(Re?) Introducing “Meta-blindness”

I was at a conference last month where I got to hear from the lovely Tendayi Bloom, a political and legal theorist in the UK who focuses on questions of noncitizenship, statelessness, and human mobility. (We’re both contributing chapters to the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Comparative Immigration Law: Tendayi’s chapter is The Logic and Legitimacy of Immigration Law while I’m writing on the national visa policy of the United States.)

In her talk, Tendayi emphasized the concept of “meta-blindness.” I found this discussion riveting as I had not previously heard of the term.

Tendayi indicated that she first learned of the term from this article: Jose Medina, The Relevance of Credibility Excess in a Proportional View of Epistemic Injustice: Differential Epistemic Authority and the Social Imaginary, Social Epistemology 25(1) (2011).

In that article, Medina discusses the concept of “meta-blindness” in the context of the jury’s actions in To Kill a Mockingbird. Medina writes that the jurors:

failed to recognize that there were things they could not recognize: they were blind to their inability to understand certain things; they were unable to acknowledge that they were ill‐equipped to understand certain sentiments and reactions. In other words, they were blind to their own blindness, insensitive to their own insensitivity… because they were not only blind but meta‐blind, because they were insensitive to their own insensitivity, they faced serious obstacles against becoming good listeners, against acquiring or developing the capacity to understand what is difficult to understand

Meta-blindness, Medina argues, is a “particularly recalcitrant kind of ignorance about the cognitive and affective limitations of one’s perspective.”

So, you might be asking, what is the antidote to meta-blindness? According to Medina, it is essential to:

…actively search for more alternatives than those noticed, to acknowledge them (or their possibility), and to attempt to engage with them whenever possible… to look at the world from more than one perspective, to hold different viewpoints simultaneously so that they can be compared and contrasted, corrected by each other, and combined when possible…. to entertain different perspectives without polarizing them, dichotomizing them, and presenting them as exhaustive.

Perhaps you were already well-versed in this particular theory. It struck me as a fascinating perspective with ample opportunities for application to our collective study of immigration law.

-KitJ