Noel Ignatiev

Noel Ignatiev (27 December 1940 – 9 November 2019) was an American author and historian. He was most famous for his work on race and social class and for his call to abolish "whiteness" as a social construct. His books include How the Irish Became White (1995).

Quotes

• By the early 1900s...it was becoming commonplace in the academy to speak of race, along with class and gender, as a social construct .... 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. Of course we expected bewilderment 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." ...
  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....
  Every group within white America has at one time or another advanced its particular and narrowly defined interests at the expense of black people as a race. That applies to labor unionists, ethnic groups, college students, schoolteachers, taxpayers, and white women. Race Traitor will not abandon its focus on whiteness, no matter how vehement the pleas and how virtuously oppressed those doing the pleading. The editors meant it when they replied to a reader, "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."
  • As quoted in When Race Becomes Real : Black and White Writers Confront Their Personal Histories (2002), edited by Bernestine Singley, excerpted in "Abolish the White Race", Harvard Magazine (September-October 2002)