Noel Ignatiev
On the last day of his teaching career, as a parting shot at, Professor Noel Ignatiev, a tenured professor at Massachusetts College, told white males to do the world a favor by killing themselves:
If you are a white male, you don’t deserve to live. You are a cancer, you’re a disease, white males have never contributed anything positive to the world! They only murder, exploit and oppress non-whites!
The Professor reported receiving “a standing ovation” from his “largely white and middle class students.”
Noel Ignatiev’s curious outburst is understandable if you know his background. Ignatiev has been part of a Gramsciist/communist movement, his entire life.
This is a movement that sees white male America as the absolute antithesis of all they hold to be good and true.
Formerly known as Noel Ignatin, Mr. Ignatiev has consistently focused on the idea that racism is the main tool used by capitalism to hold workers in check.
Noel Ignatin joined the Communist Party USA in Philadelphia in January of 1958 (he was seventeen) after about a year of working with Party people in youth activities.
Immediately after he joined the Party, there was a realignment of factional forces on the national level – a split.
The extreme left caucus in Philadelphia counted in its ranks virtually the entire South Philadelphia section (mainly white working class) and a number of people from the North Philadelphia (black) section, mostly those who had been part of the black caucus which had formed a few years earlier and maintained a precarious existence in a weakened party.
Ignatin’s far left faction was at odds with the majority grouping that believed in gradually changing America to socialism by using Blacks to push for social reform and to take over the Democratic Party.
Ignatin’s friends wanted to restore Stalin’s program, articulated by their comrade Harry Haywood, to set up a revolutionary Black led republic carved out of America’s Southern states.
The split led to a founding conference of the Provisional Organizing Committee to Reconstitute the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party, which adopted a Declaration stressing several key points: uncompromising defense of the Soviet Union and a rejection of the critical stance which the Party had begun to take toward the USSR at the time of the failed 1956 Hungarian counter-revolution; rejection of the line of peaceful transition to socialism and an affirmation of the proletarian revolution and proletarian dictatorship; and defense of the revolutionary right of self-determination of black people in the deep south as the cornerstone of policy on the black question.
Pure, uncompromising Stalinism.
Ignatin, drifted out of the Stalinist orbit, attended the University of Pennsylvania, then dropped out after three years. He worked in a Chicago steel mill and in factories that made farm equipment and electrical parts for two decades. At the steel mill, he helped organize strikes and protests by the predominantly black work force.
He was laid off from the steel mill in 1984, a year after he was arrested on charges of throwing a paint bomb at a strike-breaker’s car. He set up Marxist discussion groups in the early 1980s.
Ignatin was also active for a time in Students for a Democratic Society.
In 1968, the Chicago editorial group of The Movement – a newspaper affiliated with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and the Students for a Democratic Society, included Ignatin, radical gadfly Staughton Lynd and former Communist party leader and Alinsky acolyte Earl Durham, who later worked in Community Organizing and Family Issues in Chicago with Barack Obama.
Another member was Linda Rae Murray, who later worked with several other black Communist Party supporters on a magazine called African-American Agenda and who worked closely with Barack Obama’s personal friend and physician, long time Chicago Marxist, Quentin Young.
In the 1970s, Ignatin was a leader of the New American Movement, the Gramsciist forerunner of today’s Democratic Socialists of America.
In 1985, the by now Mr. Ignatiev, was accepted to the Harvard Graduate School of Education without an undergraduate degree. After earning his Master’s, he joined the Harvard faculty as a lecturer and worked toward a Doctorate in U.S. History.
His dissertation became a book, “How the Irish Became White.” Mr. Ignatiev said the book told how Irish immigrants came to the United States and became “oppressors” by emulating American whites.
Given comrade Ignatiev’s background, his views are not surprising.
He only made explicit, what is implicit in much of today’s American left.
Check your sources. This was originally posted on a SATIRICAL site; the speech never happened.
He should go first!