Noel Ignatiev

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Noel Ignatiev

Noel Ignatiev (27 December 1940 – 9 November 2019), born Noel Saul Ignatin, was a jewish historian and Communist who was involved with critical race theory and Whiteness studies.

Life

Ignatiev was born Noel Saul Ignatin in Philadelphia, the son of Carrie and Irv Ignatin. His family's original surname, Ignatiev, was changed to Ignatin and later back to the original spelling. His family was jewish.

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

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). He was expelled from the POC in 1966.

He later became involved in the Students for a Democratic Society. When that organization fractured in the late 1960s, Ignatiev became part of the group Sojourner Truth Organization (STO) in 1970.

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. 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.

Academic career

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

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. His dissertation, published by Routledge as the book How the Irish Became White, was advised by social historian of American race and ethnicity Stephan Thernstrom and by Alan Heimert.

Race Traitor (journal)

From the early 1990s through the mid-2000s, he published a journal called Race Traitor with the motto "treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity". The introductory issue had an article called "Abolish the White Race - By Any Means Necessary" and which stated that:

"RACE TRAITOR aims to dissolve the club, to break it apart, to explode it. Some people who sympathize with our aim have asked us how we intend to win over the majority of so-called whites to anti-racism. Others, usually less friendly, have asked if we plan to exterminate physically millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, of people. Neither of these plans is what we have in mind. The weak point of the club is its need for unanimity. Just as the South, on launching the Civil War, declared that it needed its entire territory and would have it, the white race must have the support of all those it has designated as its constituency, or it ceases to exist."

Death

On 9 November 2019, Ignatiev died at Banner University Medical Center Tucson at the age of 78.

Quotes

The key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the white race. Until that task is accomplished, even partial reform will prove elusive, because white influence permeates every issue in U.S. society, whether domestic or foreign.
—Noel Ignatiev, Abolish the White Race - By Any Means Necessary

Make no mistake about it, we intend to keep bashing the dead white males, and the live ones, and the females, too, until the social construct known as ‘the white race’ is destroyed. Not ‘deconstructed’ but destroyed.
—Noel Ignatiev, Race Traitor

See also

• Whiteness studies

External links

• Noel Ignatiev and the Anti-Establishment Establishment
• Noel Ignatiev, Scholar Who Called for Abolishing Whiteness, Dies at 78
• Promoting genocide of Whites? Noel Ignatiev and the Culture of Western Suicide