The historian, who died this month, spent a lifetime showing how racism reproduces itself.
It is common to hear the rhetoric of “white privilege” used to explain everything from the rise of Donald Trump to the “microaggressions” of the university classroom. Less common is to hear an account of the origins of the concept, initially called “white-skin privilege,” developed by the historian and activist Noel Ignatiev, who died at 78 on Nov. 9. Ignatiev presented an analysis of white supremacy based on a premise that should be uncontroversial, yet now bizarrely seems counterintuitive: The point is to abolish white supremacy, not to endlessly lament its existence while allowing it to perpetuate itself in all its brutality.
In a 1967 pamphlet called “White Blindspot” co-authored with Theodore Allen (who, following the agenda set by W.E.B. Du Bois, first coined the term “white-skin privilege” in his foundational work on whiteness), Ignatiev showed that fighting white supremacy meant seriously reckoning with its historical origins and the mechanisms of its contemporary reproduction. He wrote:
The ending of white supremacy is not solely a demand of the Negro people, separate from the class demands of the entire working class. It cannot be left to the Negro people to fight it alone, while the white workers “sympathize with their fight,” “support it,” “reject racist slanders” etc. but actually fight for their “own” demands.
The ideology of white chauvinism is bourgeois poison aimed primarily at the white workers, utilized as a weapon by the ruling class to subjugate black and white workers. It has its material base in the practice of white supremacy, which is a crime not merely against non-whites but against the entire proletariat. Therefore, its elimination certainly qualifies as one of the class demands of the entire working class. In fact, considering the role that this vile practice has historically played in holding back the struggle of the American working class, the fight against white supremacy becomes the central immediate task of the entire working class.