Jewish Harvard Professor Noel Ignatiev Wants to Abolish the White Race

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Jewish Harvard Professor Noel Ignatiev 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 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.

Ignatiev 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." 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 Ignatiev means by the inflammatory language.

Asked in a 1997 interview with the New York Times if he hates his own white skin, 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 Ignatiev wrote in that 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."

Ignatiev, a one-time 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, 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.

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."

BTW, Ignatiev's parents are jewish immigrants from Russia.

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