Noel Ignatiev

Noel Ignatiev (, born Noel Saul Ignatin; December 27, 1940 – November 9, 2019) was an American author and historian, as well as a self-avowed anti-white racist.

He was best known for his theories on race and for his call to abolish "whiteness".

Ignatiev was the co-founder of the New Abolitionist Society and co-editor of the journal Race Traitor, which promoted the idea that "treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity".

He was also a communist.

Under the name Noel Ignatin, he joined the Communist Party USA in January 1958, at the age of 17, but in August left (along with Theodore W. Allen and Harry Haywood) to help form the Provisional Organizing Committee to Reconstitute the Marxist–Leninist Communist Party (POC).

When that organization fractured in the late 1960s, Ignatiev became part of the group Sojourner Truth Organization (STO) in 1970.

Unlike other groups in the New Communist movement, the STO and Ignatiev were also heavily influenced by the ideas of Trinidadian writer C. L. R. James.

For twenty years, Ignatiev worked in a Gary, Indiana steel mill and also in the manufacturing of farming equipment and electrical components.

A Marxist activist, he was involved in efforts by African American steel workers to achieve equality in the mills.

He was expelled from the POC in 1966.

He later became involved in the Students for a Democratic Society.

Ignatiev set up Marxist discussion groups in the early 1980s.

In 1984, he was laid off from the steel mill, approximately a year after an arrest on charges of attacking a strike-breaker's car with a paint bomb.

In 1985, Ignatiev was accepted to the Harvard Graduate School of Education without an undergraduate degree.

After earning his master's degree, he joined the Harvard faculty as a lecturer and worked toward a doctorate in U.S. history.

In 1995 he published the book, How the Irish Became White, an examination of the choices made by early Irish Immigrants to the United States, many of whom, when faced with xenophobia and a history of being oppressed themselves, proceeded to take the opportunity to increase their power in society by identifying as "white" and participating in oppressing darker-skinned peoples.

Ignatiev was born Noel Saul Ignatin in Philadelphia, the son of Carrie, a homemaker, and Irv Ignatin, who delivered newspapers.

His family's original surname, Ignatiev, was changed to Ignatin and later back to the original spelling.

His family was Jewish.

His grandparents were from Russia.

Ignatiev's parents later ran a housewares store.

He attended the University of Pennsylvania, but dropped out after three years.

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.

His academic work was 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 and by Alan Heimert.

Ignatiev was the co-founder and co-editor of the journal Race Traitor and the New Abolitionist Society.

Ignatiev viewed race distinctions and race itself as a social construct, not a scientific reality.

In September 2002, Harvard Magazine published an excerpt from When Race Becomes Real: Black and White Writers Confront Their Personal Histories, edited by Bernestine Singley, about Ignatiev's role in launching Race Traitor.

Ignatiev's study of Irish immigrants in the 19th-century United States argued that an Irish triumph over nativism marks the incorporation of the Irish into the dominant group of American society.

Ignatiev asserted that the Irish were not initially accepted as white by the dominant Anglo-American population.

He claimed that only through their own violence against free blacks and support of slavery did the Irish gain acceptance as white.

Ignatiev defined 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 19th century, whiteness was strongly associated with political power, especially suffrage.

Ignatiev's book on Irish immigrants has been criticized for "conflat[ing] race and economic position" and for ignoring data that contradicts his theses.

Ignatiev stated 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 asserted that the only logical explanation for this notion is that people are members of different racial categories because society assigns people to these categories.

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

In response to a letter to the site which understood the motto as meaning 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."