You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.
-- Harlan Ellison
I think this is the "ignorance" people are talking about. In this case, your ignorance of not knowing the difference. Doesn't make you racist, just makes you ignorant. So you either choose to educate yourself or remain ignorant
Spot on! I wish I'd conceived so succinct and kind a summation as you. TY. Let's both hope it does some good.
If I'm honest, there's a part of me that is willing to forbear one's innocent ignorance. Having deep Southern familial roots, I'm no stranger to how that can can be one's circumstance. Be that as it may, there're two forms of ignorance: circumstantial and willful.
I am willing to pardon a measure of circumstantial ignorance for we all have it in "this or that" area. I am, however, quickly moved to choler by individuals who cleave to their naivete, moreover defending it via myriad Procrustean formulations, in the face of contravening information. One's adopting such a stance transforms them into modern day equivalents of Procrustes, in turn impelling me to Thesean biliousness toward them.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
-- Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays 2, 1926-29
In twenty-teens whereof we dwell, matters of race roil again with nearly as much animation as in the 1960s. Accordingly, I'd think that anyone who truly cared about seeing sooner end the travails attending racial discord had rather acquiesce to the prospect that their own comprehension of racism, bigotry and their effects is incomplete. Accepting that as a potential truth, one'd further sojourn intellectually, perhaps even experientially, to disabuse themselves of their ignorance. Indeed, the Internet makes doing so quite easy, far easier than it was for my parents to do so, which may explain partly my father's mediocre efforts to that end.
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
-- Isaac Asimov
