Treason to Whiteness Is Loyalty to Humanity

by Noel Ignatiev, David R. Roediger (Foreword by), Zhandarka Kurti (Editor), Geert Dhondt (Editor), Jarrod Shanahan (Editor)

Overview

A new collection of essays from the bomb-throwing intellectual who described the historical origins and evolution of whiteness and white supremacy, and taught us how we might destroy it.

For sixty years, Noel Ignatiev provided an unflinching account of “whiteness”—a social fiction and an unmitigated disaster for all working-class people. This new essay collection from the late firebrand covers the breadth of his life and insights as an autodidact steel worker, a groundbreaking theoretician, and a bitter enemy of racists everywhere.

In these essays, Ignatiev confronts the Weather Underground and recounts which strategies proved most effective to winning white workers in Gary, Indiana, to black liberation. He discovers the prescient political insights of the nineteenth-century abolition movement, surveys the wreckage of the revolutionary twentieth century with C.L.R. James, and attends to the thorny and contradictory nature of working-class consciousness. Through it all, our attentions are turned to the everyday life of “ordinary” people, whose actions anticipate a wholly new society they have not yet recognized or named.

In short, Ignatiev reflects on the incisive questions of his time and ours: How can we drive back the forces of racism in society? How can the so-called “white” working class be wn over to emancipatory politics? How can we build a new human community?"

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781839765056
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	06/28/2022
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	448
File size:	897 KB

About the Author

Noel Ignatiev was born in Philadelphia, the son of two Russian-Jewish immigrants. He was a life long revolutionary, a long-time steel worker in Gary, Indiana, the author of How the Irish Became White, and co-editor of the journal Race Traitor, an anthology from which won an American Book Award. He spent years debating in the Students for a Democratic Society, where he coined the term “white skin privilege” before going on to agitate on the factory floor for twenty years with the Sojourner Truth Organization. Later, he became an unlikely Harvard PhD grad, a renowned historian, and an untempered firebrand on the main political and cultural issues of our time.

Table of Contents

Foreword David Roediger xi

Acknowledgments xvii

Introduction: An American Revolutionary Geert Dhondt Zhandarka Kurti Jarrod Shanahan 1

Part I The White Blindspot

1 Passing 15

2 The POC: A Personal Memoir 24

3 In My Youth 36

4 Meeting in Chicago 39

5 The White Blindspot 44

6 Learn the Lessons of US History 61

7 Organizing Workers: Lessons for Radicals 71

8 Without a Science of Navigation, We Cannot Sail in Stormy Seas (Excerpts) 79

9 My Debt and Obligation to Ted Allen 87

Part II Black Worker/White Worker: The Sojourner Truth Organization

10 Black Worker, White Worker 97

11 Theses on White Supremacy: Expanded Remarks 115

12 No Condescending Saviors: A Study of the Experience of Revolution in the Twentieth Century (Excerpts) 119

13 Since When Has Working Been a Crime? 129

14 Are US Workers Paid above the Value of Their Labor Power? 141

15 Introduction to the United States: An Autonomist Political History 148

16 The Backward Workers 177

17 Influence 184

Part III Abolish the White Race: The Race Traitor Project

18 Abolish the White Race-by Any Means Necessary 191

19 The American Intifada 198

20 Immigrants and Whites 203

21 The White Worker and the Labor Movement in Nineteenth-Century America 211

22 When Does an Unreasonable Act Make Sense? 221

23 Antifascism, Anti-Racism, and Abolition 224

24 Aux Armes! Formez Vos Bataillons! 227

25 How the Irish Became White 230

26 The Point Is Not to Interpret Whiteness but to Abolish It 233

27 Abolitionism and the White Studies Racket 241

28 Reality and the Future 246

29 Abolitionism and the Free Society 249

30 The American Blindspot: Reconstruction according to Eric Foner and W. E. B. Du Bois 257

31 Whiteness and Class Struggle 268

32 12 Million Black Voices 276

33 Palestine: A Race Traitor Analysis 281

34 Zionism, Anti-Semitism, and the People of Palestine 293

35 Beyond the Spectacle: New Abolitionists Speak Out 310

Part IV Dual Power is the Key to Revolutionary Strategy

36 The Lesson of the Hour: Wendell Phillips on Abolition and Strategy 319

37 The World View of C. L. R. James 339

38 Modern Politics 352

39 Alternative Institutions or Dual Power? 363

40 Race or Class? 367

41 Race and Occupy: Remarks Delivered at Occupy Boston 370

42 Defining Hard Crackers 375

43 Frederick Douglass, John Brown, and the Virtues of Impracticality 380

Epilogue: My Dream 389

Afterword: Noel Ignatiev, an Intellectual Biography John Garvey 391

Notes 401

Index 417

Editorial Reviews

This book is the gift of a life well-lived—as steelworker, scholar, race traitor, and fierce anti-racist. Noel Ignatiev had a singular and memorable voice, here preserved for posterity. We will need his ideas and example moving forward.”
—Marcus Rediker, author of The Slave Ship: A Human History

“This collection of Noel Ignatiev’s writings over the past six decades could not come at a more important time in the struggle against white supremacy; they are as pertinent today as they were when they were written.”
—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States

“Ignatiev demonstrated the transformative power of working-class stories. His radicalism was always tethered to specific people, who, in their own ways, inspired sympathy and a desire for connection. That specificity will always be relevant; it may be especially so at a moment of cynical alienation, when identities have become recitations rather than communities.”
—New Yorker

“A persistent voice against white privilege.”
—New York Times

“Noel Ignatiev was a tiller in the field of identity studies long before most of us even knew there was such a field. Beyond that, he located the field at the crossroads of race and class. He was an important, innovative thinker, as well as a committed activist for social justice.”
—Russel Banks, author of Continental Drift and Cloudsplitter

“Noel Ignatiev was a giant in one of the most important fields of research to emerge in recent times: how was it that those who had been warring on the shores of Europe on religious and ethnic grounds were magically transformed upon crossing the Atlantic into the new Identity Politics of ‘whiteness’? As the brilliant Ignatiev correctly suggests, the survival of humanity may very well hang on understanding this phenomenon—then acting decisively.”
—Gerald Horne, author of White Supremacy Confronted: US Imperialism and Anti-Communism versus the Liberation of Southern Africa, from Rhodes to Mandela

“Readers are given a comprehensive view of factory militant and abolitionist Ignatiev’s powers of investigating the unstable, often ambivalent ‘complexities and contradictions’ that shape existence under capitalist social relations.”
—Dylan Davis and Patrick King, Los Angeles Review of Books

“A dialectical approach to politics that both accounts for the lived experience of trying to transform society and hones strategies based on study, debate, accumulated knowledge, and the emerging capacities of those around us … an engaging set of provocations, and practical discussions of revolutionary strategy.”
—Mike King, Boston Review

From the Publisher