When ignorance is woven into the stories, institutions, and practices of everyday life, it limits both what we know and what we are able to know.
In Ignorance by Design, Ryan L. Holmes reframes ignorance as an active social force rather than a simple absence of knowledge, showing how, in certain forms, it is cultivated to uphold structures of white male supremacy. Moving across philosophy, race theory, and the sociology of knowledge, Holmes maps the ways “unknowing” is built into institutions, everyday language, and the stories people tell about themselves and others. What emerges is a portrait of a culture in which misunderstanding is not accidental but patterned, shaping perception while insulating dominance from meaningful challenge.
Holmes identifies distinct modes of ignorance at work today and links them to forms of epistemic injustice, revealing how power is sustained not only through what societies remember but also through what they are conditioned to overlook. He examines Whiteness as an evolving epistemic social project that continually redraws the boundaries of belonging, authority, and credible knowledge. At the book's core is a sustained focus on storytelling: the dominant narratives that normalize inequality and the counter-narratives that make recognition - and transformation - possible. The result is a probing, accessible account of knowledge's blind spots - and an invitation to reshape the stories, relationships, and institutions through which we come to know one another.