Thoughts on Noel Ignatiev and whiteness studies?

[Tolstoy]

Ignatiev is a Marxist Professor at a small Massacusets college whose expertise is in "whiteness studies" which is essentially the study of what binds "white people" His destruction of whiteness theory is that there is no "white culture" and all that binds white people other than their skin color is their shared privileges and thus that white people who wish to be allies to blacks should behave in contrast to the desires of the ruling class so as to make being white no longer a source of privilege. I find it interesting and thought provoking:\


Here is his academic journal: http://racetraitor.org/

[blake 3:17]

He's very interesting. I've had issues with things published in Race Traitor though the experiences described are ones I've been able to identify with in recent times, so Im willing to cut some slack.

I really like the work the Dave Roediger who writes on similar themes.

[MEGAMANTROTSKY]

I think his position is pretty poor, based on his “What we believe” section.

The white race is a historically constructed social formation. It consists of all those who partake of the privileges of the white skin in this society. Its most wretched members share a status higher, in certain respects, than that of the most exalted persons excluded from it, in return for which they give their support to a system that degrades them.
The key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the white race, which means no more and no less than abolishing the privileges of the white skin. Until that task is accomplished, even partial reform will prove elusive, because white influence permeates every issue, domestic and foreign, in US society.

The error in the first paragraph is hard to find, particularly because everything else in it is not immediately objectionable (if by “white race” we mean white in certain contexts, which is doubtful). Just what does Ignatiev mean by “support”? Marxists understand that the working class cannot be exploited by the bourgeoisie without in some way eagerly assisting them. But this “eagerness”, the active side, is contradictory; on the other side we encounter the passive side, which I call “anti-voluntarism”: A excessive willingness to make pragmatic adaptations to reality. This is, from what I’ve experienced, the essence of both trade-union ideology and bourgeois liberalism.

Now, can we subject the “white race” to the same analysis? I would disagree, unless the “white race” is to be abstracted from class society into a completely separate system from class exploitation. And indeed, this is exactly what Ignatiev does in the second paragraph. He makes the same mistake as most privilege theorists in this regard, but then he goes a step further and declares the destruction of the “white race” to be paramount in the class struggle. Considering that racism as a power structure cannot survive without class society, his position is hard to swallow.

[Alexios]

Yay, more edgy psuedo-radicalism on college campuses. I look forward to the petit-bourgeois intellectuals this will put on MSNBC and HuffPo.

[Deep Sea]

What Ignatiev and other theorists like Theodore Allen don't seem to get is that "abolishing" the "white" "race" is destroying the national identity of the Euro-settler nation. This could be done via a process of othering various European ethnic groups, probably in the reverse order they were integrated in the first place. But they never suggest any sort of solution like this.

"Whiteness" fulfills a social function. It is both a national identity and a national ideology. It's a national identity because it gives a framework to understand oneself in relations to other people. It's an ideology in that seeks to explain the nature of social-reality in a racial framework. Undoing this identity and ideology involves very intentionally breaking up "white" society into smaller groups.

[Revolver]

What Ignatiev and other theorists like Theodore Allen don't seem to get is that "abolishing" the "white" "race" is destroying the national identity of the Euro-settler nation. This could be done via a process of othering various European ethnic groups, probably in the reverse order they were integrated in the first place. But they never suggest any sort of solution like this.

"Whiteness" fulfills a social function. It is both a national identity and a national ideology. It's a national identity because it gives a framework to understand oneself in relations to other people. It's an ideology in that seeks to explain the nature of social-reality in a racial framework. Undoing this identity and ideology involves very intentionally breaking up "white" society into smaller groups.

Actually I have read that as a possible solution. You know what you are most likely to end up with? Reactionaries like Senator Jim Webb running around talking about oppressed Scots Irish Virginians paying the price for Anglo racism in the form of racial quotas. Or worse, the creation of new, absurd ethnic tensions that continue to obfuscate class divisions the same way that race does. Those Americans descended from European immigrants are not all that removed from the history; I was raised with some hazy concept of Italian identity and was encouraged to identify as such, even though the usual indicators (name, appearance, language, etc) was gone as a result of assimilation and intermarriage.

But assimilation is entirely reversible in the name of political expediency. Or rather, the existence of this potential indicator as an alternative to whiteness makes for a tempting recourse for reactionaries. And we do not have to look very far to see how dangerous this can be. After 9/11, people with only a faint concept of ethnic Arab identity, analogous to Italian-American identity a quarter century earlier, became painfully aware that the identity took on political significance. When the Nazis rose to power, there were plenty of non-Jews deemed "Jews" by the state for purposes of Nuremberg Decrees. And so it goes.

There are plenty of other problems with this abolitionist movement though. It tends to reify race even as it disclaims race. At an operational level its tactics are not altogether clear. It suggests that white people can somehow disavow whiteness when clearly the so-called race traitors (also a kind of weirdly self-righteous and differentiating term) will always be identified as white in broader settings. It isn't that race and ethnicity do not matter, because they surely do, but it isn't at all clear to me that there is some sort of good strategy being formulated here.

[theuproar]

The op-ed "The White Anti-Racist is an Oxymoron" has to be one of the most presumptuous and non-academic pieces I have ever read. I agree with some of the premises, but the conclusions are not intellectually responsible.

As MEGAMANTROTSKY wrote above, "Considering that racism as a power structure cannot survive without class society, his position is hard to swallow."

Couldn't agree more.

[lesbian]

I mean - are you going to say the white race doesn't exist? It is true that there is a massive disparity between the white worker and the workers of colour. That white workers have mobility and access, in millions of ways, that workers of colour do not have. And disenfranchised whites make up the majority of the army in the streets suppressing workers of colour directly. There is a legitimate class antagonism between the white worker and the worker of colour.

I find it helpful to think of it by analogy (as I'm white, for transparency) - in so-called Northern Ireland, you have two different ethno-religious groups: the native Irish Catholics, and the settled Ulster Sots (or Protestants). As a Catholic worker, I can tell you now that I live in fear of the Protestant worker. In the pages of books, my primary antagonist may be the English capitalist - but on the streets, my life is threatened by the Protestant worker. It is the reality of class conflict.

The material reality of that conflict is manifest in many ways, by directly sanctioned law such as Protestant Ascendancy - the English bourgeoisie ensuring the protection of the settled workers! - to the vast reactionary paramilitary structures of the UVF and UDA, and the Police. These are not separate from the economic class conflict - they are based in it, and primarily benefit the English capitalist class, surely. But they also benefit the Protestant worker, and the Protestant worker is my antagonist, and there can be no common organizing principle between us.

It is hard for me to express in theory terms... I will try to put it more simply. You say "racism as a power structure cannot survive without class society" - this is true. But the worker of colour cannot survive with racism.

Regardless, I think it is hardly controversial to say that racism is one of the primary ways that Capitalism/class society establishes itself, maintains itself and legitimitizes itself. But it must be put more accurately - whiteness, which is the single cause and single consequence of racism - whiteness is Capitalism's primary way of establishing itself, mainting itself, and legitimizing itself.

So I agree with him that destroying whiteness is paramount.

[Revolver]

I mean - are you going to say the white race doesn't exist? It is true that there is a massive disparity between the white worker and the workers of colour. That white workers have mobility and access, in millions of ways, that workers of colour do not have. And disenfranchised whites make up the majority of the army in the streets suppressing workers of colour directly. There is a legitimate class antagonism between the white worker and the worker of colour.

I find it helpful to think of it by analogy (as I'm white, for transparency) - in so-called Northern Ireland, you have two different ethno-religious groups: the native Irish Catholics, and the settled Ulster Sots (or Protestants). As a Catholic worker, I can tell you now that I live in fear of the Protestant worker. In the pages of books, my primary antagonist may be the English capitalist - but on the streets, my life is threatened by the Protestant worker. It is the reality of class conflict.

The material reality of that conflict is manifest in many ways, by directly sanctioned law such as Protestant Ascendancy - the English bourgeoisie ensuring the protection of the settled workers! - to the vast reactionary paramilitary structures of the UVF and UDA, and the Police. These are not separate from the economic class conflict - they are based in it, and primarily benefit the English capitalist class, surely. But they also benefit the Protestant worker, and the Protestant worker is my antagonist, and there can be no common organizing principle between us.

It is hard for me to express in theory terms... I will try to put it more simply. You say "racism as a power structure cannot survive without class society" - this is true. But the worker of colour cannot survive with racism.

Regardless, I think it is hardly controversial to say that racism is one of the primary ways that Capitalism/class society establishes itself, maintains itself and legitimitizes itself. But it must be put more accurately - whiteness, which is the single cause and single consequence of racism - whiteness is Capitalism's primary way of establishing itself, mainting itself, and legitimizing itself.

So I agree with him that destroying whiteness is paramount.

What confuses me is this: If you are right that the class antagonism between the races is actually fundamental in this way, wouldn't the class for itself, the class that achieved awareness as a class and organized for the benefit of that class, engage in racial solidarity? And that includes white workers as well. If so, then this is actually an argument for the validity of racial antagonism in class politics and organizing: raising workers' class consciousness will have the effect of creating greater racial solidarity, which will look pretty racist. But if the alternative thesis is true, that the system of white supremacy actually works to the detriment of all workers regardless of race, then it will not have that effect. So I consider it to be a pretty profound empirical question, and not just for the United States. As you note, sectarian consciousness serves a similar function in Ireland and the Middle East, and there are various other ethnic or ethnoreligious categories, and racial categories, at play in other nations.

However, I think it is very clear that the interests served by this system are ruling class interests, and I think it is clear that white workers are on the whole disadvantaged by white supremacy. A racial caste system provides cheap alternative labor, a point that was crucial to understanding white workers reactions to black labor in the Rust Belt. Incidentally, this is also a component of racial tension in the housing market. And certainly there are real, material interests at stake here, but we should not overstate them. After all, most of the material "benefits" of whiteness (freedom from racial discrimination in employment, housing and police surveillance) are "goods" that have little or no discernable value independent of white supremacy itself.


The problem I discern from your argument is pretty simple: If there can be no common organizing principle between the Catholic and Protestant worker in Ireland, the white and black worker in the US or the Sunni and Shia worker in Iraq and Syria, then there can be no working class revolution. Although these are admittedly ontological categories that have material foundations that are not as persistent as one's relationship to the means of production, a relationship rooted in technological development, they become reified and determinative based on an admittedly ruling class ideology. Class struggle is necessarily abandoned in the interest of racial and sectarian consciousness. Because on a practical level, what purpose could there be to pursue class consciousness? You might argue that whiteness should be abolished, but why would anyone want to abandon this material advantage? While the concept of worker solidarity cuts across the color lines, this somewhat crude concept of racial or sectarian solidarity does not. In fact it encourages racism and sectarianism by making them fundamental in the way that class is fundamental. In this formulation, white racism is good for the white worker, not because it is moral but because there is a white class interest at stake.

The alternative formulation, which is not opposed to the concept of white privilege but analyses it quite differently, is that these divisions reflect the interests of the ruling class, and that it is the ruling class that benefits from them, at the expense of all workers.

[Thirsty Crow]

There is a legitimate class antagonism between the white worker and the worker of colour.

What does it mean that the class antagonism on these lines is "legitimate"? Furthermore, aren't we talking about an intra-class antagonism which is both a) a product of the weakness of the class (the working class) and b) a factor which feeds back into its source and functions so as to maintain the present state of things?

(though when I think about it, it seems that when you wrote "legitimate class antagonism" you were referring to the antagonism of the predominantly white police force of the state and workers/the unemployed who're "non-white"; this makes sense but then I wouldn't agree with your further comment that this is worker v. worker antagonism, but this is the problem of the class position of cops)

What I'm getting at is that communists ought not to frame these complex issues of working class fragmentation in terms of "destroying whiteness" if that doesn't categorically exclude subjecting once "privileged" workers (privileged in the sense of not being subject to particular kinds of domination and regulatory-policing practices) to the same conditions nowadays faced by working class communities of people of color. In other words, there's no sense whatsoever in focusing on even more regulatory and policing discipline and domination. Though, I'm not saying you advocate anything like this; I'm just trying to clear some potentially problematic things about all of this up.

Anyway, I think what I wrote above also implies I don't find the idea of privilege useful. Usually, it makes sense to sort of instinctively connect the word "privilege" to class position (all the more since I'm living in a central European country where there's no actual community of "non-white" people), and given the fact that it seems to me that "privilege theory" treats not being subject to particular kinds of domination and discipline as "privilege", I think the term is bound to make some confusion.

I also think it could be productive to talk about a typology of phenomena encompassed under this term "privilege" (for instance, "access" and "mobility" you mention are hardly specified and thus it is hard to know just what sort of occurrences are we talking about and how they produce intra-class antagonism). In other words, the question is how are white workers actually privileged (this isn't a rhetorical question implying I do not recognize either a) the actual differences and their significance or b) the role of said differences in class struggle both as something that escalating class struggle and working class organization must transcend, on one hand, and a tool exploited by the ruling class on the other).

[Os Cangaceiros]

Its most wretched members share a status higher, in certain respects, than that of the most exalted persons excluded from it

Can this statement actually be proven? I doubt it.