So back in the days when I used to browse /pol/, this guy Noel Ignatiev used to be brought up quite a bit especially in those threads full of poorly-sourced infographics about how those Heinous Hebrews want to destroy all white babies yada yada. I remember this guy standing out particularly because his quotes always seemed to be framed as some of the most particularly vitriolic towards white people, pic related.
Out of curiosity, I decided to do some research on him, and it turns out this guy was actually a Giga. Here's some interesting episodes from his life:
>For twenty years, Ignatiev worked in a Gary, Indiana steel mill and also in the manufacturing of farming equipment and electrical components. A Marxist activist, he was involved in efforts by African American steel workers to achieve equality in the mills. In 1984, he was laid off from the steel mill, approximately a year after an arrest on charges of attacking a strike-breaker's car with a paint bomb.>Ignatiev was accepted to the Harvard Graduate School of Education without an undergraduate degree. >From 1986 until 1992, Ignatiev served as a tutor (academic adviser) for Dunster House at Harvard College. In early 1992, Ignatiev objected to the university's purchase of a toaster oven for the Dunster House dining hall that would be designated for kosher use only. He insisted that cooking utensils with restricted use should be paid for by private funds.>In 2008, the American Jewish Committee objected to an encyclopedia article on Zionism that Ignatiev wrote for The Encyclopedia of Race and Racism. In the article, Ignatiev described Israel as a "racial state, where rights are assigned on the basis of ascribed descent or the approval of the superior race" and likened it to Nazi Germany and the Southern United States before the civil rights movement.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noel_IgnatievSo here's one of his more inflammatory quotations that nazis like to attribute to him:
>"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".Sounds pretty awful right? Like he just hate all whitoids or something? Well, the language used is definitely edgy, but the edginess was used to bring attention to a much more nuanced point:
>Ignatiev's web site and publication Race Traitor displayed the motto "treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity". In response to a letter to the site which understood the motto as meaning that the authors "hated" white people because of their "white skin", Ignatiev and the other editors responded:
>We do not hate you or anyone else for the color of her skin. What we hate is a system that confers privileges (and burdens) on people because of their color. 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 color. 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 color, 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.To me, this sounds like your run of the mill progressive position that most white people take. His book How the Irish Became White illustrates it pretty plainly, and it's common knowledge today that Irish, Italians, and other European groups worked really hard to become accepted as "white" in America, and a lot of that has to do with buying into a system of social importance, making all the right dogwhistles, and paying homage to all the right people in power. We can see the treadmill continuing to move today with so many Hispanic Americans now starting to begin their own journey by voting for Trump or Joining ICE, following Nick Fuentes, hell they even got Marco Rubio in the white house. I wouldn't be surprised if the first Hispanic president got elected on a Republican ticket.
His work is still relevant today. Whiteness since its inception 400 years ago in colonial America has always been an arbitrary categorization used by Capital to maintain institutional and political power, ever since it became obvious that free blacks, whites, and natives had more in common than landowners. "Whiteness" is one of, if not the biggest barrier to intensifying class struggle in the USA right now. Thanks chuds for keeping this guy's memory and work alive for us to appreciate.