Tactical Ignorance
& The Crisis of Epistemic Integrity
Two conversations at Theology Beer Camp last week and a video I watched this morning have led me to write this article. The second conversation happened after I preached on Sunday morning and Dan’s Video came out this morning.
Dan’s Video was very well done, and if you haven’t taken the few minutes to watch it, it’s about a young woman who took on a textbook—and about the ways Fox News took advantage of this young girl’s inability to think critically as talking points for their agenda.
It was a perfect distillation of the moment we’re in: a teenager performs certainty online, mistakes her feelings for scholarship, and a network with millions of viewers weaponizes her ignorance to discredit expertise itself. Not because they care about her or the textbook, but because the spectacle serves the larger project of the systematic dismantling of any authority that might contradict the story their abuse of power needs to tell about itself.
Somebody needs to say it: this ignorance is not passive, it’s tactical. Denzel said this recently in an interview about his latest film about leadership and influence. He was pointing to the after effect of influencer culture and how performance eclipses critical thinking. It creates a climate where this girls “not knowing” became a credential.
Tactical ignorance offers a haven for whiteness: “I can’t be held accountable for what I never learned.” This classic fallback for white identity is playing out in Dan’s video. Whiteness gets to conflate ignorance with innocence (while having the most power) and weaponizes both. Media propagandists understand this and market off of it.
They don’t need to convince anyone of truth; they just need to give people permission not to think.
When knowledge threatens power, power moves to discredit knowledge. Thats why the needle moves so much on what words mean and why the news covergae is so infuriating.
But I am saying that what’s at risk isn’t reputation or money, but ontology. For those whose entire existence depends on domination and antiblackness, facing truth means risking annihilation.
What white identity is running from is ego death.
To admit error would require dismantling the entire architecture of self. So instead, they scapegoat everything that props the identity up through viral outrage, culture wars, the systematic delegitimization of schools, experts, credentials—anything that might hold up a mirror to how fragile it is.
This is why on social media, I am trying to sound the alarm about the real crisis we are in, and it is not theological; it’s a crisis of epistemic integrity. And it has sociopolitical implications because of the ways the meaning of blackness has propped up the American infrastructure. When white identity can’t explain itself except by pointing to what it is not…it needs what it’s not to stay in place so it doesn’t have to ask.
And when a society can no longer agree on what counts as reality or knowledge, it can no longer correct itself. It can only fracture because correction is a social process that requires shared standards of evidence, a method for arbitrating competing claims, and the ability to say “we were wrong” and change course.
But when one group accepts peer review, data, and expertise while another accepts only what confirms existing belief, there is no neutral ground. There is no way to referee both sides. Disagreements cannot be resolved through persuasion or proof—only through power. And power struggles are zero-sum when it comes to white supremacy (if you can’t tell by the headlines each day), it’s either you win or I win, conquest or defeat.
Stable societies cohere around shared epistemic norms, and the enforced epistemic norm of America is white superiority. When epistemic norms dissolve, or are exposed as fallacious, that is, when society doesn’t agree on white superiority anymore, it dissolves the possibility of collective self-governance according to that shared reality.
What you get is collapse.
What you have left is tribalism, force, and the permanent emergency of competing realities.
And here we are.
But here is what white America refuses to see: the containers already exist for the holding of tension in competing realities. They have been built and tended by Black and Indigenous communities for centuries—people who have been making culture and love and meaning in the land of their captors for 400 years.
Last week at theology beer camp was telling. The selective attention of white theology has been so complete that people can feel an existential crisis while surrounded by robust traditions of meaning-making they’ve simply refused to see. They mistook their reality for the only conceivable reality, and when it failed them, they thought reality itself had failed.
White theologians are being pointed in a direction they didn’t think they would ever have to look, and they are scrambling, because then they would have to give an account for why they have not looked or listened before now.
This is what tactical ignorance produces—not just error, but a profound poverty of imagination.
That’s why the R.E.S.T. Mixtape Course draws on Black cultural creativity as sacred text: because this is a culture that has been making beauty in Babylon. Black and indigenous communities survived by learning to hold contradiction, to make beauty in the midst of violence, to know what is true when the dominant culture insists on lies.
What is required now is epistemic humility. The willingness to learn how to do faith, how to build community, how to make meaning from people white America did not pay attention to, did not think they could learn from, did not think mattered. The reckoning most people are avoiding is precisely this: That the wisdom they need has been here all along and that the people they thought were inconsequential are now indispensable.