Durable fiat is an embodiment of the white delusion that uses epistemic maneuvers to try and hide the White ignorance

**Avidyā is a Buddhist concept of ignorance and blindness to the ultimate truth**

WAYS OUT OF WHITE DELUSION?

Buddhist ethics presents several ways of addressing and eliminating the delusions that cause suffering. I will focus on two antidotes to delusion: the contemplation of causation and the cultivation of equanimity.

As may be clear by this point, knowledge, on its own, is not sufficient for liberation from suffering on the Buddhist view. It may seem strange, since a philosophical system that claims ignorance to be the fundamental source of suffering seems required to also say that knowledge is the fundamental source of liberation from that suffering. But, clearly, knowledge by itself does not always liberate us from suffering, a fact that David Burton has referred to as a “conundrum” of Buddhist philosophy.22 After all, we may already know that everything is impermanent, and it is not too difficult to understand the arguments for no-Self or even emptiness (we teach them in college classrooms). But this knowledge alone clearly does not liberate us from suffering, at least not completely. (If it did, philosophy departments would be much happier places than they usually are!) But if we understand avidyā as delusion, rather than ignorance, the claim that knowledge cannot alone liberate us from suffering is less perplexing. Delusion cannot be eliminated just by exposure to, or even acceptance of, the facts. For example, I (irrationally) experience driving as very dangerous; every intersection, every turn and stop light seem to me to be an opportunity for disaster. I know that this perception is false; driving is risky but not that risky. I know that people much less attentive than me drive successfully and without anxiety. This knowledge is helpful, but it has not uprooted my delusion of danger and, for that reason, has not eliminated my anxiety. To uproot this or any other delusion, knowledge needs to be integrated in the right ways, remembered and applied at the right times, and, perhaps most importantly, must be supported by and harmonize with emotions, desires, and perception.

REFLECTING ON CAUSATION AS AN ANTIDOTE TO DELUSION

One way to integrate our knowledge so that it is efficacious in our lives is through practices of repeated contemplation and reflection. In Buddhist philosophy, one of the most common antidotes to delusion is the frequent contemplation of cause and effect.23 Although no one would deny cause and effect—and it is not a difficult concept to grasp or assent to—we often fail to properly recognize, remember, and make logical use of certain causal relationships. We fail both to recognize and remember how our current mental, emotional, and physical state is the effect of various causes and how it is itself the cause of future states. For example, we fail to understand, or remember, how our habit of comparing ourselves to others contributes to our suffering. Or we may refuse to appreciate how our habit of prioritizing ourselves over others will lead to loneliness and unhappiness. We maintain the delusion that we can continue to prioritize ourselves over others and compare ourselves with others and that this will lead to our happiness. But this delusion fails to understand fundamental cause and effect relationships between our attitudes about others and our own happiness.

It is not reflection on any case of cause and effect, or cause and effect in general, that will uproot delusion on the Buddhist view. Rather, specific causal links are selected as proper objects of contemplation because of their relevance to understanding and overcoming human suffering. These specific causal links, the twelve links of dependent origination, are designed to show how our delusion predictably leads to our own suffering. The twelve links connect basic delusion (avidyā) to the structure of our psychology and embodiment, showing how delusion conditions sensation, perception, and other mental phenomena. (That delusion could condition perception will not be surprising to scholars of race and bias, as studies show that whites are more likely to “see” a weapon in the hand of a Black man than a white man.24) These sensations and perceptions create craving and grasping that lead to suffering. In the contemplation of the twelve links, then, delusion is featured at two distinct levels: delusion is a causal link in the chain, and it is by contemplating this causal chain that delusion is claimed to be eliminated.

It is not enough to learn these twelve links once, or to even memorize them, since they can be conveniently forgotten, especially in times when we need them the most, such as during powerful emotional experiences or when we are distracted. These causal links should be contemplated frequently and sincerely, over a lifetime. This frequent reflection forces us to do something we are not usually inclined, or well-positioned, to do: consider how our delusions may be conditioning our perceptions, desires, aversions, and judgments. The hope is that we can create a habit of thinking that fully recognizes the causal relationship between our delusional assumptions and our (and others’) suffering and, by doing so, we begin to deconstruct and eventually eliminate our delusion.

There is, I think, deep insight in the claim that delusion is maintained through a failure or refusal to recognize certain cause and effect relationships. We could accurately characterize white delusion as a failure or refusal to recognize certain racially significant causal relationships. In a recent study by sociologist Jennifer Mueller, 105 college students were asked to write analyses of their family’s intergenerational wealth transmission using concepts they had been taught in class, such as the racial wealth gap, historically discriminatory asset-building policies, and racial disparities across different kinds of capital.25 That is, students were asked to write an explicitly racial history of their family’s wealth transmission. In her analysis of their responses, Mueller identified four “epistemic maneuvers” of white racial delusion. The first, evasion, is when a student completely fails to make racebased understandings of her data. Students who used this maneuver would present their data but avoid using any terms relating to race or racism.26 This was striking, especially considering that the assignment (which was graded) explicitly required a race-based analysis.

The second epistemic maneuver is “willful colorblindness,” which “introduced alternative factors to neutralize evidence of white privilege.”27 For example, one student, who in her paper had acknowledged the benefits her white family received from discriminatory housing policies, ultimately rejected the claim that white privilege contributed to her family’s wealth because her family were immigrants who did not know English. She used an alternative factor—lack of English proficiency—to neutralize the evidence of white privilege. Tautological ignorance, the third epistemic maneuver, “produces racially conscious logic, but embeds morally laden assumptions of whites’ sincere, passive ignorance.”28 Students who used this maneuver would admit their family’s race-based privilege but insist that their family members and ancestors could not have possibly known the moral implications of the policies from which they benefited. The final epistemic maneuver is mystification, which produces “racially conscious logic, but embed(s) doubt and mystery about logically related solutions.”29 After producing cogent racial analyses, students who used this maneuver would then claim that they did not know what to do about racism, that it was too embedded in society to change, and doubted that there were any practical solutions whatsoever.

These epistemic maneuvers show a deep unwillingness on the part of whites to recognize and take seriously the causal connections between their own (and their families’) privilege (as assessed in terms of wealth in Mueller’s study) and the racial injustice suffered by people of color. Mueller’s analysis shows some of the common places in which logical reasoning about causation can break down: we can refuse to acknowledge any causal connection at all (evasion) or we can acknowledge some causal connections but fail to continue, by either refusing to apply what we know (willful colorblindness), applying what we know but refusing to acknowledge the implications of it (tautological colorblindness), or applying what we know and recognizing its implications but failing to admit our own agency in altering the causal chain in the future (mystification).

The epistemic maneuvers that maintain white ignorance are cognitive errors, often surprisingly obvious ones. In this sense, they are similar in kind to the errors that Buddhist ethicists are keen to point out: my refusal to acknowledge that my habit of prioritizing myself over others contributes to my suffering is, at least in part, a cognitive error; it is failure to fully apply consistent reasoning to my situation. Similarly, white delusion, as Mueller’s study illustrates, is a deep cognitive error, a failure to be fully rational and to apply knowledge in a consistent, logical way. So, although it is not the case that white delusion (or general delusion, for that matter) can be eradicated by simple exposure to knowledge, Mueller’s analysis suggests that interventions in critical reasoning about the specific causal relationships between white privilege and racial injustice could be helpful in addressing white delusion. To borrow from Buddhist philosophers, such reasoning about specific causal relations must be sincerely and repeatedly practiced in order to be remembered and applied in the right way at the right time. This is because the cognitive errors that are characteristic of white delusion are not so much failures to know something—recall that many of Mueller’s students were able to present all sorts of relevant facts and theories about racial injustice—but about failures to make the right (that is, logical) connections, to apply knowledge in an appropriate way, and to make rational predictions about the future based on that knowledge.