Noel Ignatin

Ignatin took the RYM II road in its most literal form. He left the student movement for industrial work and stayed there for two decades. The theory: the revolutionary had to be inside the class.

With Ted Allen he built the argument that white workers in America take part of their wage in racial standing, and that this standing buys them off. The first task of a revolutionary movement is therefore to abolish the white race as a social category. The formulation is about a category, not people. The archive states that distinction because his opponents drop it and his own writing insists on it.

He published as Noel Ignatiev from the 1990s, took a doctorate in history at Harvard, wrote How the Irish Became White in 1995, and founded Race Traitor with John Garvey. One life runs from a 1969 factional paper about youth and the working class to a 1990s academic journal about abolishing whiteness. That is why this file exists.