Multicultural Literacy, Epistemic Injustice, and White Ignorance

The traditional blackface character Black Pete has been at the center of an intense controversy in the Netherlands, with most black citizens denouncing the tradition as racist and most white citizens endorsing it as harmless fun. I analyze the controversy as an utter failure, on the part of white citizens, of what Alison Jaggar has called multicultural literacy. This article aims to identify both the causes of this failure of multicultural literacy and the conditions required for multicultural literacy to be possible. I argue that this failure of multicultural literacy is due to hermeneutical injustice and white ignorance. I close by considering possible avenues for fostering multicultural literacy.


Introduction
Every year in the first week of December, children in the Netherlands 2 eagerly await the visit of Saint Nicholas (Sinterklaas), 3 who brings them candy and presents if they behaved well throughout the year. Children are told that if they behaved badly, however, they will instead have to deal with Saint Nicholas's servant, Black Pete (Zwarte Piet), who will punish them. Saint Nicholas is an old, longbearded, awe-inspiring white man dressed in a red cloak who either rides a white horse or sits on an imposing throne. Black Pete is a buffoonish black man dressed in Renaissance page boy attire who either walks alongside his master's horse or stands next to his throne, acts clumsy or dumb, and speaks in broken Dutch. Each year, Saint Nicholas parades in the Netherlands include swarms of dancing Black Petesplayed by whites in blackface makeup 4 -taking over the streets of cities and towns across the country. At school, children sing cheerful songs about Black Pete, whose lyrics include "even though I'm black as coal, I mean well," while they apply themselves in their arts-and-crafts classes as their teachers show them how to make blackface drawings and cut-outs of Black Pete that will then proudly be displayed to decorate their classrooms and homes.
The year 2013 marked the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the former Dutch colonies of Suriname and the Dutch Antilles. But 2013 also started with a letter, addressed to the Dutch government, by a group of experts from the Special Procedures of the UN Human Rights Council, regarding the celebrated character Black Pete, whom black citizens view as a remnant of the Netherlands' colonial past and involvement in slavery. Following complaints received from individuals and civil society organizations in the Netherlands, according to which "the portrayal of Black Pete perpetuates a negative stereotype and derogatory image of Africans and people of African descent," the group of human rights experts relays in its letter to the Dutch government the concerns that "the character and image of Black Pete perpetuate a stereotyped image of African people and people of African descent as second-class citizens, fostering an underlying sense of inferiority within Dutch society and stirring racial differences as well as racism." 5 The letter asks the Dutch government whether and how it is addressing these concerns.
In its response to the UN experts, the Dutch government states that even though it "is aware that 'Black Pete' is considered by some to be offensive," the 4 Some defenders of the tradition claim that Black Pete's skin is black not because he is phenotypically black but because he is a chimney sweep who got soot on his face from coming down the chimney to leave presents for children in their homes. As many critics of the tradition have pointed out, however, this explanation does not account for the character's uniformly black face, let alone for his exaggerated red lips, afro wig, and golden earrings. This explanation also overlooks the historical, colonial origins of the character, as argued below. 5 The letter is available at https://spcommreports.ohchr.org/TMResultsBase /DownLoadPublicCommunicationFile?gId=21183. government "sees the Sinterklaas festival as a traditional children's festival. The focus is on Sinterklaas as a figure who hands out presents." 6 The government's response, moreover, seems to reflect the view of most Dutch citizens, who are mostly white: (i) it is tradition; (ii) it is about children and presents; (iii) it has nothing to do with racism. Black (and white) citizens 7 who have denounced these practices as offensive and racist have in response been met with disbelief, dismissal, insults, threats, and even physical violence, as have the UN rapporteurs looking into the allegations raised against the tradition.
While some of these reactions straightforwardly display explicit racism or intentional racial hostility, others seem to express a genuine (if slightly annoyed or amused) puzzlement at the suggestion that the portrayal of the otherwise muchbeloved figure of Black Pete is racist-that is, that "Black Pete is racism," 8 to quote the homonymous anti-Black Pete campaign in the Netherlands. 9 Both types of reaction, however, equally result in flat denial of the claim that Black Pete is racism. The peremptory reply, in both cases, is that Black Pete is not racism-end of (or rather, no need for) discussion. In this sense, this peremptory reply, voiced in both types of reaction present in the Black Pete controversy, powerfully exemplifies an utter failure of what Alison Jaggar (1999) has called multicultural literacy-that is, an effort on the part of the dominant group to understand and be receptive to the experiences and perceptions that nondominant groups might have of the dominant culture.
The article proceeds as follows. I first present Jaggar's concept of multicultural literacy and explain why it is relevant and useful to analyze the controversy surrounding Black Pete (section 1). I then proceed to identify both the causes of this failure of multicultural literacy as well as the conditions required for multicultural literacy to be possible. I argue that this failure of multicultural literacy is due to hermeneutical injustice (section 2) and connect the latter to white 6 https://spcommreports.ohchr.org/TMResultsBase/DownLoadFile?gId=31496. 7 In this article, I use the term "citizen" in the broad, democratic sense of being a member of civil society, rather than in the narrow, legal sense of holding citizenship. 8 "Zwarte Piet is Racisme" in Dutch. 9 Note that racism is present, in different forms, on two different levels here: the individual level of certain citizens' aggressive and explicitly racist reaction to the controversy, and the structural level of social representations, which includes the racist portrayal of Black Pete, quite independently of the degree of individual explicit racism displayed by anyone in Dutch society, or of the degree of individual awareness of the racist character of the portrayal of Black Pete. For more on these different forms of racism, see section 2. ignorance (section 3). I close by considering possible avenues for fostering multicultural literacy (section 4).

The Black Pete Controversy as a Failure of Multicultural Literacy
In her work on multicultural democracy, Jaggar has argued for cultural recognition as an active project, going beyond mere passive tolerance. Thus conceived, cultural recognition requires what she calls multicultural literacy. Multicultural literacy, Jaggar explains, "is not knowledge of the self-interpretations of the dominant culture; instead, it requires understanding the characteristic experiences and self-conceptions of groups constituted by age, gender, class, and disablement, as well as by ethnicity" (1999,325). In particular, multicultural literacy requires that dominant groups be willing "to confront subordinated groups' perceptions of the dominant culture and the ways in which that culture continues to exploit subordinated groups and maintain its dominance" (1999,325). Multicultural literacy, Jaggar adds, involves "recogniz[ing] each other's specific collective identities" (325). More specifically, and importantly for the connections I will draw to epistemic injustice and to white ignorance in the next two sections, multicultural literacy "means being open to the possibility that someone's words may offer valuable insights generated not independently of, much less despite, her group identity but actually in virtue of that identity" (325).
In other words, multicultural literacy as an active project of cultural recognition requires acknowledging the fact that our social position and corresponding collective identity (e.g., gender, race, class, etc.) affects our perception and understanding of the social world and its social practices. The concept of multicultural literacy thus relies on a conception of culture/cultural groups as defined or constituted by social position and collective identity as a social group. That is, the concept of multicultural literacy relies on the notion of what we might call a social-cultural group, examples of which include "groups constituted by age, gender, class, and disablement, as well as by ethnicity" (Jaggar 1999, 325).
To more fully spell out the concept of multicultural literacy and the conception of a social-cultural group it involves, it proves useful turn to Iris Marion Young's conception of a social group as defined primarily by a sense of identity, defined "in terms of the cultural forms, social situation, and history that group members know as theirs" (1990,44). In Young's analysis, social groups constitute cultural groups. Social groups occupy dominant (e.g., man, white, rich) or nondominant (e.g., woman, black, poor) social positions that correspond to different cultures. Young articulates this point most clearly with her notion of cultural imperialism, which she develops with examples of social-cultural groups construed along axes such as race, gender, indigeneity, and sexual orientation (1990,(59)(60). Cultural imperialism occurs when the dominant social meanings and representations-which reflect the perspective and experience of dominant groups-render the perspective and experience of nondominant groups invisible, while simultaneously stereotyping nondominant groups and marking them as Other (1990,(58)(59). In a point that might have been made in the context of the Black Pete controversy, Young notes that "these stereotypes so permeate the society that they are not noticed as contestable" (59). Importantly for our understanding of the Black Pete controversy as involving a failure of multicultural literacy (i.e., a failure on the part of the dominant group to understand the perspective and experience of the nondominant group with regard to the portrayal of Black Pete), and hence as involving a conflict between different cultural groups, Young explains: The group defined by the dominant culture as deviant, as a stereotyped Other, is culturally different from the dominant group, because the status of Otherness creates specific experiences not shared by the dominant group, and because culturally oppressed groups also are often socially segregated and occupy specific positions in the social division of labor. Members of such groups express their specific group experiences and interpretations of the world to one another, developing and perpetuating their own culture. . . . This, then, is the injustice of cultural imperialism: that the oppressed group's own experience and interpretation of social life finds little expression that touches the dominant culture, while that same culture imposes on the oppressed group its experience and interpretation of social life. (1990, 60; emphasis in original) Again, this latter passage could have been written about the Black Pete controversy, which, as mentioned earlier and argued in the next section, is the result of the outright rejection, by (most) white Dutch citizens, of (most) black Dutch citizens' experience and interpretation of the portrayal of Black Pete as racist. This rejection exemplifies an utter failure of multicultural literacy-or to put it conversely, an instance of multicultural illiteracy-as no attempt is made by the dominant group to understand and be receptive to the experiences and perceptions that the nondominant group might have of the dominant culture, namely of the portrayal of Black Pete.
Clearly understood as relying on a conception of cultural groups as social groups (i.e., social-cultural groups), Jaggar's account of multicultural literacy as an active project of cultural recognition provides a relevant and useful conceptual resource to analyze the Black Pete controversy. 10 Before turning to the connections between multicultural illiteracy and epistemic injustice (section 2) and white ignorance (section 3), one last point is in order regarding the characterization of the Black Pete controversy as a problem of conflicting cultures and multiculturalism. Is multiculturalism an appropriate concept to use in this context? 11 Does the Black Pete controversy not rather amount to a conflict within one single, Dutch culture, rather than between two different cultures? Writing directly about the Black Pete controversy, Afro-Surinamese Dutch scholar Gloria Wekker observes: As long as the Dutch imperial past does not form part of the common, general store of knowledge, which coming generations should have at their disposal, as long as general knowledge about the exclusionary processes involved in producing the Dutch nation does not circulate more widely, multiculturalism now cannot be realized, either. People of color will forever remain allochtonen, the official and supposedly innocuous term meaning "those who came from elsewhere," racializing people of color for endless generations, never getting to belong to the Dutch nation. The counterpart of "allochtonen" is autochtonen, meaning "those who are from here," which, as everyone knows, refers to white people. (2016,15) Wekker adds that "contemporary constructions of 'us,' those constructed as belonging to Europe, and 'them,' those constructed as not belonging . . . entail the fundamental impossibility of being both European, constructed to mean being white and Christian, and being black-Muslim-migrant-refugee" (2016, 21). These passages claim is not that multicultural literacy is the only relevant or useful analytical concept to explain what is happening or what is at stake in the controversy. Nor, therefore, is my claim that the concept of multicultural literacy captures or exhausts all aspects of the complex dynamics at play in the controversy (for an overview of many of the factors at play in the Black Pete controversy, see Wekker 2016, chapter 5). Indeed, in the remainder of this article, I will connect my analysis of the controversy and the way it exemplifies multicultural illiteracy to the further analytical concepts of epistemic injustice (section 2) and white ignorance (section 3). 11 Compare, for example, the accounts of multiculturalism offered by Will Kymlicka (1995) or Jacob Levy (2000), who, while open to the possibility that their arguments might have implications for cultural minorities understood along axes such as gender, race, sexual orientation, and so forth, prefer to focus on cultural minorities understood along axes such as indigeneity, language, ethnicity, or religion. For further discussion of the normative significance of these divergent understandings of cultural minorities, see Catala 2015b. make clear that multiculturalism is very much an appropriate concept to use in the context of the Black Pete controversy. They also make clear that (mis)representing the controversy as one involving one single, Dutch culture contributes to the perpetuation of cultural imperialism by obscuring the fact that what appears to be Dutch culture is in fact white Dutch culture.
Having explained the relevance and usefulness of the concept of multicultural literacy to analyze the Black Pete controversy, I now turn to my argument that this failure of multicultural literacy is due to hermeneutical injustice (section 2), before connecting the latter to white ignorance (section 3).

Multicultural (il)Literacy and Hermeneutical Injustice
Jaggar stresses the importance of developing multicultural literacy because social-cultural groups are analogous to "systems of communication existing in unequal relationships to one another" (1999,323). This means that nondominant social-cultural groups (e.g., women, blacks, or the poor) may face particular difficulties when engaging in democratic deliberation. Specifically, Jaggar notes that mainstream or dominant discourses "may not contain sufficient discursive resources to express the perspectives of subordinated groups, with the result that when the members of those groups press their claims, they may appear inarticulate, confused or, in the worst case, even be unintelligible to nonmembers" (1999, 312). Jaggar adds that this type of unequal relation of communication "undermines the credibility of some speakers and may even silence some entirely" (312). She notes that challenges formulated by nondominant groups often "will be met with defensiveness, ridicule or outright attack" and, echoing Wekker's remark on the perpetual outsider status of "allochtonen," that "those resistant to change may even contest the authenticity of the challengers' membership in the community" (321). Though she does not use the terminology of epistemic injustice subsequently developed by Miranda Fricker (2007), Jaggar essentially refers to the undue, identity-based deficits in intelligibility and credibility that respectively characterize hermeneutical and testimonial injustice as defined by Fricker (see below). More precisely, Jaggar points to the threats that epistemic injustice poses to successful democratic deliberation. 12 In what follows, I argue that epistemic injustice also undermines the civic virtue of multicultural literacy that Jaggar advocates as a means of overcoming otherwise unequal relations of communication. Specifically, I argue that the failure of multicultural literacy in the Black Pete controversy is due to hermeneutical injustice.
Epistemic injustice is a particular type of injustice that an individual suffers specifically in her capacity as a knower-as a knowledge contributor or user-in virtue of her membership in a nondominant social group. Fricker (2007) identifies two kinds of epistemic injustice. In testimonial injustice, an individual's testimony is wrongfully dismissed because she is a member of a nondominant social group-for example, a black person is not believed because she is black. The analysis I offer below will rely on the other type of epistemic injustice: hermeneutical injustice. In hermeneutical injustice, an individual's social experience is wrongfully misunderstood because of her social group's unequal participation in the production of social meanings or collective understandings-for example, not being able to convey as such an experience of sexual harassment before the term was coined.
Otherwise put, hermeneutical injustice occurs when a member of a nondominant group is unable to successfully communicate part of her social experience because of a lack of an adequate, common, or recognized vocabulary in the society (Fricker 2007(Fricker , 2016. That is, her social experience is collectively misinterpreted or misrepresented because of the hermeneutical marginalization of nondominant groups-because the society's pool of interpretive labels, conceptual tools, and social meanings (what Fricker calls the society's hermeneutical resource) is shaped mainly by dominant groups. As a result, social meanings do not adequately track, and indeed obscure, some aspects of the social experience of nondominant groups, rendering this social experience unintelligible to mainstream society.
Importantly, note that hermeneutical injustice is not due solely to the lack of an adequate term or understanding for a particular social experience (e.g., sexual harassment); it is also due to the prevalence of other, problematic characterizations or understandings of that same experience (e.g., harmless flirting), which attest to the undue influence of dominant groups over the society's hermeneutical resource. Hermeneutical injustice thus centrally concerns the correct understanding of a particular social experience, practice, or situation.
In the remainder of this section, I argue that the failure of multicultural literacy in the Black Pete controversy-that is, the lack of attempt on the part of white citizens to understand and be receptive to the experiences and perceptions that black citizens might have of the dominant, white culture-is due to a hermeneutical injustice regarding the (in)correct understanding of Black Pete as (not) racist. Both sides seem to agree that racism is wrong (the Dutch indeed view themselves as fundamentally antiracist), and that if Black Pete is racism, then Black Pete is wrong. The question dividing both sides is whether Black Pete is racism.
This dividing question of whether Black Pete is racism is a matter of hermeneutical injustice because it fundamentally concerns social representations and collective understandings-specifically, whether the conceptual label or tool of social interpretation "racism" is fitting to describe the portrayal of Black Pete and, by extension, whether the current social representation of Black Pete should be discarded. As we will see, arguing that Black Pete is racism requires not only clarifying which understanding of "racism" is being used among several possible ones, but also countering prevalent alternative characterizations or interpretations of Black Pete in the mainstream hermeneutical resource. For all these reasons, the question of whether Black Pete is or is not racism is one that falls squarely within the purview of hermeneutical (in)justice.
From the aforementioned response of the Dutch government, which also matches the stance of most Dutch citizens, we can glean two tentative reasons seemingly aiming to support most white citizens' claim that Black Pete is not racism. 13 These two reasons are presented as alternative, competing understandings of Black Pete, prevalent in the mainstream hermeneutical resource, and are meant to foreclose the possibility that Black Pete is racism. The first is that the festival, including Black Pete, is tradition. The second is that the festival is about children and presents. While both reasons are ultimately red herrings, they are often cited in defense of Black Pete and hence warrant our critical attention for a moment.
The fact that a cultural practice like a festival is tradition tells us nothing about the nonracist character of this practice or festival. The appeal to tradition, rather, seems to sidestep the real question (of racism) 14 and to imply that because the festival is tradition, it cannot be changed. Tradition here is construed as static and ahistorical. It cannot evolve and is in no way a function of historical sociopolitical factors. Ironically, this construal of tradition is what we might call the colonial construal of tradition: it is the one that European colonists typically used to highlight the supposed cultural backwardness of the peoples they colonized and to justify the practices and aims of their colonial projects (Jaggar 2005;Jaggar and Tobin 2013;Mohanty 1984;Narayan 1997;Said 1978). Interestingly, this time, the colonial construal of tradition is invoked by the dominant group with respect to its own tradition, rather than that of the nondominant group, as a rationalization of its 13 My presently proposed analysis-which was developed independently of and prior to the publication of Wekker's book, and which is based on the response from the Dutch government and on news articles from around the Western world since 2011-is congruent with Wekker's diagnosis of the Black Pete controversy, which analyzes it in terms of several recurring themes found in Dutch citizens' reactions to the accusations that Black Pete is racism, among which tradition and children are most prominent. The precise content of the complementary analyses that Wekker and I respectively carry out under these two headings of course differs (see Wekker 2016, chapter 5). 14 On sidestepping the question of racism, see also Wekker (2016, introduction and chapter 5). unwillingness to change a controversial festival. Either way, this colonial construal of tradition is plainly inaccurate: traditions can and do change over time, and they do so as a result of historical sociopolitical factors, including colonialism and the contact between colonizers and colonized (Jaggar 2005;Jaggar and Tobin 2013;Mohanty 1984;Narayan 1997;Said 1978). Indeed, this is so in the case of the controversial Saint Nicholas festival: Saint Nicholas stories and celebrations did not always include Black Pete, and the character's first appearance in the mid-nineteenth century 15 takes place against the historical backdrop of Dutch colonialism and involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. If anything, then, tradition, when scrutinized more closely, points to the racist origins of the figure of Black Pete. Of course, when tradition is invoked in defense of the festival that involves Black Pete, it is not subjected to such critical scrutiny. That the festival is tradition is taken to be reason enough to keep the festival as is. Hence the appeal to tradition paradoxically conceals the problematic historical origins of Black Pete.
What about the appeal to the fact that the Saint Nicholas festival is about children and presents, another common response to the charge that Black Pete is racism? Again, this fact alone tells us nothing about the nonracist character of the festival. Like the appeal to tradition, the appeal to children and presents seems to sidestep the real question (of racism) by creating a shift in focus through two related argumentative moves, which we might call causal erasure 16 and good intentions. First, with causal erasure, the appeal to children and presents shifts the focus away from the active causal role the subjects of the festival play (the adult organizers and performers who are responsible for the festival), to the passive recipient role of the objects of the festival (the children the festival aims to entertain and to treat with presents). Second, with good intentions, the appeal to children and presents points to the positive intention or purpose behind the practice of the festival (to entertain and to treat children) in order to minimize or detract attention from the negative effects or meaning of this practice (marginalization of black citizens and racist stereotypes). This double shift in focus-from the active subject to the passive object of a practice, and from the negative effects to the positive intentions behind the practice-which operates via the twin argumentative moves of causal erasure and good intentions, is not uncommon in controversies involving racism, slavery, or colonialism. 17 Indeed, this double shift in focus has often been used to legitimize 15 The story titled "Saint Nicholas and his Servant," by school teacher Jan Schenkman, was published in 1850. 16 What Mills (2015) has termed "racial erasure" would fall under the broader concept of causal erasure I introduce here. 17 Defenses of the controversial Belgian tradition called Les Noirauds ("noiraud" is French for "swarthy") likewise center around the two argumentative moves which I European colonialism. First, the move of causal erasure. European colonialism was not about European colonizers (the subjects of colonialism), European territorial expansion via dispossession, nor European economic enrichment via exploitation; rather, European colonialism was about the colonized (the objects of colonialism), the burden of the white man to bring civilization, roads, bridges, schools, and hospitals to the backward/savage/incapable peoples it colonized. Again, there is a shift from the active causal role of the colonizers to the passive recipient role of the colonized. 18 Second, the move of good intentions. Rather than emphasize and recognize the horrors of European colonization and its inherent racism, there is a tendency to present colonization as driven by the noble purpose of bettering the colonized: their mores, infrastructure, education, or health. 19 Again, there is a shift from the negative effects and meaning of colonization to the allegedly positive intentions behind it.
To review, the two tentative reasons seemingly aiming to support most white citizens' claim that Black Pete is not racism-namely, the appeal to tradition and the appeal to children and presents-are ultimately red herrings that obscure the problematic historical origins of what is really at issue in the controversy, namely the figure of Black Pete and its racist character.
In addition to countering these two alternative characterizations or interpretations of Black Pete (as being about tradition and children/presents) have called causal erasure and good intentions (for an example of such a defense, see "Avec les Belges qui se griment en Noirs pour parader dans les rues de Bruxelles" (Peter Detailleur, Vice, March 31, 2017; https://www.vice.com/fr/article/xy9mpq/belgique-noirauds-parade-traditionbruxelles-racisme). The tradition consists in Belgian notables' collecting money for charity by parading through the streets of Brussels in blackface and nineteenth century costumes, because when the tradition started in 1876, Belgian people were fascinated by the European "exploration" of Africa. To this day, the tradition continues in the same form. First, the causal erasure move operates a shift from the active causal role of the subjects/orchestrators of the tradition to the passive recipient role of its objects/the vulnerable: the Noirauds tradition is not about wealthy and powerful white men (indeed, blackface is supposedly necessary for their anonymity!), it is about the beneficiaries of the good cause they are helping through charity. Second, the good intentions move operates a shift from the historically problematic origins of the tradition and the racist meaning of blackface to its well-intentioned purpose of collecting money for charity. 18 For an insightful analysis of colonialism that complicates this dichotomy, see Lu (2011). 19 For an incisive critique of European colonialism, see Mills (1997Mills ( , 2007Mills ( , 2015. prevalent in the mainstream hermeneutical resource, addressing the question of whether Black Pete is racism requires spelling out the notion of racism-that is, clarifying which understanding of "racism" is being used among several possible ones. The following observations from Mitchell Esajas, cofounder of the Stop Blackface initiative in the Netherlands, and from Jerry Afriyie, an artist and activist who was violently arrested in 2011 for protesting Black Pete, provide a good starting point to do so. Esajas observes: "The Dutch people, they believe about themselves that they are tolerant, but then when you point this out you get this aggressive reaction and it shows there is this conflict within. It shows that there is something wrong. . . . It shows that there is racism." 20 Afriyie notes: "When you talk about these things people will say, 'ah there is no racism here. Racism is something of America.'" 21 Regarding racism, Afriyie adds: "It's not just about Zwarte Piet. It's about discrimination on the job market, police brutality, racial profiling. The fact that if I were to jump into a Lexus now and drive, I would be stopped in ten minutes." 22 In other words, most white citizens in the Netherlands fail to see how Black Pete could be racism because the Dutch are tolerant people, and tolerance, by definition, precludes racism. 23 So even if white Dutch citizens perform in blackface, this act cannot be racist because Dutch people are tolerant and tolerant people do not do racist things. There are at least two problems with this view. The first concerns the notion of racism this view involves; the second the notion of a tolerant/nonracist culture or person. Problem 1: The notion of racism. Since tolerance is an individual virtue, white citizens' presumption that tolerance precludes racism suggests that they understand racism as individual prejudice, and more specifically as explicit individual prejudicefor example, explicit beliefs that blacks are morally or intellectually inferior. The conception the Dutch have of themselves as tolerant and hence not racist, however, 20 Melissa Noel. 2015. "The Fight Against 'Black Pete,' a Holiday Blackface Tradition." NBC News website, Dec. 23. http://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/fight-againstblack-pete-holiday-blackface-tradition-n485081. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 On the self-perception and self-understanding of the Dutch as inherently tolerant and antiracist, see also Wekker (2016, 151, 154, 166). This self-representation or self-interpretation prevalent in the hermeneutical resource of mainstream Dutch society illustrates once more that the question whether the portrayal of Black Peteand hence to some extent, Dutch culture -is racist is a matter of hermeneutical (in)justice. overlooks the possibility of types of racism that are not explicit or not individual, namely aversive racism and structural racism. Let's look at each in turn.
To illustrate aversive racism, consider the case of a white liberal employer, sincerely committed to racial equality and thoroughly rejecting any explicitly prejudiced beliefs regarding nonwhites. Still, negative stereotypes of nonwhites (e.g., as incompetent, lazy, or aggressive) in that society might give rise to implicit beliefs or biases that unduly influence the employer's judgment when deciding whom to hire. Looking at otherwise identical résumés, and despite her explicitly antiracist commitments and beliefs, the employer nonetheless chooses to hire the white candidate over the nonwhite candidate. As this example shows, aversive racism is an individual but not an explicit phenomenon. Thus, the absence of explicit individual prejudice is not sufficient to preclude racism.
To illustrate structural racism, consider the following story, recounted by American civil rights activist Whitney Young (cited in Friedman 1975, 400): I go to the employer and ask him to employ Negroes, and he says, "It's a matter of education. I would hire your people if they were educated." Then I go to the educators and they say, "If Negro people lived in good neighborhoods and had more intelligent dialogue in their families, more encyclopedias in their homes, more opportunity to travel, and a stronger family life, then we could do a better job of educating them." And when I go to the builder he says, "If they had the money, I would sell them the houses"-and then I'm back at the employer's door again, where I started to begin with. This example shows how racism can be structural, that is, how different institutions or practices (here, employment, education, and housing) combine to form a social structure (and vicious circle) that systematically excludes nonwhites while systematically including whites. Structural racism is not a matter of explicit individual prejudice; it is neither an individual nor an explicit phenomenon. At no point in the story does anyone say: "I don't like black people because they are intellectually or morally inferior, and that's why I don't want to give them a job/an education/a house." Suppose that no one in this story either explicitly or implicitly believes that blacks are intellectually or morally inferior (i.e., they are neither explicitly nor aversively racist). The exclusion of black people from these goods is not the result of (explicit or implicit) individual racist intentions, beliefs, or attitudes. Rather, their exclusion from these advantages results from the social structure, and more precisely from the way the social institutions and practices that make up this structure work together and reinforce each other, creating a race-based cycle of systematic exclusion (for nonwhites) and inclusion (for whites).
To go back to the question of racism in the Netherlands, both aversive and structural racism might be at play in some of the indicators of racism to which Afriyie points. Neither racial discrimination in hiring nor racial profiling, for example, need involve explicit individual prejudice. Both discrimination and profiling, however, might signal aversive and structural racism. Similarly, blackface need not involve explicit individual prejudice. Rather, I submit that it is a part of structural racism: it is one of the many practices and institutions, including cultural ones like Black Pete, that contribute to a social structure that results, for whites and for nonwhites, in systematically differential opportunities and treatment, both material (e.g., employment, education, housing, health care) and symbolic (e.g., positive or negative social meanings and representations in the media, the arts, holiday traditions, and mainstream culture in general).
In sum, the absence of explicit individual prejudice on the part of white Dutch citizens does not mean that Black Pete is not racism nor that racism does not exist in Dutch society. As argued above, racism can also be aversive or structural, with blackface falling into the latter category.
Problem 2: The notion of a tolerant/nonracist culture or person. The question of individual tolerance, however, still warrants our attention. Recall that white Dutch citizens' reasoning seems to be that because Dutch culture and citizens are tolerant and tolerant people do not do racist things, Black Pete cannot be a racist cultural practice, nor blackface a racist act. This picture gets things backward. It assumes that a culture or person is tolerant first, and therefore its cultural practices or their individual actions are not racist. But it is the reverse. A culture or person can be said to be tolerant/not racist to the extent that its cultural practices or their individual actions are tolerant/not racist. If these practices or actions display intolerance or racism, then the culture or person can hardly be said to be tolerant/not racist. 24 In the Black Pete case, the conception the Dutch have of themselves and of their culture as tolerant/not racist seems to logically precede any normative assessment of the tolerant or nonracist character of their cultural practices or individual actions. Rather, the determination of the tolerance/nonracism of the people and their culture seems logical and ontological. The claim that the Dutch are tolerant/not racist is taken to be as analytically true as the claim that a bachelor is an unmarried man: to be a bachelor just is to be an unmarried man; to be Dutch just is to be tolerant/not racist. Tolerance/nonracism becomes naturalized as an intrinsic or necessary property and as a fixed trait of the culture or person, rather than historicized as an extrinsic and contingent attribute that is the result of an always-ongoing process. Tolerance/nonracism is construed in an ontological, essential, and declarative mode, rather than in a practical, habitual, and performative mode. 25 To review, I have argued that the failure of multicultural literacy in the Black Pete controversy-that is, the lack of attempt on the part of white citizens to understand and be receptive to the experiences and perceptions that black citizens might have of the dominant, white culture-is due to a hermeneutical injustice involving the incorrect understanding of Black Pete as not racist. In the next section, I shed further light on the Black Pete controversy by connecting this hermeneutical injustice to white ignorance.

Hermeneutical Injustice and White Ignorance
Charles Mills has powerfully shown how racially divided societies tend to be characterized by what he calls an epistemology of ignorance, "a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions (which are psychologically and socially functional), producing the ironic outcome that whites will in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made" (Mills 1997, 18). Mills's analysis is directly relevant to the Black Pete controversy, since white citizens in this case seem unable to understand the cultural practice they themselves have created. That is, the Black Pete controversy seems to centrally involve white ignorance. White ignorance, Mills argues, is due to what he terms racialized causality: "an ignorance, a non-knowing, that is not contingent, but in which race-white racism and/or white racial domination and their ramifications-plays a crucial causal role" (2007,20). This racialized causality is thus "expansive enough to include both straightforward racist motivation and more impersonal social-structural causation, which may be operative even if the cognizer in question is not racist" (2007,21).
Thus far, I have argued that the Black Pete controversy is due to a hermeneutical injustice involving the incorrect understanding of Black Pete as not racist. In this section, I show that looking at the Black Pete controversy through the twin lenses of hermeneutical injustice and white ignorance allows us to gain a more fine-grained picture of all three.
To begin, it is useful to go back to the definition of hermeneutical injustice introduced by Fricker. As mentioned earlier, hermeneutical injustice consists in an undue intelligibility deficit: the social experience of members of nondominant groups is collectively misunderstood. This intelligibility deficit, moreover, can have one of two causes, which each give rise to a different type of hermeneutical injustice (Fricker 2007). The first possible cause of diminished intelligibility is a gap in the society's pool of conceptual tools (i.e., in the society's hermeneutical resource). In this case, hermeneutical injustice concerns the content of the communicative attempt. For example, if society lacks the concept of sexual harassment, the successful communication of this experience will be greatly hindered; the social experience of women who are sexually harassed will tend to be collectively misunderstood. 26 The second possible cause of diminished intelligibility is the use of a nondominant expressive style or mode of reasoning in a context where another, dominant expressive style or mode of reasoning typically prevails. In this case, hermeneutical injustice concerns the form of the communicative attempt. For example, if society favors expressive styles or modes of reasoning that are culturally associated with masculinity over ones that are culturally associated with femininity (Gilligan 1982), successful communication of their social experience by individuals using the latter style or mode will be greatly hindered; their social experience will tend to be collectively misunderstood.
Let's now look more closely at the form-based type of hermeneutical injustice. Lawrence Kohlberg's studies of children's moral development as related by Carol Gilligan (1982) provide a good illustration. Gilligan shows that Kohlberg's understanding of children's moral development was limited to the extent that the scale and criteria he was using to measure it were biased in favor of the boys' expressive style and against the girls' expressive style. Using a scale and criteria that could make sense of the boys' answers only, Kohlberg was unable to make sense of the girls' answers. His conclusion regarding this lack of intelligibility was that it signaled a problem not with his scale but rather with the girls' moral development. In other words, the dominance of the boys' expressive style made the girls' answers unintelligible and condemned them to a rather grim verdict.
Importantly, it should be noted that form-based hermeneutical injustice will often produce content-based hermeneutical injustice. In the case of Kohlberg's studies, the fact that the girls' expressive style is not recognized as valid (form-based type), and that their answers are therefore unintelligible, prevents the girls from contributing, to the field of psychology and children's moral development, 26 Note that content-based hermeneutical injustice can arise even if nondominant groups create the relevant concepts, when these concepts are not adopted into the mainstream hermeneutical resource or are blocked or ignored by dominant groups (Catala 2015a;Dotson 2012Dotson , 2014Fricker 2016;Mason 2011;Medina 2013;Pohlhaus 2012). In this case, there is still a gap in the mainstream hermeneutical resource, with the same result that the social experience of nondominant groups is collectively misunderstood. I argue below that this is due to the operation of problematic cognitive-epistemic norms (such as self-obliviousness or lack of critical self-reflection; naturalization and dehistoricization). alternative understandings both of the moral dilemmas used by Kohlberg and of their own moral development (content-based type).
Let's now connect this two-pronged picture of hermeneutical injustice as content-and form-based to white ignorance. Recall Mills's definition of ignorance as "a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions (which are psychologically and socially functional), producing the ironic outcome that whites will in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made" (Mills 1997, 18). Ignorance, in this description, seems to be playing out at two related levels: the level of cognitive dysfunction and the level of inaccurate understandings of the world this cognitive dysfunction creates. That is, ignorance is not just about ignorance of the object of knowledge or what is (not) known: it is not just about missing or ignoring a certain epistemic content or outcome in the form of alternative, nondominant understandings of history, reality, or society. Ignorance is also about ignorance of the subject of knowledge or the knower: it is also about failing to grasp one's own cognitive-epistemic processes and norms in the form of self-obliviousness or lack of critical self-reflection. As a result, one's perception of the world will seem naturally correct and any competing perception or statement to the contrary will seem naturally incorrect in its unintelligibility. In other words, in this two-pronged picture of ignorance as involving both the object and the subject of knowledge, "the cognitive norms that produce ignorance . . . naturalize and dehistoricize both the process and product of knowing" (Alcoff 2007, 56).
We are now equipped to connect our two-pronged picture of hermeneutical injustice with our two-pronged picture of white ignorance. Recall that Kohlberg's measuring scale is calibrated in such a way that only certain kinds of statements make sense. Statements that do not make sense within his interpretive framework, moreover, signal a problem with the other, female person or object of knowledge (their inferior moral development) rather than with the scale used by the researcher or subject of knowledge (inadequate criteria to capture moral development). Similarly, white ignorance involves cognitive-epistemic norms (self-obliviousness or lack of critical self-reflection; naturalization and dehistoricization) that preclude certain interpretations of the social world from making sense. Interpretations of the world that do not make sense, moreover, signal a problem with the other, nonwhite person or object of knowledge (their inferior epistemic capacities) rather than with the cognitive-epistemic processes used by the white cognizer or subject of knowledge (inadequate cognitive-epistemic norms). Moreover, much like formbased hermeneutical injustice (excluding nondominant expressive styles) produces content-based hermeneutical injustice (excluding alternative understandings of a given social experience or situation), subjective ignorance (involving inadequate cognitive-epistemic norms, such as self-obliviousness and dehistoricization) produces objective ignorance (involving inadequate understandings of the social world, such as the understanding that Black Pete is not racism).
The foregoing articulation and juxtaposition of hermeneutical injustice and ignorance show that they overlap. By overlap, I do not mean that the concepts of hermeneutical injustice and ignorance are exhaustively coextensive. Rather, they overlap to the extent that they track some of the same phenomena, namely the exclusionary processes and outcomes that define the intelligibility economy, that is, what is (un)intelligible, (mis)understood, or (not) recognized as valid in mainstream society and why this comes to be the case. That is, the foregoing shows that the concepts of hermeneutical injustice and ignorance are explanatorily similar, in terms of both their explanandum and their explanans: they not only aim to explain the same object (the intelligibility economy), they also provide very similar explanations or explanatory tools to explain this object (the two two-pronged pictures articulated and juxtaposed above). 27 While the links between hermeneutical injustice and ignorance have been variously theorized, 28 I want to add to this important theorization with the following distinctive claim. Specifically, my claim is that hermeneutical injustice (construed as involving both a form-based and a contentbased type) and ignorance (construed as involving both a subjective and an objective level) overlap in the following ways: form-based hermeneutical injustice and subjective ignorance overlap; content-based hermeneutical injustice and objective ignorance overlap. That is, while the concepts of hermeneutical injustice and ignorance may not be exhaustively coextensive, the social phenomena of hermeneutical injustice and ignorance will tend to co-occur. I illustrate my claim below with the Black Pete controversy, but before doing so, I want to further specify my claim.
Adapting Mills's (2007, 22) point that privileged, group-based ignorance can be theorized from several axes of social identity like race or gender-that is, that ignorance includes not only white ignorance but also male ignorance, for example-I want to suggest that, similarly, hermeneutical injustice can be further specified in terms of gender, race, and so forth. While Fricker's examples of sexual harassment for content-based hermeneutical injustice and of Gilligan's work on feminine expressive styles for form-based hermeneutical injustice both illustrate what I 27 This is not to deny that the common explanandum (the intelligibility economy) is otherwise part of a distinctive theory or project in each case (Mills's theory of the racial contract in critical race theory; Fricker's theory of epistemic injustice at the intersection of ethics and epistemology). Nor therefore, is this to deny that each project may have other explananda. 28 See, for example, Catala (2015a), Dotson (2012), Fricker (2016), Mason (2011), Medina (2013), Mills (2015), and Pohlhaus (2012).
propose to term male hermeneutical injustice, the Black Pete controversy, to cite but this example, illustrates what I propose to term white hermeneutical injustice. Applying this point to my above claim, I want to suggest that white hermeneutical injustice and white ignorance explanatorily overlap as follows: form-based white hermeneutical injustice and subjective white ignorance overlap; content-based white hermeneutical injustice and objective white ignorance overlap.
I can now illustrate my claim of the explanatory overlap between white hermeneutical injustice and white ignorance with the Black Pete controversy. Recall my argument that the failure of multicultural literacy-the lack of attempt on the part of white citizens to understand and be receptive to the experiences and perceptions that black citizens might have of the dominant, white culture-is due to a hermeneutical injustice involving the incorrect understanding of Black Pete as not racist. My contention is that this content-based white hermeneutical injustice (the incorrect understanding of Black Pete as not racist) overlaps with objective white ignorance (an inadequate understanding of the social world involving racialized causality). Moreover, this content-based white hermeneutical injustice (the incorrect understanding of Black Pete as not racist) is the result of a prior formbased white hermeneutical injustice (using and privileging the white/dominant group's cognitive norms of naturalization and dehistoricization and excluding contrary cognitive norms), which overlaps with the type of cognitive dysfunction that characterizes the subjective component of white ignorance.
Otherwise put, the cognitive-epistemic norms (self-obliviousness or lack of critical self-reflection; naturalization and dehistoricization) involved in subjective white ignorance as well as in form-based white hermeneutical injustice, preclude certain interpretations of the social world (Black Pete is racism) from making sense, and hence produce the type of inadequate social understandings involved in objective white ignorance as well as in content-based white hermeneutical injustice. In the Black Pete controversy, the problematic cognitive-epistemic norms (selfobliviousness or lack of critical self-reflection; naturalization and dehistoricization) associated with both subjective white ignorance and form-based white hermeneutical injustice can be seen to operate in the twin argumentative moves of causal erasure and good intentions identified earlier, and in the persistence of the outright rejection of the suggestion that Black Pete is racism despite clear demonstrations of the historical, colonial, racist origins of the tradition. 29 As I suggest in the next section, these argumentative moves and persistent denial, which result in a failure of multicultural literacy, are due at least partly to the institutionalization of these problematic cognitive-epistemic norms through the very structure of the society: 30 its bodies of knowledge, its cultural institutions and symbols, and other spheres of hermeneutical influence like the media, politics, or the arts.

Conclusion: Developing Multicultural Literacy
To conclude, I want to suggest that developing multicultural literacy requires counteracting hermeneutical injustice and ignorance both at the level of the object of knowledge (the cognitive-epistemic content or outcome) and at the level of the subject of knowledge (the cognitive-epistemic norms or process). In this respect, the concept of (il)literacy is fitting because it refers not just to an (in)ability to read a particular content (this word or that sentence in a given language L), but more broadly to an (in)ability to read as a general process (any or most words or sentences in L). 31 The ability to read L will require learning and applying certain norms or conventions (e.g., if L uses the Roman alphabet, that all letters have an uppercase and a lowercase form, that certain combinations of letters yield certain sounds, that different punctuation symbols play different roles, etc.). That is, literacy can be gained, or illiteracy can be counteracted, by learning and applying certain norms (the general reading process) which then give access to a certain substantive result (reading a particular content). Similarly, knowledge can be gained, or hermeneutical injustice and ignorance can be counteracted, by becoming aware of problematic, exclusionary cognitive-epistemic norms (naturalization and dehistoricization; self-obliviousness or lack of critical self-reflection) and replacing them with more inclusive cognitive-epistemic norms (denaturalization and historicization; self-transparency or critical self-reflection), 32 which then give access to alternative understandings of the social world, including the cultural practice of Black Pete.
Since combatting content-based hermeneutical injustice and objective ignorance (the level of alternative understandings) requires combatting form-based hermeneutical injustice and subjective ignorance (the level of cognitive-epistemic norms), how might denaturalization and historicization be fostered in order to yield greater self-transparency and critical self-reflection?
Just as literacy is best acquired when the learner is young and when it is practiced regularly, knowledge of one's country's 33 history of colonialism and involvement in slavery should be taught in elementary and secondary education, and be further imprinted throughout the society's many cultural institutions and symbols: for example, museums, stories, books, movies, documentaries, monuments, and town, street, or building names that highlight historical realities while bringing to the fore those that suffered and resisted them instead of glorifying those that brought them about or contributed to them. 34 In other words, multicultural literacy requires historical literacy. This in turn might require measures to guarantee greater diversity and inclusion in those social and professional spheres that have a direct impact on the society's hermeneutical resource and conception of itself: for example, affirmative action policies in spheres such as the media, advertising, politics, education, or the arts.
To review, I have argued that the failure of multicultural literacy in the Black Pete controversy is due to a hermeneutical injustice involving the incorrect understanding of Black Pete as not racist. I have further shown that looking at the controversy through the twin lenses of hermeneutical injustice and white ignorance provides a more fine-grained picture of all three. I have suggested that hermeneutical injustice can be further specified in terms of gender or race, for example, allowing us to identify its different variants (such as male or white hermeneutical injustice) more directly and precisely. I have suggested that white ignorance involves both a subjective component (where the subject of knowledge is oblivious to their own, problematic cognitive-epistemic norms and processes) and an objective component (where the object of knowledge is inadequately known, construed, or understood). I have shown that subjective white ignorance and formbased white hermeneutical injustice overlap and that objective white ignorance and content-based white hermeneutical injustice overlap. I have argued that securing multicultural literacy requires combatting both subjective ignorance/form-based hermeneutical injustice and objective ignorance/content-based hermeneutical injustice. I have suggested that this might be best achieved through denaturalization and historicization channels that yield greater self-transparency and critical selfreflection on the part of the white, dominant group. My hope is that the analysis I have offered here has contributed to a more complete and precise understanding of multicultural literacy, epistemic injustice, and ignorance, and of the important ways in which they are connected.