Being wilfully obtuse is that thing where otherwise intelligent White people believe things that make no sense – like Darren Wilson’s account of killing Michael Brown. It is where they fail to understand you no matter how patiently and carefully you try to make something clear to them. On this blog it comes across as a sudden lack of understanding of simple English, like their otherwise functioning brain has stopped working – because it has!

I call it wilful because it does not seem to be tied to a lack of intelligence, knowledge or education. If anything, more education seems to make them more obtuse.

Bell hooks calls it learned helplessness. George Orwell in “1984” called it protective stupidity or crimestop. Both see it as a feature of brainwashing by powerful interests – White supremacy for hooks, IngSoc for Orwell:

“Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc…”

Crimestop stops thoughtcrime.

People notice this sort of thing in me in regard to Catholicism and sexism.

In the US it is most noticeable in Whites on the subject of race, especially in those with better educations. That is no accident. University education in the US functions more as a form of brainwashing than of enlightenment.

I used to think that if I used the right words, the scales would fall from the eyes of White people. They would see what I see in regard to race. I thought I was just saying it wrong – until I noticed two things:

Black people had no trouble understanding me, even those as young as 16. Many Whites, even those in their 40s or 50s, had trouble understanding me even though it was apparent from the words they used that they had a university education.

For example, I used to think that anyone in the US over the age of 30 had lived long enough to know how profoundly unfair US society is, that the Bootstrap Myth was just that, a myth. But that turned out to be true only for people of colour. Many otherwise intelligent White people, with a straight face, would say stuff that made them sound like an 11-year-old who had read the dictionary.

Wilfully obtuse Whites say that Blacks “play the race card” or “see racism in everything”, that Blacks are imagining racism. That is because the protective stupidity of Whites makes them blind to racism.

Deep down they know the truth. For example, when students tell bell hooks that race does not matter, she asks them whether they would want to come back to life as Black or White. Most, regardless of their birth race, say White – as if it does matter!

What this means is that no amount of facts or reasons, no matter how clearly, calmly and patiently you lay them out, is going to change the minds of the wilfully obtuse. They are too brainwashed. They are too far gone.

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