Noel Ignatiev

Noel Ignatiev
Nationality	American
Employer	Massachusetts College of Art
Known for	Critical Race Theory

Noel Ignatiev is an American history professor at the Massachusetts College of Art best known for his call to "abolish" the white race. Ignatiev is the co-founder and co-editor of the journal Race Traitor and the New Abolitionist Society. He also has written a book on antebellum northern racism against Irish immigrants, How the Irish Became White.

Career

Biography

Ignatiev's parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia. He attended the University of Pennsylvania but dropped out after three years. He worked in a steel mill in Chicago and in factories manufacturing farm equipment and electrical parts for two decades. Ignatiev was a Marxist activist and helped organize strikes and protests by the predominantly black work force at the steel mill. He was laid off from the steel mill in 1984, a year after he was arrested on charges of throwing a paint bomb at a strike-breaker's car.

Ignatiev set up Marxist discussion groups in the early 1980s. In 1985, Mr. Ignatiev was accepted to the Harvard Graduate School of Education without an undergraduate degree. After earning his master's, he joined the Harvard faculty as a lecturer and worked toward a doctorate in U.S. history.

Noel Ignatiev first became politically active in Students for a Democratic Society. When that organization split, Ignatiev became part of the Third-worldist and Maoist New Communist Movement, forming the group Sojourner Truth Organization in 1970. Unlike other groups in the New Communist Movement, the STO and Ignatiev were also heavily influenced by the ideas of C.L.R. James.

Ignatiev was a graduate student at Harvard University where he earned his Ph.D. in 1995. He taught courses there before moving to the Massachusetts College of Art, where he currently teaches. His academic work is linked to his call to "abolish" the white race, a controversial slogan whose meaning is not always agreed upon by those who debate his work. His dissertation, published by Routledge as the book How the Irish Became White, was advised by prominent social historian of American race and ethnicity Stephan Thernstrom. Ignatiev is the co-founder and co-editor of the journal Race Traitor and the New Abolitionist Society.

Harvard Controversy

From 1986 until 1992, Ignatiev served as a tutor for Dunster House at Harvard University (ie., as an academic advisor for the undergraduate students that lived in Dunster). In the spring of 1992, Ignatiev vocally objected to the placement of a toaster in the Dunster House dining hall designated for kosher use only, and demanded that it be removed or paid for by private funds. In a subsequent letter to the Harvard student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, Ignatiev stated that "I regard anti-Semitism, like all forms of religious, ethnic and racial bigotry, as a crime against humanity and whoever calls me an anti-Semite will face a libel suit."

Dunster House subsequently refused to renew Ignatiev's contract, stating that his conduct was "unbecoming of a Harvard tutor." Dunster co-master Hetty Liem said it was the job of a tutor "to foster a sense of community and tolerance and to serve as a role model for the students," and that Ignatiev had not been able to do this. Liem also alleged that Ignatiev had tried to "impress his own beliefs on others", and to "single-handedly and unilaterally demand reversal of a house policy". He added that Ignatiev could have held a roundtable discussion to address the issue, but instead acted like "a bull charging in a shop".

Ideas

Views of race

Ignatiev is part of a wide consensus of social scientists and geneticists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries who view race distinctions and race itself as a social construct, not a scientific reality. In his study of Irish immigrants in the nineteenth-century United States, Ignatiev recounts the Irish triumph over nativism and shows how that triumph marked the incorporation of the Irish into the dominant group of American society. Ignatiev asserts that the Irish were not initially accepted by native-born Americans of Anglo-Saxon descent as white. He claims that only through their own violence against free blacks and support of slavery did the Irish gain acceptance as white. Ignatiev and other scholars of the field define whiteness as the access to white privilege, which according to Ignatiev gains people perceived to have "white" skin admission to certain neighborhoods, schools, and jobs. In the nineteenth century it was strongly associated with political power, especially suffrage.

Ignatiev states that attempts to give race a biological foundation have only led to absurdities, as in the common example that a white woman could give birth to a black child, but a black woman could never give birth to a white child. Ignatiev asserts that the only logical explanation for this notion is that people are members of different racial categories because society assigns people to these categories.

The "New Abolition" and "White Race"

Ignatiev's academic views of race are not necessarily as controversial as his statements about the abolition of the white race. Though often misunderstood as a call for the physical elimination of "white people," Ignatiev has repeatedly explained that what he is calling for is the abolition of white privilege and race identity.

In response to a letter to the journal Race Traitor which charged that the authors "hated" white people because of their "white skin," Ignatiev and the other editors responded:

We do not hate you or anyone else for the color of her skin. What we hate is a system that confers privileges (and burdens) on people because of their color. It is not fair skin that makes people white; it is fair skin in a certain kind of society, one that attaches social importance to skin color. When we say we want to abolish the white race, we do not mean we want to exterminate people with fair skin. We mean that we want to do away with the social meaning of skin color, thereby abolishing the white race as a social category. Consider this parallel: To be against royalty does not mean wanting to kill the king. It means wanting to do away with crowns, thrones, titles, and the privileges attached to them. In our view, whiteness has a lot in common with royalty: they are both social formations that carry unearned advantages.

Ignatiev's web site and publication Race Traitor, display the motto "treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity".

Works Published

• "'The American Blindspot': Reconstruction According to Eric Foner and W. E. B. DuBois," Labour 31 (1993): 243-51.
• "The Revolution as an African-American Exuberance," Eighteenth-Century Studies 27, no. 4 (Summer 1994): 605-13.
• How the Irish Became White (1995) ISBN 0-415-91384-5
• Race Traitor (anthology of articles from the journal by the same name edited with John Garvey) (1996) ISBN 0-415-91392-6
• "Zionism, Antisemitism, and the People of Palestine," Race Traitor (May 2004).

References

• Interview with Ignatiev by Danny Postel for Zmag.org (1996).
• "The Point Is Not To Interpret Whiteness But To Abolish It" talk by Noel Ignatiev at Berkeley, California (1997).
• "Harvard Hates the White Race?", article by Paul Craig Roberts at VDARE.com (2002).
• Noel Ignatiev on the role of westward expansion and African Americans for PBS's series Africans in America.
• Dunster Dismisses Vocal Tutor (May 11, 1992).
• No Toaster Subsidy (March 18, 1992).

See also

• Whiteness studies
• Race traitor

External links

• The New Abolitionist Society
• Sojourner Truth Organization archive

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