yolland
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In the dictionary sense, 'ignorant' (as well as 'ignorance' and 'ignoramus') can only be used in the sense of lack of knowledge--the verb form 'ignore' is unique in carrying that sense of willful disregard. But I too was wondering why that is, so I checked the OED...BonoVoxSupastar said:I always found it interesting that the word ignorant has the root word ignore, which implies an effort, yet 'ignorant' is often defined as just lack of knowledge...
French ignorer in its various forms entered English via the Normans, at that time carrying only the sense of 'uninformed'. Since English already had its own series of words based on the Germanic form ('know') of that same root (gno-), and since that's the sort of ultra-basic core vocabulary not easily displaced, the French forms don't seem to have become widely used until quite recently--especially the verb form 'ignore.' That verb appears in 17th- and (with sharply decreasing frequency) 18th-century texts, carrying the sense of 'to manifest a lack of awareness of'. But then around the late 18th century, it was revived in the specific context of law: to 'ignore' a proposed bill was to pointedly 'un-know' it. By the mid-19th century, the word made its way back into popular use--but this time carrying only the new meaning of 'to disregard, refuse to know'. Meanwhile the noun and adjective forms, which had never fallen out of popular use, confusingly continued to carry the older meaning.
Interestingly, in Latin itself ignorare actually carried both senses, but apparently that sense of willful disregard was lost in most of the Romance languages for at least some period of time. The fact that Latin was (and is) so important in law presumably accounts for that particular sense of it being revived in English via that profession--not sure if that's how it might have worked in the Romance languages or not.
I'm not sure you meant to suggest this, but IMO it's questionable whether racism as we know it emerged only from a need to justify the Atlantic slave trade. I would argue that racism was at least incipient in the 'logic' of European colonialism (which was already well underway) to begin with: 'These heathen brutes need what Christian civilization has to offer them.' While that ideology doesn't in itself lead inevitably to slavery and mandatory social segregation, and in theory even offers 'freedom' to said 'brutes' once they adopt the master's ways, I think its consequences still represent a distinct departure from the less systematic kinds of depredations you get from the more time-honored combo of 'mere' greed (we'll invade, then retool their economy to suit our goals) plus "the more common 'fear of the foreign Other' " (...then of course, put structures in place to protect our interests) seen in, say, Moghul India. It may not be 'racism' per se, since the chauvinism involved is primarily cultural, not based on skin color, but it's already sliding towards that idea of 'what you are is innately bad and beastly and wrong, such that it's our natural right and duty to put a stop to it'. (And perhaps even, '...and there must be something wrong with you to live so contemptibly in the first place'.)maycocksean said:I would argue that the greed came first. In the early years of the settlement of the New World, blacks and whites were both brought over as indentured servants and essentially treated eqaully as far as I understand it. Look at the way black/white racism has developed in this country and it's radically different and far more corrosive than the more common "fear of the foreign Other" prejudice found in many other parts of the world.
Maybe that was critical to the development of racism 'proper', maybe it wasn't, but either way I tend to see that context as a powerful enabler of what came afterwards. Bacon's Rebellion was only the most noteworthy of a string of late-17th-century upheavals which made it clear to the aristocracy that the danger of poor whites and blacks joining forces against them was too real to not be taken seriously. Already by 1667, Virginia had passed a law declaring that baptism conferred no immunity from being enslaved for life--in other words, 'once a heathen, always a heathen' (prior to that, it was generally understood that Christian Africans could not be slaves, only indentured servants). In some ways that was probably an emblematically fateful moment, because it 'resolved,' and not for the better, a tension already inherent in the 'heathen brutes' justification: if there really is nothing wrong with these people besides an undesirable worldview, then why are we going about changing it so violently, and in practice continuing to hold the cloth they were originally cut from against them, even after they accept the changes? So there really is an ironic paradox lurking in there--the widespread acceptance of 'all men created equal,' when confronted with the temptations of profit and power, winds up enabling the lame qualifier 'but these particular men are innately less equal than others,' cementing an ideology which outlasts the empire itself, because it locates its authority in 'nature' and not the government.
Ever read Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (1781)? In a nutshell, that was the essence of his views on slavery. Like many Westerners (not just Americans) of his time, he did hold a condescending and infantilizing view of black people, considering them clearly inferior in 'reason' and 'imagination'--the old 'heathen brutes' idea, basically--and therefore not really worthy citizenship material for his country. At the same time, he emphatically denied those were acceptable grounds for slavery, which he proposed legislation to end several times (the end of the slave trade in Virginia came about through one of his bills). His proposed 'solution' to this 'dilemma' was a sort of population exchange: free the slaves...but ship them back to Africa; then to make up for the loss of their labor, bring in more white settlers.BonoVoxSupastar said:In other words, if you were taught that the world was flat and didn't question it, then the world was flat. But let's say you weren't taught the world was flat, but it would be profitable to believe so, could you convince yourself to believe the world was flat just because it would make you money?
Jefferson does seem to have revised his low opinion of blacks late in his life. But he never did free more than a few of his own slaves--something he'd said he'd do once all his debts were paid off, which never happened. If we're to take that vow at face value, then I think his was pretty clearly a case of someone who 'knew the world isn't flat' (i.e., that there can be no morally acceptable arguments for slavery) effectively continuing to live in accord with the (profitable) premise that indeed it is flat.
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