Description
Book SynopsisFor 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 won over to emancipatory politics? How can we build a new human community?
Trade ReviewA persistent voice against white privilege * The New York Times *
there is no political or literary trend-or President-capable of derailing Ignatiev's true lifelong project. In his writing, and in
Race Traitor and
Hard Crackers, Ignatiev demonstrated the transformative power of working-class stories. His radicalism was always tethered to specific people, who, in their own ways, inspired sympathy and a desire for connection. That specificity will always be relevant; it may be especially so at a moment of cynical alienation, when identities have become recitations rather than communities. -- Jay Caspian Kang * New Yorker *
This book is the gift of a life well-lived - as steelworker, scholar, race traitor, and fierce anti- racist. Noel Ignatiev had a singular and memorable voice, here preserved for posterity. We will need his ideas and example moving forward. -- Marcus Rediker, author of
The Slave Ship: A Human HistoryThis collection of Noel Ignatiev's writings over the past six decades could not come at a more important time in the struggle as white supremacy; they are as pertinent today as they were when they were written. -- Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of
An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United StatesIgnatiev demonstrated the transformative power of working-class stories. His radicalism was always tethered to specific people, who, in their own ways, inspired sympathy and a desire for connection. That specificity will always be relevant; it may be especially so at a moment of cynical alienation, when identities have become recitations rather than communities * New Yorker *
Noel Ignatiev was a tiller in the field of identity studies long before most of us even knew there was such a field. Beyond that, he located the field at the crossroads of race and class. He was an important, innovative thinker, as well as a committed activist for social justice. -- Russel Banks, author of
Continental Drift and
CloudsplitterNoel Ignatiev was a giant in one of the most important fields of research to emerge in recent times: how was it that those who had been warring on the shores of Europe on religious and ethnic grounds were magically transformed upon crossing the Atlantic into the new Identity Politics of "whiteness"? As the brilliant Ignatiev correctly suggests, the survival of humanity may very well hang on understanding this phenomenon - then acting decisively. -- Gerald Horne, author of
White Supremacy Confronted.from time to time a study comes along that truly can be called 'path breaking,' 'seminal,' 'essential,' a 'must read.'
How the Irish Became White is such a study. -- John Bracey, W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, University of Massachussetts, Amherst
Readers are given a comprehensive view of factory militant and abolitionist Ignatiev's powers of investigating the unstable, often ambivalent 'complexities and contradictions' that shape existence under capitalist social relations. -- Dylan Davis and Patrick King * Los Angeles Review of Books *
A dialectical approach to politics that both accounts for the lived experience of trying to transform society and hones strategies based on study, debate, accumulated knowledge, and the emerging capacities of those around us...an engaging set of provocations, and practical discussions of revolutionary strategy. -- Mike King * Boston Review *
