freedom
07-02-2001, 11:55 AM
This ought to be right up you alley.....
"Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity"
Noel Ignatiev, a professor of history and American studies, is a white man who wants to abolish the white race. A self-styled "race traitor" and "new abolitionist," Ignatiev co-founded and co-edits Race Traitor, a journal dedicated to undermining white supremacy and junking the concept of race.
Ignatiev says the white race has to go because it is a social arrangement that welds Jim Crow privilege to amoral capitalist exploitation. "After all, there are some people ruling this country from the top who are benefiting from their oppressive rule of a majority of white folks," he says. "The problem in this country is a whole lot of the slaves think they are masters."
According to Ignatiev, buying into white privilege leads many whites to embrace a sense of white solidarity at the expense of non-whites. In spite of its palpable impact on history and human relations, he says, race has no biological validity, no inherent differences of any scientific significance — it's an artificial social construct that only persists because people accept it. Fortunately, however, American white supremacy has always had its opponents, black and white, and Ignatiev situates his activism within a long tradition of white opposition to slavery and racism.
"For whatever reasons, this country keeps producing so-called white people who are not comfortable with that description of themselves," he said. He mentioned Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield, fictional characters, granted, but also archetypes who embody the existential dilemma of discerning white people. "They're not comfortable with what it means to be white in this country. They grow up thinking they're crazy — often they're made crazy. [Race Traitor's] project is to discover these people, let them know they're not alone, there are others like them and communities of people who will embrace them."
The Race Traitor journal and the New Abolitionist Society are Ignatiev's vehicles for getting the word out and inspiring activities to get rid of whiteness. "The first issue [of Race Traitor] was 1993. We've published around 14 issues of about 100 pages each. Each one is a mix of personal commentary, cultural criticism, and review."
The first one, published as an experiment, sold enough to pay for publishing the next one. "It went on like that for awhile," Ignatiev said. "We don't have staff or expensive offices. It goes by subscription, word of mouth, and some through alternative distributors." The press run is 2000, he divulged. Writers and readers range from denizens of academe to inmates of prisons. "Around the magazine we've developed a readership of people who are in touch with each other; they use its pages to communicate with each other. We hold occasional conferences and meetings and try to support local activity."
The "What We Believe" mission statement on Race Traitor's website says basically that according to the American racial hierarchy, the "most wretched members" of the white race are superior to "the most exalted persons excluded from it" (people of color). In return for this negatively defined status (determined not by what they are but by their illusion that they're not merely a marginally better treated set of "******s") white people collectively "give their support to a system that degrades them."
Thus, "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." In other words, if white people will stop acting like white people, racism will go away. "The key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish…the privileges of the white skin. Until [then]…even partial reform will prove elusive, because white influence permeates every issue, domestic and foreign, in U.S. society," the statement finishes.
Professor Ignatiev gave an example of an action in line with New Abolitionist Society goals. "At a branch in Phoenix, Arizona people conduct a cop-watch program. People who are white go out on streets with cameras, observe and record the cops." And what are the effects of this action? "They're calling the police to account and placing themselves in an adversarial relationship with the police, just by being there and witnessing with a camera." He said the New Abolitionists do a lot of speaking on college campuses and before various groups, and get occasional death threats from hard-core white supremacists who list Race Traitor and the New Abolitionist Society on their hate websites.
He gets static from some unexpected directions as well. "Interestingly enough, the detraction comes often from people, white, who are ostensibly committed to abolishing supremacy," Ignatiev said. "They find various ways of objecting to us — some white feminists, some Jews, some traditional leftists — who have their own grievances with American society. They don't want to acknowledge their own complicity with the oppression of others due to benefiting from some degree of white privilege, whether they intend to or not." Intermittently a black critic "will say we're putting white people in the vanguard of the civil rights struggle, but we know the overwhelming burden of leading the struggle against whiteness in this country is borne by blacks," he said. Then, too, there's the "white Left's accusation that we're promoting race against class," said Ignatiev, which appears to ignore the New Abolitionists' argument that the illusion of white privilege lets society's rulers get away with exploiting whites as well as blacks.
The New Abolitionist Society has no formal ties with such other civil liberties and rights organizations as the NAACP or the ACLU, but Ignatiev cited a long involvement in the movement, saying he has been "a friend of equality and justice going back for forty years, trying in modest ways to overturn white supremacy." Almost half of Race Traitor's contributing editors are black, as is much of the readership. "We have gotten a good deal of encouragement and support," said the magazine's courageous leading contributor, adding, "I would say that support is tempered with a certain amount of skepticism about our achieving our goal" of abolishing the white race.
Ignatiev himself acknowledges the enormity of his goal and the limits of his work's impact, and says people who pose serious threats to American white supremacy have historically gone into exile, gone insane, or been killed. "I know I'm not doing enough to bother 'them' because I'm still walking around," he says. "I should be dead. We publish a magazine, make a little noise, stir up a little dust," he sums up his "modest" but important continuation of the white abolitionist tradition.
It isn't one we hear much about, beyond William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. We know, though, via both apocryphal tale and historical record, that white people who "betray the race" (often crudely labeled "******-lovers") have and can suffer the same fates as rebellious slaves and assertive people of color. For examples: Militant abolitionist and revered Race Traitor role model John Brown was hanged December 12, 1859. Federal judges of the Second Reconstruction — men of conscience like William Wayne Justice of Texas and Virginia's Robert Merhige who implemented desegregation orders in the 1960s and '70s — have endured bombings, threats to their families, and social isolation. Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center has used up several cat-lives surviving attacks during the 30 or so years he has waged successful legal battles against hate groups from his headquarters in Confederate president Jefferson Davis's hometown of Montgomery, Alabama.
And there are the soldiers, the white "nobodies" who have given a good deal more than lip service to the ideals of social justice and human rights. In 1870 William C. Luke, a white teacher and rights activists at the venerable Alabama HBCU Talladega College, was lynched at Cross Plains — now Piedmont, Alabama — along with nine Negroes who remain nameless. Andrew Goodman and Michael Henry Schwerner shared the grisly death of their black civil rights comrade, James Earl Chaney, at the hands of the Mississippi Klan in 1964. The forgotten woman martyr, Viola Liuzzo, a Detroit mother working for a democratic America in Mississippi, was murdered in 1965 and then slandered posthumously as a "loose" woman sexually addicted to the mythological black phallus. Elizabeth Cole related in her book, Long Time Coming, how her white family was terrorized for years by Robert Chambliss, the uncle-in-law whom she ultimately helped convict of killing the "four little girls" in the bombing of Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. These are but a few of the white folks who could be celebrated during Black History Month since they are not usually commemorated on the Fourth of July or Memorial or Veterans' Days for being the stalwart patriots and freedom fighters they surely are.
The "modest" membership and scope of the New Abolitionist Society doesn't discourage Ignatiev, who described the current effort in terms of 18th- and 19th-century abolition advocacy and the early stages of the mid-20th-century civil rights movement. "When abolitionists began, the majority of the northern population was opposed to slavery, but their opposition did not make any difference because they were not willing to channel that opposition into activity," e.g. "they were upholding slavery by paying taxes to the government," he said. "Through direct action and public propaganda, abolitionism made it impossible to maintain the slave system. Similarly, in the civil rights period, the majority of Americans thought legal discrimination and segregation were wrong, but weren't willing to jeopardize their own lives and comfort to do anything about it. Then when people began to sit-in and take other direct actions, many Americans supported the move for change with resources, their bodies and lives, and at the polls."
Ignatiev pinpointed a critical difference today, now that we have nearly two generations of people — adults in their 20s and 30s, and early 40s — of all races who have little knowledge and no experience of the obvious discriminations in past centuries: slavery itself; segregated schools and public facilities; denial of voting rights (Floridians excepted); total exclusion from entire employment and economic sectors, and so forth.
"It's not so obvious, the institutions that reproduce the white race today, but if the targets are not as obvious and symbolic, that's not to say they're not there," Ignatiev said somewhat wearily as he left it up to the hearer to supply the usual litany: a morally bankrupt court and legal system; massive imprisonment of people of color; redlining in business development and housing; and the beat goes on.
"Our challenge is to figure out ways to challenge the operation of these institutions," said Ignatiev. "Unlike in the past where white Americans had an uneasy conscience, the difficulty is that many white Americans now believe the problem is solved, discrimination is a thing of the past and, if anything, that they are victims of discrimination through affirmative action." The goal of this race traitor is to "abolish all the social weight, eliminate the privileges and the burdens of whiteness: the stifling conformity." Calling the prevailing US system "a self-repressive soul-strangling regime," Ignatiev said something the more grievance-cultivating of us African Americans would be well-served to remember.
"Misery is not the monopoly of people of color in this country," he says. "White skin does not guarantee the possessor a stress-free life: many are exploited, degraded, impoverished, denied access to decision-making." The tradeoff many whites make for better access to jobs, housing, education, relatively speaking, is "their willing subordination and acceptance of a degraded condition." White privilege is a sham that for most whites in the US, Ignatiev contends, is a substitute for freedom and dignity, and the price is high.
First published: July 02, 2001
------------------
"Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them"
Martin Luther King Jr.
"You cannot separate peace from freedom, because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom" -Malcom X
"Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity"
Noel Ignatiev, a professor of history and American studies, is a white man who wants to abolish the white race. A self-styled "race traitor" and "new abolitionist," Ignatiev co-founded and co-edits Race Traitor, a journal dedicated to undermining white supremacy and junking the concept of race.
Ignatiev says the white race has to go because it is a social arrangement that welds Jim Crow privilege to amoral capitalist exploitation. "After all, there are some people ruling this country from the top who are benefiting from their oppressive rule of a majority of white folks," he says. "The problem in this country is a whole lot of the slaves think they are masters."
According to Ignatiev, buying into white privilege leads many whites to embrace a sense of white solidarity at the expense of non-whites. In spite of its palpable impact on history and human relations, he says, race has no biological validity, no inherent differences of any scientific significance — it's an artificial social construct that only persists because people accept it. Fortunately, however, American white supremacy has always had its opponents, black and white, and Ignatiev situates his activism within a long tradition of white opposition to slavery and racism.
"For whatever reasons, this country keeps producing so-called white people who are not comfortable with that description of themselves," he said. He mentioned Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield, fictional characters, granted, but also archetypes who embody the existential dilemma of discerning white people. "They're not comfortable with what it means to be white in this country. They grow up thinking they're crazy — often they're made crazy. [Race Traitor's] project is to discover these people, let them know they're not alone, there are others like them and communities of people who will embrace them."
The Race Traitor journal and the New Abolitionist Society are Ignatiev's vehicles for getting the word out and inspiring activities to get rid of whiteness. "The first issue [of Race Traitor] was 1993. We've published around 14 issues of about 100 pages each. Each one is a mix of personal commentary, cultural criticism, and review."
The first one, published as an experiment, sold enough to pay for publishing the next one. "It went on like that for awhile," Ignatiev said. "We don't have staff or expensive offices. It goes by subscription, word of mouth, and some through alternative distributors." The press run is 2000, he divulged. Writers and readers range from denizens of academe to inmates of prisons. "Around the magazine we've developed a readership of people who are in touch with each other; they use its pages to communicate with each other. We hold occasional conferences and meetings and try to support local activity."
The "What We Believe" mission statement on Race Traitor's website says basically that according to the American racial hierarchy, the "most wretched members" of the white race are superior to "the most exalted persons excluded from it" (people of color). In return for this negatively defined status (determined not by what they are but by their illusion that they're not merely a marginally better treated set of "******s") white people collectively "give their support to a system that degrades them."
Thus, "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." In other words, if white people will stop acting like white people, racism will go away. "The key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish…the privileges of the white skin. Until [then]…even partial reform will prove elusive, because white influence permeates every issue, domestic and foreign, in U.S. society," the statement finishes.
Professor Ignatiev gave an example of an action in line with New Abolitionist Society goals. "At a branch in Phoenix, Arizona people conduct a cop-watch program. People who are white go out on streets with cameras, observe and record the cops." And what are the effects of this action? "They're calling the police to account and placing themselves in an adversarial relationship with the police, just by being there and witnessing with a camera." He said the New Abolitionists do a lot of speaking on college campuses and before various groups, and get occasional death threats from hard-core white supremacists who list Race Traitor and the New Abolitionist Society on their hate websites.
He gets static from some unexpected directions as well. "Interestingly enough, the detraction comes often from people, white, who are ostensibly committed to abolishing supremacy," Ignatiev said. "They find various ways of objecting to us — some white feminists, some Jews, some traditional leftists — who have their own grievances with American society. They don't want to acknowledge their own complicity with the oppression of others due to benefiting from some degree of white privilege, whether they intend to or not." Intermittently a black critic "will say we're putting white people in the vanguard of the civil rights struggle, but we know the overwhelming burden of leading the struggle against whiteness in this country is borne by blacks," he said. Then, too, there's the "white Left's accusation that we're promoting race against class," said Ignatiev, which appears to ignore the New Abolitionists' argument that the illusion of white privilege lets society's rulers get away with exploiting whites as well as blacks.
The New Abolitionist Society has no formal ties with such other civil liberties and rights organizations as the NAACP or the ACLU, but Ignatiev cited a long involvement in the movement, saying he has been "a friend of equality and justice going back for forty years, trying in modest ways to overturn white supremacy." Almost half of Race Traitor's contributing editors are black, as is much of the readership. "We have gotten a good deal of encouragement and support," said the magazine's courageous leading contributor, adding, "I would say that support is tempered with a certain amount of skepticism about our achieving our goal" of abolishing the white race.
Ignatiev himself acknowledges the enormity of his goal and the limits of his work's impact, and says people who pose serious threats to American white supremacy have historically gone into exile, gone insane, or been killed. "I know I'm not doing enough to bother 'them' because I'm still walking around," he says. "I should be dead. We publish a magazine, make a little noise, stir up a little dust," he sums up his "modest" but important continuation of the white abolitionist tradition.
It isn't one we hear much about, beyond William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. We know, though, via both apocryphal tale and historical record, that white people who "betray the race" (often crudely labeled "******-lovers") have and can suffer the same fates as rebellious slaves and assertive people of color. For examples: Militant abolitionist and revered Race Traitor role model John Brown was hanged December 12, 1859. Federal judges of the Second Reconstruction — men of conscience like William Wayne Justice of Texas and Virginia's Robert Merhige who implemented desegregation orders in the 1960s and '70s — have endured bombings, threats to their families, and social isolation. Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center has used up several cat-lives surviving attacks during the 30 or so years he has waged successful legal battles against hate groups from his headquarters in Confederate president Jefferson Davis's hometown of Montgomery, Alabama.
And there are the soldiers, the white "nobodies" who have given a good deal more than lip service to the ideals of social justice and human rights. In 1870 William C. Luke, a white teacher and rights activists at the venerable Alabama HBCU Talladega College, was lynched at Cross Plains — now Piedmont, Alabama — along with nine Negroes who remain nameless. Andrew Goodman and Michael Henry Schwerner shared the grisly death of their black civil rights comrade, James Earl Chaney, at the hands of the Mississippi Klan in 1964. The forgotten woman martyr, Viola Liuzzo, a Detroit mother working for a democratic America in Mississippi, was murdered in 1965 and then slandered posthumously as a "loose" woman sexually addicted to the mythological black phallus. Elizabeth Cole related in her book, Long Time Coming, how her white family was terrorized for years by Robert Chambliss, the uncle-in-law whom she ultimately helped convict of killing the "four little girls" in the bombing of Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. These are but a few of the white folks who could be celebrated during Black History Month since they are not usually commemorated on the Fourth of July or Memorial or Veterans' Days for being the stalwart patriots and freedom fighters they surely are.
The "modest" membership and scope of the New Abolitionist Society doesn't discourage Ignatiev, who described the current effort in terms of 18th- and 19th-century abolition advocacy and the early stages of the mid-20th-century civil rights movement. "When abolitionists began, the majority of the northern population was opposed to slavery, but their opposition did not make any difference because they were not willing to channel that opposition into activity," e.g. "they were upholding slavery by paying taxes to the government," he said. "Through direct action and public propaganda, abolitionism made it impossible to maintain the slave system. Similarly, in the civil rights period, the majority of Americans thought legal discrimination and segregation were wrong, but weren't willing to jeopardize their own lives and comfort to do anything about it. Then when people began to sit-in and take other direct actions, many Americans supported the move for change with resources, their bodies and lives, and at the polls."
Ignatiev pinpointed a critical difference today, now that we have nearly two generations of people — adults in their 20s and 30s, and early 40s — of all races who have little knowledge and no experience of the obvious discriminations in past centuries: slavery itself; segregated schools and public facilities; denial of voting rights (Floridians excepted); total exclusion from entire employment and economic sectors, and so forth.
"It's not so obvious, the institutions that reproduce the white race today, but if the targets are not as obvious and symbolic, that's not to say they're not there," Ignatiev said somewhat wearily as he left it up to the hearer to supply the usual litany: a morally bankrupt court and legal system; massive imprisonment of people of color; redlining in business development and housing; and the beat goes on.
"Our challenge is to figure out ways to challenge the operation of these institutions," said Ignatiev. "Unlike in the past where white Americans had an uneasy conscience, the difficulty is that many white Americans now believe the problem is solved, discrimination is a thing of the past and, if anything, that they are victims of discrimination through affirmative action." The goal of this race traitor is to "abolish all the social weight, eliminate the privileges and the burdens of whiteness: the stifling conformity." Calling the prevailing US system "a self-repressive soul-strangling regime," Ignatiev said something the more grievance-cultivating of us African Americans would be well-served to remember.
"Misery is not the monopoly of people of color in this country," he says. "White skin does not guarantee the possessor a stress-free life: many are exploited, degraded, impoverished, denied access to decision-making." The tradeoff many whites make for better access to jobs, housing, education, relatively speaking, is "their willing subordination and acceptance of a degraded condition." White privilege is a sham that for most whites in the US, Ignatiev contends, is a substitute for freedom and dignity, and the price is high.
First published: July 02, 2001
------------------
"Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them"
Martin Luther King Jr.
"You cannot separate peace from freedom, because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom" -Malcom X