Overview

For sixty years Noel Ignatiev provided an unflinching account of 'whiteness'–a social fiction that has for centuries been an unmitigated disaster for all working class people, including the white ones. 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 explosive guilt trips of the Weather Underground and recounts which kind of strategies proved most effective to winning white workers in Gary, Indiana to black liberation. He discovers the prescient political insights of the 19th century abolition movement and surveys the wreckage of the revolutionary 20th century with CLR James. And he attends to the thorny and contradictory nature of working-class consciousness that is irreducible to that great political past time of opinion polling or the deceptively simple arithmetic of 'rational choice' theories. Through it all, our attentions are turned to the everyday life of ""ordinary people"", whose actions seem to anticipate a wholly new future society that they have not yet recognized nor named. Although the essays collected here were written over sixty years of radical organizing and mischief making, they read as if they were produced yesterday, asking questions that are still on our minds: how can we drive back the forces of racism in our society? how can the so-called 'white working class' be won over to progressive politics? How can we build a new human community?

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9781839765018

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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

A persistent voice against white privilege * The New York Times * there is no political or literary trend-or President-capable of derailing Ignatiev's true lifelong project. In his writing, and in Race Traitor and Hard Crackers, 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. -- Jay Caspian Kang * New Yorker * 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 <i>The Slave Ship: A Human History</i> This collection of Noel Ignatiev's writings over the past six decades could not come at a more important time in the struggle as white supremacy; they are as pertinent today as they were when they were written. -- Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of <i>An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States</i> 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 * 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 <i>Continental Drift</i> and <i>Cloudsplitter</i> 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 <i>White Supremacy Confronted</i> .from time to time a study comes along that truly can be called 'path breaking,' 'seminal,' 'essential,' a 'must read.' How the Irish Became White is such a study. -- John Bracey, W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, University of Massachussetts, Amherst 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 *

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 as 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

Author Information

Noel Ignatiev was born in Philadelphia, the son of two Russian-Jewish immigrants. He was a life long revolutionary, a long-time steel worker (Gary, Indiana), the author of How the Irish Became White, and co-editor of the journal Race Traitor. 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.

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