Noel Ignatiev’s Long Fight Against Whiteness

By Jay Caspian Kang, The New Yorker, November 15, 2019

Ignatiev (1940–2019) spent his life insisting that whiteness was not an identity to be celebrated but a system to be abolished. Born into a working-class Jewish family in Philadelphia, he joined the Communist Party as a teenager and later worked for decades in steel mills, trying to radicalize his coworkers.

In 1967, he wrote a letter that many scholars cite as one of the first modern articulations of “white privilege.” But for Ignatiev, privilege was not simply an accounting of advantages. It was a strategy used by bosses to divide white and Black workers — a “civil war in the white mind” that kept labor movements fractured. His organizing through the Sojourner Truth Organization aimed to push white workers to repudiate their whiteness and join with Black and Latino colleagues in solidarity.

Though Ignatiev often faced disappointment — watching white coworkers resist integration or cling to illusions of rising into the ownership class — he never abandoned his belief in the possibility of transformation. Later in life, he taught at Bowdoin College, challenging students to see race as a system and whiteness as a political invention.

Kang recalls being one of Ignatiev’s students, inspired by his uncompromising conviction that a society without white supremacy was possible. Even as Ignatiev doubted whether his work “had amounted to anything,” his influence continues — in the students he mentored, in the workers he tried to reach, and in ongoing calls to confront whiteness directly.

Go here if link doesn’t work: https://perma.cc/FJ58-YGBQ

Citation: Jay Caspian Kang, “Noel Ignatiev’s Long Fight Against Whiteness,” The New Yorker, November 15, 2019.