ANTIWHITENESS.ORG

← Profiles

Noel Ignatiev

Antiwhite activist-scholar who campaigned to “abolish” the White race, co-edited Race Traitor (“treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity”), and wrote How the Irish Became White (1995). Born Noel Saul Ignatin; December 27, 1940–November 9, 2019.

This page summarizes Ignatiev’s life, his best-known writing, and his public rhetoric on Whiteness for readers tracking calls—in academia and activism—to dismantle White identity as such.

Background

Ignatiev was born in Philadelphia to a Jewish family; his grandparents were from Russia. The family surname was recorded as Ignatin before he restored Ignatiev. He attended the University of Pennsylvania for three years but did not graduate. As a young man he joined and then broke from organized communist currents, was active in Students for a Democratic Society and the Sojourner Truth Organization, and spent roughly two decades working in steel and related industry in Gary, Indiana, while organizing around Black workers’ equality in the mills. After a layoff in 1984, he entered Harvard’s Graduate School of Education without a bachelor’s degree, earned an MA in 1985, and completed a PhD in American history in 1995 with a dissertation supervised by Stephan Thernstrom and Alan Heimert. He taught at Harvard and later at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. He died in Tucson, Arizona, at 78.

Race Traitor and “abolishing” Whiteness

With John Garvey and others, Ignatiev co-founded the New Abolitionist Society and co-edited the journal Race Traitor, which used the slogan “treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.”

In an excerpt republished in Harvard Magazine (2002), from his contribution to Bernestine Singley’s anthology When Race Becomes Real, Ignatiev wrote that “the goal of abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed white supremacists.” In the same piece: “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.”

How the Irish Became White

His dissertation, published as How the Irish Became White (Routledge, 1995), argues that nineteenth-century Irish immigrants in the United States were not fully assimilated to the dominant Anglo-American racial order at first, and that many secured a place on the “White” side of the color line partly through alignment with antiblack racism and labor politics that excluded Black workers. It became a standard assignment in Whiteness studies.

Themes relevant to antiwhiteness

  • Public advocacy to eliminate “the White race” treats White identity as a formation to be wiped out, not reformed.
  • Editorial rhetoric explicitly promises to “bash” White men and women and to “destroy” the White race.
  • Scholarly narrative that ethnic groups “became White” through complicity in antiblackness supplies a moral origin story in which White Americans’ standing is tied to collective guilt.

Further reading