Our visual environment is complicated and our cognitive capacity is limited. As a result, we must strategically ignore some stimuli in order to prioritize others. Common-sense suggests that foreknowledge of distractor characteristics, like location or color, might help us ignore these objects. But empirical studies have provided mixed evidence, often showing that knowing about a distractor before it appears counter-intuitively leads to its attentional selection. What has looked like strategic distractor suppression in the past is now commonly explained as a product of prior experience and implicit statistical learning, and the long-standing notion that distractor suppression is reflected in alpha-band oscillatory brain activity has been challenged by results appearing to link alpha to target resolution. Can we strategically, proactively suppress distractors? And, if so, does this involve alpha? Here, we use concurrent recording of human EEG and eye movements in optimized experimental designs to identify be...