"It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have"
About this Quote
Baldwin isn’t warning against ignorance in the abstract; he’s indicting what happens when not-knowing becomes an instrument of rule. The line is built like a legal brief with a moral fuse: “It is certain” opens with courtroom confidence, then “in any case” shrugs off the usual evasions. No loopholes, no “both sides.” By the time he arrives at “ignorance, allied with power,” he’s named the real monster: not mere prejudice, but sanctioned blindness with badges, budgets, and credibility.
The subtext is Baldwin’s recurring diagnosis of America’s racial order: injustice doesn’t require everyone to be hateful, only that enough people in charge can afford not to understand. Ignorance becomes a strategy. It converts lived realities - police violence, housing discrimination, educational segregation - into “complicated issues,” then uses that manufactured complexity to stall remedies. In Baldwin’s world, innocence is rarely innocent; it’s often a cultivated alibi.
Calling this enemy “ferocious” matters. Ferocity suggests appetite and momentum, something that doesn’t just block justice but hunts it down. Justice, after all, depends on recognition: seeing who is harmed, how systems work, what repair costs. Power paired with ignorance refuses recognition while insisting on authority. That’s why it’s worse than malice alone. Malice can be confronted; ignorance with power can declare itself neutral, reasonable, even benevolent - and still crush people.
Contextually, Baldwin is writing out of mid-century America’s civil rights upheavals, when official institutions routinely denied what was plainly happening. The sentence lands now because the template persists: when those with decision-making power outsource knowledge of others’ lives, “not knowing” becomes policy.
The subtext is Baldwin’s recurring diagnosis of America’s racial order: injustice doesn’t require everyone to be hateful, only that enough people in charge can afford not to understand. Ignorance becomes a strategy. It converts lived realities - police violence, housing discrimination, educational segregation - into “complicated issues,” then uses that manufactured complexity to stall remedies. In Baldwin’s world, innocence is rarely innocent; it’s often a cultivated alibi.
Calling this enemy “ferocious” matters. Ferocity suggests appetite and momentum, something that doesn’t just block justice but hunts it down. Justice, after all, depends on recognition: seeing who is harmed, how systems work, what repair costs. Power paired with ignorance refuses recognition while insisting on authority. That’s why it’s worse than malice alone. Malice can be confronted; ignorance with power can declare itself neutral, reasonable, even benevolent - and still crush people.
Contextually, Baldwin is writing out of mid-century America’s civil rights upheavals, when official institutions routinely denied what was plainly happening. The sentence lands now because the template persists: when those with decision-making power outsource knowledge of others’ lives, “not knowing” becomes policy.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
More Quotes by James
Add to List
