White like me

Part 5 - Redneck Trotsky

by Ellen Barry

Or almost no one.

From his house in Somerville, among unsold stacks of his periodical Race Traitor, Noel Ignatiev is making tentative plans to overturn the race system. The plan goes this way: if enough white Americans reject the privileges they are given as whites, then the privileges will eventually cease to exist. The movement makes use of ringing slogans -- "Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity" -- and recommends such mild forms of anarchism as the "Copwatch," a Minneapolis youth movement in which groups of white kids follow police officers around with video cameras "to remind cops their actions are not going unnoticed" and "shift the repression by the police away from African-American kids and onto us." Other strategies seem to range from flouting of social norms (for instance, renting houses in white neighborhoods to black families) to organized mass disobedience (for instance, armed robbery).

Two years after publishing How the Irish Became White, Ignatiev has turned his back on the academic movement he helped create. His Harvard lecturing job has come to an end, and he plans to turn all his attention to the movement he hopes Race Traitor will foster: an army of "New Abolitionists," modeling themselves on John Brown, who will disrupt the social equilibrium enough to permit radical change.

Race Traitor's readership is made up of educators, members of the religious community, and people who academics tend to regard with some alarm -- prisoners and skinheads. The group that is not reading Race Traitor is what Ignatiev refers to, witheringly, as "the traditional left." It's no wonder. In reaching out to the groups they do appeal to, Ignatiev and company have run roughshod over liberal sensibilities. Race Traitor has printed value-neutral interviews with neo-Nazis, and Ignatiev himself, in one issue, inveighed against "the propensity of American Jews to whine about the sufferings of past Jews." Both Ignatiev and Roediger (a fellow New Abolitionist) say they hold out the hope that the most virulent racists are the most promising converts to an antiestablishment crusade. (One issue of Race Traitor urged people to take another look at white militias as potential allies in the fight against racism.)

"Among skinheads, there are people who might very easily move to other positions," says Roediger. "In the Twin Cities, the antiracist skinheads are very often carrying the day. These are young people who are very disaffected from the whole of society, and who are posing the question of whether it is worth it to identify as white. In this sense, they can be rather effective."

These days, the Race Traitor movement is getting approving attention from the general public -- a compilation of essays from the magazine won a 1997 American Book Award from Ishmael Reed's Before Columbus Foundation. But plenty of critics are asking what, exactly, whites will be after they stop being white. There are no historical precedents for the kind of "post-white" lifestyle that Ignatiev proposes. The plan of action itself is pretty amorphous. And, as in most revolutionary agendas, the stakes are high: success will be measured in the breakdown of social systems.

The academics Ignatiev criticizes acknowledge his contributions to the field, but they are criticizing him right back. Younger whiteness scholars, like UVA's Lott, say Ignatiev is just another '60s Marxist railing at academia.

"It's frustrating, because the activist time frame moves quicker than the academic time frame," says Lott. "But I think that too broadly caricaturing [younger academics] is generational condescension. It comes close to nostalgicizing the civil-rights movement, which is a way to stall history."

And Jeff Ferguson, an old colleague of Ignatiev's who teaches a class in whiteness at Amherst College, explains that he's not in the politics business.

"As far as I'm concerned, there are such a thing as intellectuals, and intellectuals are people who think for a living," he says. Whiteness studies "is academically interesting and that's what we do. That's what we get paid for."

And what we're learning about whiteness doesn't necessarily make the course of social change clearer, he adds. It may make it more confusing. "I'm not the kind of person who wants to build up a lot of heat until there's some light around," says Ferguson, with a little laugh.

Part 6 - Race to the finish

Ellen Barry can be reached at ebarry[a]phx.com.