Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity

Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity
David R Roediger, Zhandarka Kurti, Jarrod Shanahan
RRP:
NZ$ 45.00
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NZ$ 36.00
Paperback
h234 x 153mm - 448pg
28 Jun 2022 UK
International import eta 7-19 days
9781839765018
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For sixty years Noel Ignatiev provided an unflinching account of ' whiteness' -a social fiction that has for centuries been an unmitigated disaster for all working class people, including the white ones. 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 explosive guilt trips of the Weather Underground and recounts which kind of strategies proved most effective to winning white workers in Gary, Indiana to black liberation. He discovers the prescient political insights of the 19th century abolition movement and surveys the wreckage of the revolutionary 20th century with CLR James. And he attends to the thorny and contradictory nature of working-class consciousness that is irreducible to that great political past time of opinion polling or the deceptively simple arithmetic of ' rational choice' theories. Through it all, our attentions are turned to the everyday life of "ordinary people", whose actions seem to anticipate a wholly new future society that they have not yet recognized nor named. Although the essays collected here were written over sixty years of radical organizing and mischief making, they read as if they were produced yesterday, asking questions that are still on our minds: how can we drive back the forces of racism in our society? how can the so-called ' white working class' be won over to progressive politics? How can we build a new human community?
"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 History "This collection of Noel Ignatiev' s writings over the past six decades could not come at a more important time in the struggle against 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 States "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. " -New Yorker "A persistent voice against white privilege. " -New York Times "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 Cloudsplitter "Noel 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: US Imperialism and Anti-Communism versus the Liberation of Southern Africa, from Rhodes to Mandela
Noel Ignatiev was born in Philadelphia, the son of two Russian-Jewish immigrants. He was a life long revolutionary, a long-time steel worker (Gary, Indiana), the author of How the Irish Became White, and co-editor of the journal Race Traitor. He spent years debating in the Students for a Democratic Society, where he coined the term ' white skin privilege' before going on to agitate on the factory floor for twenty years with the ' Sojourner Truth Organization. ' Later, he became an unlikely Harvard PhD grad, a renowned historian, and an untempered firebrand on the main political and cultural issues of our time.
Status: Active
ISBN-13: 9781839765018
Published: 28 Jun 2022
Published In: United Kingdom
Imprint: Verso Books
Publisher: Verso Books
Format: Paperback
Height: 234mm
Width: 153mm
Pages: 448

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