Yesterday I learned that my friend and comrade Noel Ignatiev passed away. He’d been in poor health for some time, diagnosed with a rare form of gastrointestinal cancer that made it difficult for him to swallow properly or digest, but it still caught me off guard. A couple weekends ago I’d seen him at the Hard Crackers release party, which I’d gone to with my friends Kaspar, Arianna, Joseph, and Chelsea. Once a few contributors to the latest issue finished speaking, Noel got up there and gave a rousing summary of what the project is about.

To me, at least, he seemed in good spirits. About a year or so ago, after chatting frequently via social media, Noel asked for my number. We talked now and then over the phone, which I barely do with anyone anymore, where he explained to me his condition. But when I saw him at this event, he came off as lively and even optimistic. The doctors apparently had told him there was a good chance they could operate, since the rest of his body was quite strong. So hearing of his death last night came as a shock to me. What a shame we can’t have him around another decade or two.

Most people know Noel from his book How the Irish Became White, or from the journal Race Traitor that he helped edit back in the nineties and early aughts. Ignatiev was a pupil of Theodore Allen, whose epic treatise on The Invention of the White Race was a landmark in the field. Though deeply indebted to Allen, which he was always the first to acknowledge, he eventually broke with his former master. Against the emerging academic field of “whiteness studies,” Ignatiev fulminated that the point was not to study whiteness but abolish it.

Unfortunately, some of the concepts he helped to popularize took on a life of their own after working their way into liberal online discourse. None has been so abused as the notion of “white skin privilege,” which Ignatiev et al. never meant to function as some sort of individualized guilt complex. During an interview with Orchestrated Pulse, he told Vincent Kelley:

John Garvey and I began Race Traitor with the goal of breaking up the white race, as a contribution to working-class solidarity. We never used, endorsed or promoted identity politics; we railed against multiculturalism and “diversity”; we were scornful of those who wanted to preserve the “good aspects” of “white culture” or to “re-articulate” or “decenter” whiteness. We wanted nothing to do with the growing academic field of “whiteness studies.” We did share some vocabulary with individuals and organizations that were traveling on different roads to different places.

The most significant instance of this was the word “privilege.” In light of the political travesties that have developed under the term since, we wish we had differentiated ourselves more categorically from those who wanted to make careers in journalism, social work, organizational development, education and the arts, and who insist that the psychic battle against privilege must be never-ending; instead of challenging institutions they scrutinize every inter-personal encounter between black people and whites to unearth underlying “racist” attitudes and guide people in “unlearning” them. Hectoring people about their privileges was never our approach; it is an annoyance rather than a challenge.

Indeed, though he deftly avoided the question Kelley posed to him about the work of Adolph Reed, Noel told an online discussion group that he’d corresponded with Reed back in the mid-aughts. Reed eventually stopped responding to his repeated queries, so the dialogue sadly came to naught. Though he sympathized with Reed’s critique of identity politics, he feared (quite rightly) that all Reed was offering was warmed-over social-democratic trade unionism. Ignatiev identified far more with the left communist positions of Loren Goldner, who also contributed to Race Traitor.

Others adopted positions on race vaguely similar to Ignatiev’s, but he did not hesitate to criticize or distance himself from their work when they diverged. For example, he wrote a very harsh criticism of fellow STO veteran J. Sakai for his book Settlers: Mythology of the White Proletariat, which I reposted on my blog (this set off a fresh storm of controversy). More of his notes on Sakai can be accessed here. Ignatiev certainly appreciated the early work of David Roediger on The Wages of Whiteness, and wrote a favorable review of that book in 1992, but was less impressed by Roediger’s recent stuff on intersectionality.

He and I didn’t agree on everything, to be sure. Several months ago there was a thread in which he invoked Shlomo Sand’s book The Invention of the Jewish People, a text I generally find tendentious and specifically reject for the weight it accords to the so-called “Khazar hypothesis.” I let him know how I felt, and we argued a bit back and forth. Noel took it all in stride, though he felt others had been disrespectful in their tone towards him. That was the great thing about Noel, though: you could argue with him for hours, but he never held it against you as long as it was honest and never got personal.

When he addressed the small but packed backroom at Freddy’s Bar in Brooklyn two weekends ago, the gist of his remarks was that Marx ruthlessly criticized ideology, but he never wrote of its adherents as stupid or simply deluded. Rather, he spent countless pages investigating the material reasons that people believe the things they do, why they routinely act against their own objective interest. Usually, there is a very real logic at work in their misapprehension of reality; Frankfurt School theorists thus refer to ideology as a “socially necessary illusion.”

Outside, afterwards, I brought up the fascist myth of “the great replacement” — the paranoid nativist fantasy that foreigners and nonwhites are going to steal their jobs and women. As Noel indicated in his remarks, this is of course an ideological and irrational belief. However, it is rooted in a reality that fascists are all too willing to seize upon for their own advantage: under capitalism, the sad fact of the matter is that we are all radically replaceable. Liberals would prefer to deny this reality outright, but communists must recognize the truth that fascists twist into falsehood.

Noel couldn’t stick around too long after the event, as he had to drive back to Connecticut, so it was a short conversation. Just two weeks later, he’d be gone. Was still doing it till the end, though. RIP, comrade. Hard Crackers will endure as a testament to your memory.

Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.