Noel Ignatiev

Ignatiev traces the tattered history of Irish and African-American relations, revealing how the Irish used unions, the Catholic Church, and the Democratic Party to help gain and secure their newly found place in the White Republic, and explores the role of Irish Americans in the wave of anti-Negro violence that swept the country in the 1830s and 1840s. Illustrations.

How the Irish Became White

In the 1960s and '70s, class struggle surged in U.S. industrial cities. Many leftists joined these struggles by going to work in the nation's factories; among them was Noel Ignatiev. He labored in different factories during this period, and this memoir came from his experiences as an electrician in the blast furnace division of U.S. Steel Gary Works. His first-hand account reveals the day-to-day workings of white supremacy, patriarchy, and the exploitation of labor. More so, though, we see the seeds of a new society sown in the workers' on-the-job resistance. The stories Noel tells are gripping and humorous--and at times will bring you to tears.

Life in the Largest Steel Mill in the World

Acceptable Men

A new collection of essays from the bomb-throwing intellectual who described the historical origins and evolution of whiteness and white supremacy, and taught us how we might destroy it. For sixty years, Noel Ignatiev provided an unflinching account of “whiteness”—a social fiction and an unmitigated disaster for all working-class people. This new essay collection from the late firebrand covers the breadth of his life and insights as an autodidact steel worker, a groundbreaking theoretician, and a bitter enemy of racists everywhere. In these essays, Ignatiev confronts the Weather Underground and recounts which strategies proved most effective to winning white workers in Gary, Indiana, to black liberation. He discovers the prescient political insights of the nineteenth-century abolition movement, surveys the wreckage of the revolutionary twentieth century with C.L.R. James, and attends to the thorny and contradictory nature of working-class consciousness. Through it all, our attentions are turned to the everyday life of “ordinary” people, whose actions anticipate a wholly new society they have not yet recognized or named. In short, Ignatiev reflects on the incisive questions of his time and ours: How can we drive back the forces of racism in society? How can the so-called “white” working class be wn over to emancipatory politics? How can we build a new human community?"

Treason to Whiteness Is Loyalty to Humanity

John Garvey

Race Traitor brings together voices ranging from tenured university professors to skinheads and prison inmates to discuss the "white question" in America. Working from the premise that the white race has been socially constructed, Race Traitor is a call for the disruption of white conformity and the formation of a New Abolitionism to dissolve it. In a time when white supremicist thinking seems to be gaining momentum, Race Traitor brings together voices ranging from tenured university professors to skinheads and prison inmates to discuss the "white question" in America. Through popular culture, current events, history and personal life stories, the essays analyze the forces that hold the white race together--and those that promise to tear it apart. When a critical mass of people come together who, though they look white, have ceased to act white, the white race will undergo fission and former whites will be able to take part in building a new human community.

Noel Ignatiev

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