American men? Are their insights as African Americans independent of their lack of insight as men, or are their insights conditioned and even skewed by it?
Mills denies that intersectional considerations justify what he calls a “retreat into a nonjudgmental epistemic neutrality.” Footnote 36 Rather, he conceives of the perspectives of differently intersected groups as providing consecutive corrections:
Because the working class Marx studied was not an abstraction but a group composed largely of white males, their subversive insight into the structure of social oppression … was only partial. Women’s perspective was required to uncover the significance of rape as a sustaining mechanism of patriarchal repression. But because the women who developed this analysis were themselves largely white, they in turn tended to miss the particular historical significance of rape accusations made against black men by white women. Again, therefore, a theoretical corrective was necessary, this time in the form of a critique of white, middle-class feminist theory by black women…In each case a better approximation to the holistic reality of the situation is being achieved.” Footnote 37
This conclusion follows, however only if the corrections offered by consecutive epistemic perspectives are compatible and cumulative. Yet if African American women correct white middle-class feminism by pointing to the historical threats to African American men posed by white women who falsely accuse them of rape, what about the African American women raped by white and African American men? If rape is a mechanism of subordination, is it only white women who feel its threat? Mills’s analysis strangely erases African American women. Indeed, the very sensitivity to the subordination of African American men that Mills conceives of as a mark of privileged insight serves to reinforce ignorance about African American women. Footnote 38
Still, perhaps the more severe problem with Mills’s recourse to standpoint theory is that it remains unclear how exactly it is meant to correct for white ignorance. It may present perspectives from which the continuing effects and existence of racism become clear. Yet we do not lack for alternative epistemologies: even if we limit our survey to the past twenty-five years, those years have been replete with reports and discussions of anti-black violence, racial discrimination, and disparate treatment. To be sure, twentieth-century violence and discrimination against African Americans forced some into silence; yet voices such as W.E.B. Du Bois, the black press in general, and others documented and described it. Indeed, white Southern newspapers themselves trumpeted the successes of lynching as a method of subordinating African Americans. Thus the problem is not that we have lacked accounts and analyses of either our past or the on-going effects of racial marginalization and discrimination. Nor, moreover, are these effects visible only from the standpoints of those who have suffered. The problem is that these accounts and analyses are either not yet incorporated into the understanding the United States has of itself or, as in the case of the state of Oklahoma, that it has potentially consciously suppressed. In other words, the issue is not establishing the privileged standpoints from which marginalization and discrimination appear but, rather, trying to ensure that reports of what already appears from many standpoints become part of the standard history and public memory of the United States. It is in this endeavor that I think philosophical hermeneutics has a role to play. I begin with its own approach to the entwinement of perception, conception, memory, testimony, and motivated group interest.
Philosophical Hermeneutics
If Mills stresses the orientation of perception by conception, philosophical hermeneutics looks to what philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, following Martin Heidegger, calls the fore-structure of understanding. Footnote 39 Understanding is always understanding as. It is not a matter of encountering objects in a neutral way, or as raw perceptual givens, and then deciding how to understand or describe them. Rather, we always already understand them in some way or other. We understand a play by Shakespeare or Marlowe as a play by Shakespeare or Marlowe, and in doing so, already possess anticipations and expectations with regard to its themes, language, quality, importance, and so on before we engage in explicit interpretations of it. Gadamer also stresses the same point that Mills does: that the orientations we possess are not simply our own creations, but rather consequences of our cultural milieu. Moreover, just as Mills includes as part of this cultural milieu the memories of those who compose it and the testimonies of those able to be heard in the past, Gadamer looks to historical tradition. The fore-structure of understanding that is part of our encounter with the works of Shakespeare and Marlowe is one we inherit from previous generations. The anticipations and expectations that orient us to that which we are trying to understand reflect the results of their own encounters with the texts and the ways in which they took them up, related them to other texts and events, and passed them down to us. The same holds for text-analogues such as actions, institutions, practices, and events. We anticipate their meaning on the basis of historical pre-orientations or assumptions that our predecessors bequeath to us and that contain the interpreted results of their experiences. As an alternative to citing Kornblith’s claim that the influence of social factors begins at birth, Mills might have as easily begun with Gadamer: “Understanding is, essentially, a historically effected event.” Footnote 40
Yet we can draw very different implications from this insight than Mills does. Four are of particular significance. First, because we belong to different historical traditions and because historical traditions are internally complex, we anticipate different meanings and are oriented to that which we are trying to understand in different ways. We approach texts and text analogues in terms of different interests, concerns, and contexts of relations that open up different vantage points for understanding them. Take Herbert Melville’s Benito Cereno. Mills understands the novella as a depiction of his thesis of white ignorance. Boarding the crippled ship, San Dominick, the white Amasa Delano.
has all around him the evidence for black insurrection, from the terror in the eyes of the nominal white captain … as his black barber Babo puts the razor to his throat to the Africans clashing their hatchets ominously in the background. But so unthinkable is the idea the inferior blacks could have accomplished such a thing that Delano searches for every possible alternative explanation for the seemingly strange behavior of the imprisoned whites. Footnote 41
Andrew Delbanco, in contrast, understands the novella in terms of the events of September 11, 2001: “In our own time of terror and torture, Benito Cereno has emerged as the most salient of Melville’s works: a tale of desperate men in the grip of a vengeful fury that those whom they hate cannot begin to understand.” Footnote 42 Thus, while Mills focuses on Delano’s inability to grasp the temporary victory of the Africans on the San Dominick, Delbanco focuses on the extent of their wrath. Whereas Delbanco emphasizes the Africans’ perspective as a way of trying to comprehend the contemporary fury many currently feel towards the United States, Mills emphasizes Delano’s perspective in order to provide a graphic case of white non-comprehension. Both interpretations differ, moreover, from interpretations of the 1950s that thought Melville played up the blackness of the Africans in order to emphasize their evilness.
The second important implication that we can draw from the way understanding is historically affected follows. Neither Mill’s nor Delbanco’s interpretation of Benito Cereno is the last word on the book. Not only do their understandings differ both from one another and from other interpretations but, in addition, history continues so that different generations of interpreters understand the same texts and text analogues differently. Later generations understand them in terms of concerns and interests earlier generations cannot have had and they can relate them to new findings and new or different texts and text-analogues. If critics in the 1950s thought the Africans symbolized evil, more recent readers see the novella as a critique of slavery. If critics could not have understood Benito Cereno in terms of the attacks on the World Trade towers before they happened, Delbanco takes the attacks as his reference point. What we might call the after-history of a text or text-analogue is never-ending. Understanding is part of an on-going history and as long as that history does not end, texts and text-analogues will always be understood in a new and different ways.
For Mills, of course, these first two implications we can draw from philosophical hermeneutics reflect a pernicious relativism or, at the very least, a retreat into nonjudgmental neutrality. To maintain that we can understand differently, given the different contexts of significances and relations in terms of which we understand, seems to require that we give up on all possibility of adjudicating between different understandings. If we are to say that Delbanco and Mills are equally insightful in the interpretations of Benito Cereno, are we also to say that we should take African American perceptions of inequality no more seriously than we take the perceptions of those whites who claim to be currently more victimized?
To suppose that we need to answer this question affirmatively presumes that there is an easy way to move from the claim that all understandings of meaning are equally historically affected, to the conclusion that all are equally valid. It also presumes that there is an easy way to move from the claim that no one group possesses privileged insight into its society, to the claim that all views of all groups possess or lack the same level of insight. Nevertheless, to say that some interpretations are equally valid is not to say that all are. Here philosophical hermeneutics relies on the hermeneutic circle and conceives of plausible interpretations as those that are able to integrate part and whole. Thus, if what we took to be a white victimhood fails to cohere with research into the legacy and effects of discrimination against people of color, we must assume a problem with either the thesis of white victimhood or the research; if that research coheres with itself, with the facts it discovers, the testimony it hears and so on, then we must give up on the claims to victimhood. In any case, there is a difference between an understanding that allows for the possibility of understanding differently and a failure to understand at all. We can integrate the aspects of Benito Cereno and the research into discrimination in some different but equally plausible ways, ones that draw different connections and emphasize different figures and actions. Still, we need not allow for any interpretation at all, even those that discount most or all of the text or evidence.
The third implication we can draw from the way understanding is historically effected is that it is incomplete. We never know all the meanings a text or text-analogue can have. Rather, texts institutions, practices, actions, and the like take up relations to new texts, text-analogues, and circumstances; across and within historical time frames, different interpreters situate texts and text-analogues in relation to different issues and concerns; different interpreters emphasize different aspects of texts, institutions, practices, and the like and integrate them with one another in different ways. A fourth implication of effective history follows. We are ignorant and we always have more to learn. We can never know all the meanings a text or text-analogue can have because we cannot know the future; nor to the extent that tradition relies on testimony and memory, can we assume that we know all the facets of the past. Rather, there are always new and rediscovered voices to which to listen and new meanings we can uncover. Indeed, the only way we can begin to compensate for our ignorance is to acknowledge it and to engage in on-going investigations and interrogations in which we sift through archives, listen to the testimonies of others, and engage in conversations with them in which we discover other ways of understanding from which we may be able to learn.
Gadamer claims that this last compensation is one of the greatest insights we can gain from Plato’s account of Socratic questioning. When other characters in the Socratic dialogues ask questions, they usually “come to grief” because they assume that they know the answers in advance. Although they provide comic relief, they fail to advance consideration of the topic at issue. In contrast, Gadamer thinks that Socrates’s questions advance consideration of the topic because they issue from a desire to know and that desire to know, for its part, issues from “knowing that one does not know.” Footnote 43 We may not agree with Gadamer’s view of Socrates’s sincerity in asking questions or in claiming he knows that he does not know. Nevertheless, Gadamer is surely justified in suggesting that, whereas asking questions to which we think we know the answers leaves us with no possibility of ever knowing more than what we already know or think we already know, asking questions of texts, artifacts, and others on the basis of a self-acknowledged ignorance affords us the possibility of learning.
Where those of whom we are asking questions also ask questions of us and do so because they recognize their own inevitable ignorance, we engage in a reciprocally educative dialogue. We each set the understandings of the other against our existing understanding of the subject matter and if these do not cohere, we and our conversation partners engage in a mutual process of revising one or the other understanding, or both. Because the starting point of this process is a desire to know founded in a recognition that we do not know, the point of questioning is not to show the superiority of our position but to bring out the strength of the positions or interpretations of others. The same holds for the questions our conversation partners ask. This learning will remain a partial one on both sides. Yet this partiality suggests the value of continuing to engage in dialogue with others about ourselves and our past.
Conclusion
In every congress since 1989, Michigan Congressman John Conyers has proposed a bill to establish a commission to explore the question of reparations to African Americans. The bill does not mandate reparations but only authorizes a study of the question and of the history that might justify them. Thus, whether or not reparations are forthcoming, arguably as significant is a national reckoning with the past, or what Coates calls the “collective introspection” that such a study could elicit. Footnote 44 Nonetheless, the bill has never made it to the floor. To the contrary, talk of reparations elicits a vehemently negative response: discussing the question would be “racially incendiary,” Footnote 45 would risk re-opening “the very wounds it is intended to heal,” Footnote 46 and would “reignite smoldering racial animosities that have just managed to cool, a little, over the past decades.” Footnote 47
Philosophical hermeneutics suggests that these reactions are counter-productive. In the first place, recent events in Ferguson and Baltimore raise questions about the degree to which wounds have healed and animosities cooled. Second, the experience of Germany as well as South Africa and other countries suggests that public discussions of difficult pasts allow for policies and debates over policies less infected by unresolved tensions and suppressed testimonies. By rooting the bases of such debates and discussions in a general recognition of ignorance, philosophical hermeneutics emphasizes a mutual and on-going education. In the United States, it encourages public discussion of race and racial history and reformed American history courses of precisely the sort that Oklahoma would like to avoid.
Yet in order to insist on the importance of incorporating African American history into American public memory, we need not take the tack that Mills and others do. For Mills and others, U.S. history is centrally a history that begins with the decimation of native peoples and that runs through the exploitation of slave labor, the passage of the Chinese exclusion act, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, Jim Crow, racial terrorism, and the current incarceration of masses of African American men. Furthermore, versions of American history that conceive of these events as deviations, even extended deviations, from its constitutional ideals reverse the proper relation between the main trajectory, which is one of marginalization and subordination, and the deviations, which may be ones of intermittent social justice. To begin with freedom and equality, however, and to conceive of American history as a progressive attempt to meet these ideals is fundamentally to misunderstand it and to do so in a motivated and self-congratulatory way. Yet from a historical perspective within a history that is multifaceted and does not end, we cannot know how to write the “true” history of the United States and we can legitimately understand American history differently than Mills does, stressing, say, the actions of Quakers and abolitionists and the effects of the Civil Rights movement, Brown v. Board of Education, and Stonewall, as well as the decision of countless city clerks in 2014 and 2015 to extend their operating hours in order to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, often before the final approval of the courts. Just as we allow for different interpretations of texts, we can allow for different interpretations of American history that emphasize different trajectories and align events in different ways.
On the one hand, then, while the politics of memory that Germany has practiced since the 1960s may have had “a profound effect upon its political culture and national identity,” as McCarthy claims, the refusal of Americans to confront their own past at all continues to distort its politics. Indeed, to the extent that white Americans attribute the disadvantages African Americans suffer to cultural factors and think that, as whites, they are unfairly put upon, any policy that promises to assist African Americans is seen as yet another way in which white Americans bear undue costs. Like Mills and others, philosophical hermeneutics insists on the importance of overcoming this sort of white ignorance. On the other hand, we need not decide what the “truth” of American history is: either a racist history or a progressive attempt to realize constitutional ideals. Instead, we are interested in what each interpretation of that history has to teach the other.
Acknowledging our ignorance may have a certain strategic advantage. Accusing whites of ignorance while attributing superior insight to others, or to marginalized and subordinated groups, serves only to reinforce white intransigence, as exemplified by the Oklahoma state legislature. In contrast, admitting to a universal ignorance can encourage openness on the part of others. We no longer insist on the superiority of our standpoint but can rather present it as a contribution to an on-going discussion in which we model for others a commitment to listening. In any case, acknowledging our ignorance aptly reflects our historical situation insofar as we are affected by the past, oriented by our own interests and concerns, and unwitting with regard to the future. To the extent that we acknowledge ignorance, we can work for an on-going education. The problem with white ignorance, then, is not ignorance per se, but rather an arrogant ignorance that presumes that it already knows.
