Does Mills’s Epistemology Suggest a Hermeneutic Injustice of White AfroSkepticism?

Abstract Charles Mills (1997) posits an epistemology of ignorance that underwrites the complicity of Whites as signatories of the racial contract. There is prevailing discourse about the complicity of White persons in perpetuating racism and whether they can experience epistemic injustice. In this paper, the claim to hermeneutical injustice, in particular, makes a further assertion that moral blameworthiness is mitigated for a subcategory of White Americans because of being socialized into a White-dominant culture of caste-based AfroSkepticism. I argue, based on Pierce’s conceptualization of doubt, as against Descartes, that AfroSkepticism is a totalizing belief system predicated on a racial group-based social epistemology and maintains a settled stance of questioning the commensurate citizenship of Blacks or American descendants of slaves. These perceived social costs warrant educational interventions that can dismantle its reasoning architecture. White AfroSkepticism poses a barrier to the teacher’s efforts to cultivate the democratic habitus in students; however, educator preparation that takes its existence into account can build on the standard classroom practices of critical social justice that promote equity, critical multicultural education, and critical thinking.