This interview is part of the The Stone, a New York Times online forum for contemporary philosophers and critical theorists. It is the fifth in a series of dialogues on violence. Henry A. Giroux is a professor in the department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and the author of America’s Addiction to Terrorism. Brad Evans is a senior lecturer in international relations at the University of Bristol in England.
”Brad Evans: Throughout your work you have dealt with the dangers of ignorance and what you have called the violence of ‘organized forgetting.’ Can you explain what you mean by this and why we need to be attentive to intellectual forms of violence?
Henry Giroux: Unfortunately, we live at a moment in which ignorance appears to be one of the defining features of American political and cultural life. Ignorance has become a form of weaponized refusal to acknowledge the violence of the past, and revels in a culture of media spectacles in which public concerns are translated into private obsessions, consumerism and fatuous entertainment. As James Baldwin rightly warned, ‘Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.’…”
Read the entire conversation on the New York Times website.
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