A Harvard professor wants to abolish the white
race.
Noel Ignatiev, a founder of a journal
called Race Traitor and a fellow at Harvard's W.E.B. DuBois Institute, a leading
black-studies department, argues in the current issue of Harvard Magazine that
"abolishing the white race" is "so desirable that some may find it hard to
believe" that anyone other than "committed white supremacists" would oppose
it.
In excerpts appearing this week in
newspapers nationwide, Mr. Ignatiev, who is white, [He is not white, he is jewish, as the the reporter of this article very well knows and states below - ed. note.] writes that "every group
within white America," including "labor unionists, ethnic groups, college
students, schoolteachers, taxpayers and white women" has at one time or another
"advanced its particular and narrowly defined interests at the expense of black
people as a race."
Mr. Ignatiev pledges in the
essay that his journal, Race Traitor, intends 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."
His colleagues at Harvard seem not
to take his proposal entirely seriously. Others cite the article as an example
of Harvard's institutional racism.
Sara
Stillman, assistant to the publisher of Harvard Magazine, says there's clearly
some "misunderstanding" about what Mr. Ignatiev means by the inflammatory
language.
Asked in a 1997 interview with the
New York Times if he hates his own white skin, Mr. Ignatiev said, "No, but I
want to abolish the privileges."
"The white
race is like a private club based on one huge assumption that all those who look
white, are, whatever their complaints or reservations, fundamentally loyal to
the race. We want to dissolve that club, to explode it," he
said.
Christopher Reed, executive editor of
Harvard Magazine, defended what Mr. Ignatiev wrote in the September-October
issue. "He's arguing against the mind-set and attitude that automatically grants
privileges to white people he wants more fairness," Mr. Reed said in a
statement.
The university's public affairs
office said it had no comment.
The article
already has stirred anger among some conservatives, who see the article as
typical of the liberal climate in academia. "Suppose Frontpagemagazine.com ran a
headline 'Abolish the Black Race'?" asks David Horowitz on his magazine's Web
site. "What do you think the reaction would be? But at Harvard, where demonizing
whites is merely the standard curriculum, an article like this can appear in a
glossy magazine whose cover story is 'Whither the Art
Museum?'
"Race hatred, if directed against
white people, is just part of the progressive culture," says Mr. Horowitz, a
radical-turned-conservative and author of "Civil Wars: The Controversy Over
Reparations for Slavery."
Mr. Ignatiev, a
one-time steelworker and Marxist activist who earned a doctorate at Harvard,
could not be reached for comment. But he writes about what he believes at the
Web site of Race Traitor, whose motto is: "Treason to whiteness is loyalty to
humanity."
"The key to solving the social
problems of our age is to abolish the white race, which means no more and no
less than abolishing the privileges of the white skin. Until that task is
accomplished, even partial reform will prove elusive, because white influence
permeates every issue, domestic and foreign, in U.S. society," the journal's
statement of purpose says.
"The existence of
the white race depends on the willingness of those assigned to it to place their
racial interests above class, gender, or any other interests they hold. The
defection of enough of its members to make it unreliable as a predictor of
behavior will lead to its collapse."
Among the
"privileges" of being white, according to Race Traitor, are not being followed
by security in stores, not being harassed by police, having easier access to
better schools, jobs and housing, and not being asked whether skin color or
affirmative action got you a job.
In the essay
in Harvard Magazine, Mr. Ignatiev says he always expected "bewilderment" at his
views from "people who still think of race as
biology."
"We frequently get letters accusing
us of being 'racists' just like the KKK, and have even been called a 'hate
group.'" he wrote.
Mr. Ignatiev attempts to
clarify how he could be seeking to abolish the white race without calling for
genocide. "Our standard response is to draw an analogy with anti-royalism: to
oppose monarchy does not mean killing the king; it means getting rid of crowns,
thrones, royal titles, etc."
Abolition of a
monarchy has often been marked by killing the monarch and sometimes his family
members; for example, England in 1649, France in 1792, Russia in 1917 and Iraq
in 1958. Even those nations that have abolished kings or emperors without
regicide generally have forced the monarch into
exile.
Mr. Ignatiev grew up in a Philadelphia
family that he says was devoid of racial bias. As a child, he swam at a free
community pool, where he was the only white patron. He says his parents refused
to pay a $1 fee that was designed to keep other public pools
all-white.
Mr. Ignatiev's parents, Jewish
immigrants from Russia [Jewish not White], were not college educated, but he attended the
University of Pennsylvania, dropping out after three years. He worked in a
Chicago steel mill and in factories that made farm equipment and electrical
parts for two decades. At the steel mill, he helped organize strikes and
protests by the predominantly black work
force.
He was laid off from the steel mill in
1984, a year after he was arrested on charges of throwing a paint bomb at a
strike-breaker's car. He set up Marxist discussion groups in the early 1980s. In
1985, Mr. Ignatiev was accepted to the Harvard Graduate School of Education
without an undergraduate degree. After earning his master's, he joined the
Harvard faculty as a lecturer and worked toward a doctorate in U.S.
history.
His dissertation was his book, "How
the Irish Became White." Mr. Ignatiev said the book told how Irish immigrants
came to the United States and became "oppressors" by emulating American
whites.