Greg, thanks for helping me think through this. I sensed how great the moral cognitive dysfunction was when I read how easily and obsequiously the newspaper allowed the folks at the City define the success of the Brooklyn renewal project in terms of the increased tax return in value to the city on the land in Brooklyn. The focus on that as the "success" seems so pointless, but they cast that rationale to forget 200 businesses, over 1000 families and the homes of a dozen congregations. The immense value of all the community's webs of relationships, its schools, daycare centers and college - its pipelines to the middle class - none of that was in the accounting, nor the 5-min walkable distances between these residents and their means to life (to be replaced by miles and the ache of that severance in terms of sheer hours of time and costs of daily commutes to replicate them) totally absent even from their cognition, not just moral cognition.
Thanks for this comment, Eric. In the beginning of Mills' work that I cited (The Racial Contract), he puts forward the idea that one effect of Whiteness in white people is an "epistemology of ignorance." In the Racial Contract (the idea, not the book), he says, "one has an agreement to misinterpret the world. One has to learn to see the world wrongly, but with the assurance that this set of mistaken perceptions will be validated by white epistemic authority, whether religious or secular."
I believe that's what you're saying, and it is dead on.
Greg, thanks for helping me think through this. I sensed how great the moral cognitive dysfunction was when I read how easily and obsequiously the newspaper allowed the folks at the City define the success of the Brooklyn renewal project in terms of the increased tax return in value to the city on the land in Brooklyn. The focus on that as the "success" seems so pointless, but they cast that rationale to forget 200 businesses, over 1000 families and the homes of a dozen congregations. The immense value of all the community's webs of relationships, its schools, daycare centers and college - its pipelines to the middle class - none of that was in the accounting, nor the 5-min walkable distances between these residents and their means to life (to be replaced by miles and the ache of that severance in terms of sheer hours of time and costs of daily commutes to replicate them) totally absent even from their cognition, not just moral cognition.
Thanks for this comment, Eric. In the beginning of Mills' work that I cited (The Racial Contract), he puts forward the idea that one effect of Whiteness in white people is an "epistemology of ignorance." In the Racial Contract (the idea, not the book), he says, "one has an agreement to misinterpret the world. One has to learn to see the world wrongly, but with the assurance that this set of mistaken perceptions will be validated by white epistemic authority, whether religious or secular."
I believe that's what you're saying, and it is dead on.