Race Traitor: Ignatiev on Palestine
Introduction by Israel Shamir:

In Lausanne, at One Democratic State conference, I’ve met a Boston professor Noel Ignatiev, a newcomer to our struggle, to whom I felt immediate ideological affinity. Ignatiev declared himself ‘a new abolitionist’ striving for abolition of the Whiteness in the US, and his magazine is called The Race Traitor http://racetraitor.org/ .

He wrote: “The white race is a historically constructed social formation. It consists of all those who partake of the privileges of the white skin in this society. Its most wretched members share a status higher, in certain respects, than that of the most exalted persons excluded from it, in return for which they give their support to a system that degrades them.

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. 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 behaviour will lead to its collapse. Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.”

As you noticed, his discourse is rather similar to the one we try to introduce regarding the Jews. Indeed, his magazine called also for ‘abolition of the Jewish caste’ (No. 4) and termination of the Jewish privilege in the US (No. 5), that is for creation of truly One Democratic state in the US. This position shows his great sincerity: otherwise, the White Nationalists would be able to say that he is doing a ‘Jewish thing’ by trying to undermine ‘whiteness’. However, his principled stand against Jewish privilege makes him invaluable. Paraphrasing his words we can say ‘Treason to Jewishness is loyalty to humanity’.

Ignatiev was attacked by White Nationalists in the same manner the Jewish Nationalists attacked me – partly due to the Nationalists’ lack of understanding of the concept. On his magazine site there is the following exchange familiar to whoever argued for abolition of Jewishness:

Dear Race Traitor:

I read your statement "What We Believe." I am a sixteen-year-old white girl and so far as I know I have never done anything wrong to any person of another colour. Why do you hate me simply because I have white skin? You say you want to abolish the white race. You people are as bad as the Ku Klux Klan.

A reader

Editors' reply:

Thank you for writing. You have misunderstood our meaning. We do not hate you or anyone else for the colour of her skin. What we hate is a system that confers privileges (and burdens) on people because of their colour. It is not fair skin that makes people white; it is fair skin in a certain kind of society, one that attaches social importance to skin colour. When we say we want to abolish the white race, we do not mean we want to exterminate people with fair skin. We mean that we want to do away with the social meaning of skin colour, thereby abolishing the white race as a social category. Consider this parallel: To be against royalty does not mean wanting to kill the king. It means wanting to do away with crowns, thrones, titles, and the privileges attached to them. In our view, whiteness has a lot in common with royalty: they are both social formations that carry unearned advantages.

Noel Ignatiev found many Americans born with white skin who understood that ‘Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity’. With Jews, we have an altogether more formidable task.

The following is the Lausanne talk by Noel Ignatiev :

I speak today as a member of the editorial collective of Race Traitor: Journal of the New Abolitionism, published in the United States since 1992. The aim of the journal is to assist in abolishing the white race. In our view the white race is neither a biological nor a cultural formation¾there is no “white” language or religion¾but a caste, which exists only because of the privileges its members enjoy within the state, and the legacy of those privileges. Given this understanding it is natural that we would be led to the struggle against the Israeli state, where people from fifty countries, speaking different languages and practicing different religions or no religion at all, have been labeled “Jews” and assigned state privileges based on the fiction of a common and unique descent.

September 11, 1991 has become one of those moments, along with the assassination of President Kennedy and the death of Elvis Presley, of which Americans tend to recall what they were doing when they heard the news. I am a teacher at a small arts college. I was delivering a lecture to my first-year history class on a seventeenth-century war between the Puritan settlers of New England and an alliance of indigenous peoples, a war that led to the elimination of the indigenous peoples from that region. A colleague poked her head in the door and informed me that someone had just flown an airplane into the World Trade. Uh huh, I said, and continued with my lecture. A few minutes later, someone came around and told me that the school was being closed. I ignored her: What better use could I make of my time, I asked myself, than to provide students with some history that might explain why someone would want to attack the World Trade Center? However, a few minutes later one of the senior administrators entered my classroom and ordered me to leave immediately. I bowed to superior force, and dismissed the class.

Recalling that incident highlights a truth a friend has recently pointed out to me, that the United States of America was the world’s first zionist state: that is, it is the first place that was settled by people who arrived with the certainty that God had promised them the land and authorized them to dispossess the indigenous population. In my paper for this Conference, which is on the website, I discuss imperialist interests, Jewish influence, and Christian doctrine as explanations for the unstinting support the U.S. gives Israel. But I would argue that it is the similarity in origin of the two states as much as any of the other factors that leads Americans to see their image in Israel and support it notwithstanding the opinion of most of the rest of the world.

But all is not well in the first zionist state. Americans are not a happy people. The flavor of life there has been well captured in a recent novel, The Keepers of Truth, by Michael Collins, who, as an immigrant who has lived in America for many years, is able to look at the country with the eyes of an outsider. I quote from the novel:

I drove toward the bleeding strip of neon, the solitary cars here and there, seeing the small drive-in windows, glass tombs encasing high-school dropouts, mostly young girls, some male misfits, the dim of mind, all banished to the night shift for minimum wage. It was this new destiny of strip malls and eateries that scared the shit out of me, that made me wince and understand why people kill each other…. Along these strips of neon were the killing fields of our post-industrialism, these glasshouse eateries of disaffection where people get big eating bleeding burgers, clogging up their arteries and going about dying slowly over black tar coffee. Out here at this hour you bore witness to the attenuated deaths, the casualties that go uncounted. And when the sun rises, the radio whispers of the night that passed, it gives the grim statistics of pulverising rapes, robberies where clerks were pistol-whipped and tied up in freezers, or shot in the face and left to bleed to death, a young woman with two children missing from a seven-eleven [convenience store], a solitary sentry, working alone of course¾margins of profit dictate there can’t be two clerks on duty. And it passes itself off, this violence, this madness, as nothing to do with politics. Somehow we are an apolitical nation. There are no collective actions of warfare. Everything can be dismantled to the level of the individual. Each act of violence is isolated; it forms no mood; it feeds into no general rebellion. It’s maybe the greatest secret we possess as a nation: our sense of alienation from everyone else around us, our ability to have no sympathy, no empathy for others’ suffering, a decentralised philosophy of individual will, a culpability that always lands back on each of us. “You can be whatever you want to be”… It was the mantra of our society…

Anyone who understands anything about human psychology knows that the time must come when the perpetual, generalized, undirected violence described here so well, this constant road-rage where millions of people turn into crazed killers whenever they get behind the wheel of an automobile, must sooner or later explode. The form the explosion will take cannot be predicted. But there can be no doubt that it will open up possibilities of striking for freedom for many now held down by the power of the U.S. Included in that number are the indigenous, oppressed people of Palestine, about whom it is certainly no exaggeration to say that what happens in the U.S. is of the greatest importance.

History offers occasional examples of small groups to whom it is given to play a greater role in world events that their numbers would normally indicate. The indigenous people of Palestine are such a group. The chairman said earlier that one aim of this Conference is to introduce humanity into world politics. When the present nightmare is ended, the human race, and the people of North America in particular, will record a great debt to the Palestinian people, whose refusal to submit to overwhelming power has set an example for humankind, and may even succeed in bringing humanity to the mighty United States of America, a place which needs all the help it can get.