“Treason To Whiteness Is Loyalty To Humanity.”

Who is ready to commit treason?

The late, great Noel Ignatiev said whiteness in America must be abolished.

It was not enough, according to Ignatiev, to just challenge white supremacy and white privilege. The entire system had to go.

The title of this article (seen above) is the title of one of his books. All Americans must commit race treason. It is the only way out of this racial mess.

And this is not a call for a “color-blind” America either. As Justice John Paul Stevens wrote once — color-blindness is a meaningless abstraction.

If you don’t know what I mean or what the late Noel Ignatiev means — here’s a few examples.

Justice Clarence Thomas is loyal to white supremacy.

Dinesh D’Souza, the far-right Indian-American writer and filmmaker is loyal to whiteness and white supremacy.

Marjorie Taylor Green is a white supremacist and loyal to whiteness. Millions of Americans who call themselves “white” are loyal to whiteness.

Some people I know go even further. They have concluded that if you accept the privileges and advantages of the system, you are basically a white supremacist.

This is hard, hard stuff to process. Friends of yours, co-workers, neighbors, etc. are passive and active perpetrators of the system. Some are trying; some aren’t trying to abolish it, neutralize it.

Noel Ignatiev came to his own conclusions on “whiteness” because he was a Jewish-American who grew up in Philadelphia and he saw the evils and depravity of white supremacy at work on the African American population in that city. He also knew that the Jewish people slaughtered in Europe and Russia were killed because they were considered less than white. It was all the same.

Eventually, Ignatiev began publishing a magazine called RACE TRAITOR. It was subtitled — “Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.”

Noel Ignatiev also wrote a book called How The Irish Became White. This is his magnum opus. This book provides one example of how whiteness was chosen over Irish heritage for its advantages. In other words, the racial caste system is a choice.

An American ethnic group — the Irish once made a call to join the fight against chattel slavery in America. They had opposed slavery collectively for over 700 years by then because they saw it as the evil that it is. They were Irish Catholics, not Protestants.

But, in America, the capstone of white supremacy, the Irish elected eventually to be white. There would be no Black-Irish alliance against slavery even though they had been prisoners of a penal system in England. The Irish elected to accept the “rules of social hierarchy and become “oppressors.”

Ignatiev’s latest book published after his death is entitled appropriately, Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity.

It is a tall task. Americas of European descent have mostly failed to rise up on this one and accept the challenge. This is why nothing gets better even as African Americans overcome the obstacles year and after year and press on. Our historical instincts and connections to ancient traditions and culture help “us” forge ahead despite the racial caste system.

Some of us fail as well to commit treason. Many of us don’t.

I am throwing down the gauntlet right here saying — commit treason to whiteness every day, day by day. What choice do you have? If you like the way things are, then you probably don’t care. If not, the choice is race treason.

Don’t let Ignatiev’s charge be in vain.

Brian Gilmore is a poet and public interest lawyer, and the author of four books of poetry. He is also a frequent contributor to The Progressive Magazine.

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Sources

Elizabeth Theiss-Morse, “Who Counts as an American?,” Goran Grgić Australasian Journal of American Studies , DECEMBER 2021, Vol. 40, №2 (DECEMBER 2021), pp. 123–128