Treason to Whiteness Is Loyalty to Humanity

by Ignatiev, Noel; Roediger, David R.; Kurti, Zhandarka; Dhondt, Geert; Shanahan, Jarrod

• ISBN13: 9781839765018
• ISBN10: 1839765011
• eBook ISBN(s): 9781839765056
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2022-06-28
• Publisher: Verso
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Summary

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?"

Author Biography

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.