Ignorance is scary. If you’re ignorant, people hate you. If you’re ignorant, someone will tell you that you are what is wrong with society. I’d rather be called a slut a thousand times over than be called ignorant because ignorance is basically the root of all evil. But the thing is, everybody is a little ignorant because you can be ignorant about anything.

By definition, all ignorance means is a lack of information or unfamiliarity, but it has become an insult, synonymous with “offensive”, “dumb”, “uneducated”, and “bigot”. To be fair, typically people who do spew racist and sexist remarks like exhaust pipes are ignorant; it’s like they took ignorance and made it their bitch. For this reason, I think most people pride themselves on not being racist/sexist/etc., but that’s not quite the same as being ignorant. However, in defending ignorance, I think that anyone can be ignorant and, depending on how you handle it, that is okay.

I’ll come clean— I recently had a race related moment of ignorance when I carelessly trivialized racism in Brazil since I thought the disparity between rich and poor was at the forefront of Brazil’s problems, thus assumed race wasn’t as much of an issue. Despite having visited Museo Afro Brasil, I only seemed to recall a video I saw in Portuguese 1 about how Brazil was named after a type of wood and how it is a melting pot of ethnicities and cultures, which definitely helped affirm my misconceptions about Brazilian society.

After realizing how wrong I was (which did not take long), I felt mortified. It seemed obvious—how could the country that was the last to abolish slavery not have a race issue? The numerous articles, academic literature, and newspaper reports made it abundantly clear how misguided I was and even showed a strong correlation between race relations and socio-economic discrepancies.

The funny thing about ignorance, is that it’s 20/20 hindsight. If I had remained in denial, I would not only be insolent, I would be blind and deaf as well. Since arriving in Rio, many of my program peers have commented on the dirty looks they get until it becomes obvious that they are American, or rather, not black Brazilians, who are generally looked down upon for being poor. As an Asian woman, I am subjected as well to unabashed harassment that I have never encountered in the U.S. It was ethnocentric and just plain dumb to assume that the U.S was the only country with race issues, although we seem to be the most open about it, or at least the loudest.

If the world were split into racists and non-racists, without a doubt, most people would probably fall into the latter. The line between these categories, at least in my experience, has been based on actions: saying, writing, promoting racist things, or not doing these things. Knowledge has been implied: racist people don’t know what is right and not-racist people know what is right. What about people who keep quiet because they just don’t know?

Would race still be an issue is everyone were a pristine pillar of cultural sensitivity? If everybody could live up to that impossible standard, I think there would still be areas of ambiguity, areas where right and wrong are not always obvious. There’s no doubt that knowledge is part of the solution, but if it is also the determinant (i.e defining racist/not racist), doesn’t it make ignorance a plague on both our houses?