The got ignorance? campaign is back and was on display Wednesday on the torsos of hundreds of students. It is a clever slogan, a spin-off of the “Got Milk?” campaign of several years ago. Its inventors, however, could have been a little more clever by choosing a slogan that made an association (like milk and health, ignorance and racism) that was a little more accurate.

Thinking that racially contemptuous attitudes are to be blamed foremost on a lack of information is a profound (and ubiquitous) error. Ask yourself, is there any fact or figure that could be produced in order to thwart racial antagonism? Or to cause a Ku Klux Klan member to cede his membership? What sort of information could possibly be supplied to mitigate the mistreatment of individuals on the basis of race?

A better slogan for this campaign might be “Got Virtue?” for it is not an increase in knowledge that is necessary for a decrease in racially antagonistic attitudes, but rather an increase in virtue.

What is required is not that people learn more facts, but that people make different value judgments.

Leading a life that realizes all people have equal moral worth requires the adoption of virtue and integrity, not the acquisition of information in a classroom.

The main attraction of believing that racially antagonistic attitudes are caused by ignorance is that it allows us to believe that education can bring about an improvement in those attitudes. This would be very convenient, since it is far easier for teachers to impart knowledge than it is for them to impart virtue on their students.

But hasn’t education done a lot to reduce such attitudes? It may sometimes appear this way (and its “successes” are certainly celebrated by teachers and politicians, the two groups most committed to the belief that schooling can fix almost every problem.)

But much more than bringing about any real improvement, education has simply replaced racist attitudes with a doctrine that is almost as depraved: that acknowledging actual differences among races, other than those of “racial identity,” is “racism;” that all cultures are on equal moral ground, and to deny this is “racism” or “ethnocentrism;” that the source of all negative views of or attitudes toward other races is in defects of empirical knowledge, not in defects of character.

What is most pernicious about this doctrine is that it decries as racist anyone who even suggests that we consider an alternative.

Anyone who has been paying attention at all lately has surely noticed these attitudes among younger generations, especially the predilection to gasp at the slightest suggestion (it need not even be an assertion) that there might be differences among the races, or that the Confederacy wasn’t pure evil, etc. This sort of behavior makes real dialogue about racism nearly impossible.

As long as this sort of dysfunctional view of the world persists, I see no reason to think that the discourse concerning issues related to race will not continue to be as fruitless as it has been for the last 10 years.

Jeremy Alm

Graduate Student

Mathematics