Noel Ignatiev
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Noel Ignatiev is a 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.
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[edit] Career
[edit] Biography
Noel Ignatiev was professor of history at Harvard University 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. Ignatiev, a Marxist historian, received a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1995. 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. Prior to becoming an academic, he worked for over twenty years in steel mills, farm equipment plants, and machine tool and electrical parts factories. Ignatiev is the co-founder and co-editor of the journal Race Traitor and the New Abolitionist Society.
Because Ignatiev's scholarly and personal agenda are linked with work on race, racism, and racialism, Ignatiev's own background vis-a-vis racial theories has become part of some debates about his ideas. Some who are eager to identify him as Jewish point to the appearance of Ignatiev's name on a list of "Righteous (Former) Jews"[1] published on a Web site registered to activist McGowan. The list names persons of Jewish origin that its unnamed authors lionize for having rejected whatever links they are perceived to have had with the Jewish religion and/or the Jewish people. Those who question this identification point to Ignatiev's family name, which is rare among persons of Jewish origin, and his first name, a synonym for Christmas which is rarely used in Jewish families. Ignatiev himself is not known to have weighed in on the matter.
[edit] 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. Ignatiev had tried to "impress his own beliefs on others", and to "single-handedly and unilaterally demand reversal of a house policy". Liem added that Ignatiev could have held a roundtable discussion to address the issue, but instead acted like "a bull charging in a shop".
[edit] Ideas
[edit] Views of race
Ignatiev is part of a a wide consensus of social scientists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries who have joined biologists in identifying race as a social construct and not a scientific reality; what is unusual is the distance he takes this assertion, and his manner of asserting it. 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, the most common is the belief 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, then, that the only logical explanation for this notion is that people are members of different racial categories because society assigns people to these categories.
[edit] 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. Ignatiev's web site and publication Race Traitor, display the motto "treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity".
In an interview with Danny Postel on St. Patrick's Day, 1996, Ignatiev stated:
"Either the fascists are going to lead people into a poor white man's revolution, which would open the doors to horrors beyond anything that we've seen--from which I do not exclude Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. Or these people are going to say: To hell with this. We do not wish to be white. We wish to recognize that other people, those fighting hardest against the injustices of this society, the most extreme victims of it--the black youth--who are doing their best to resist what American society is doing to them: therein lie our closest potential allies. In other words, we are not going to be white anymore. We're going to take a chance on being free."
A year later in 1997 at a conference at Berkeley, California, Ignatiev stated, "Whiteness is not a culture... Whiteness has nothing to do with culture and everything to do with social position. It is nothing but a reflection of privilege, and exists for no reason other than to defend it." Also, "When it comes to abolishing the white race, the task is not to win over more whites to oppose 'racism'; there are 'anti-racists' enough already to do the job."
Some of Ignatiev's opponents have wildly distorted his remarks and used his statements such as the following (from the [New Abolitionists Society's website][2]) to suggest that he advocates the genocide of white people:
"The key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the white race -- in other words, to abolish the privileges of the white skin. Until that task is accomplished, even partial reform will prove elusive, because white influence permeates every issue, domestic and foreign, in U.S. society. The way to abolish the white race is to challenge, disrupt and eventually overturn the institutions and behavior patterns that reproduce the privileges of whiteness, including the schools, job and housing markets, and the criminal justice system. The abolitionists do not limit themselves to socially acceptable means of protest, but reject in advance no means of attaining their goal."
Ignatiev refuted such accusations in another place on the same web site [Race Traitor website][3], arguing: "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."
[edit] 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).
[edit] References
- Interview with Ignatiev by Danny Postel for Zmag.org (1996).
- "The Point Is Not To Interpret Whiteness But To 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).
- Ignatiev on List of Righteous (Former) Jews.
