The Lie that Invented Racism by John Biewen | TEDx [Video]

In this widely-viewed Ted Talk, John Biewen makes a presentation on the origins of racism, that is, the origin of race as a concept. He reached out to renowned scholar Dr. Ibram X. Kendi and got the answer on how this all began and that you can read for yourselves in his seminal text, Stamped From the Beginning. 

In his masterful and authoritative account that Biewen subsequently recounts, Kendi finds that Gomes Eanes de Zurara was hired to write a book by the Portuguese King in the 1450s where he lumped all the people of African into a distinct group. A few years earlier, slave traders with close connections to the Portuguese Crown pioneered the Atlantic slave trade. The book thusly served to justify this trade by pointing to the inferiority of African peoples. 

Allow me to expound a bit on this lie that invented racism. Yes, it was invented, created. There is no country or national origin named "white" from which people emanate.

Racialization, a historical and contemporary process, created "others" to justify subordinate status, war, conquest and colonization and to set up structures like capitalism and ideologies like the supremacy of fair- or white-skinned peoples and individualism that disproportionately benefits whites. Western European immigrants that migrate to these shores readily become "American" within a generation or two in their sense of selves, as well as how they are seen by others.

Racialization was designed to rationalize horrific actions and policy decisions that wreaked havoc on Black and Brown people and established an enduring sense of privilege among many white people.

Specifically, Biewen maintains that racism is a tool to divide us and to prop up systems of advantage where some people are more highly ranked than others in systematic, stubborn ways.

Biewen's main personal discovery is that racism isn't a problem for people of color, but rather for white people. It's a "white people's problem," he emphatically states, and not the other way around. 

As to how this makes him feel, Biewen says that it's not so much about feelings of guilt, but rather about personal responsibility. He's specifically moved to pull down "the power that we [white people] did not earn." 

Great for the high school and college classroom.

-Angela Valenzuela

References

Kendi, I. X. (2016). Stamped from the beginning: The definitive history of racist ideas in America. Hachette UK.

Gildea, K. (2017, July 29). Impressive and challenging look at the history of racist ideas in US: Epic in scope, this book examines the many different and complex sources of racism, Irish Times. Retrieved: https://tinyurl.com/2p8sh89c

 The Lie that Invented Racism

by John Biewen | TEDx

To understand and eradicate racist thinking, start at the beginning. That's what journalist and documentarian John Biewen did, leading to a trove of surprising and thought-provoking information on the "origins" of race. He shares his findings, supplying answers to fundamental questions about racism -- and lays out an exemplary path for practicing effective allyship.

This talk was presented to a local audience at TEDxCharlottesville, an independent event. TED's editors chose to feature it for you.

Read more about TEDx.  Listen to John Biewen's 14-part podcast series on whiteness.

Whatever happened to Foxfire? Still glowing? by Carl Glickman, Phi Delta Kappan

This is a blog about Ethnic Studies for white people who may feel left out of the Ethnic Studies conversation, and that's unfortunate, as we all need to know each others' histories, cultures, and stories. To this end, this is a powerful story published in the Phi Delta Kappan of a social justice curriculum in one such community that I was reminded of at a Kappa Delta Pi Diversity Summit that I attended this morning. I just located this wonderful piece by my dear friend and colleague, Dr. Carl Glickman, that documents the 50-year impact of this social justice curriculum in the Appalachian town of Mountain City in Rabun County, Georgia, otherwise termed, "Foxfire." It's important that we share these stories as they are educative in and of themselves. However, they further illustrate how those of us of all backgrounds have a stake in the Ethnic Studies movement. Enjoy! 

-Angela Valenzuela 

#EthnicStudiesNow

Whatever happened to Foxfire? Still glowing?

Carl Glickman | February 1, 2016




Fifty years later, Foxfire’s practices are often embraced by educators, even if they no longer know its name.

A first-year teacher was frustrated over the behavior of his bored and belligerent high school students, many from the small Appalachian town of Mountain City in Rabun County, Ga. He confronted them about their behavior and asked them what would make English class more interesting. After some discussion, students agreed that they would rather learn the state-required English curriculum of composition, punctuation, and sentence usage through a class project.

Together, the teacher, Eliot Wigginton, and students decided to create a community magazine and call it Foxfire, which was named for the glowing, green fungus found on decaying trees in the adjacent forest. The year was 1966.

What began as one teacher’s pursuit of making learning interesting for one small group of students helped change beliefs about the potential of ordinary students to become deeply involved in school learning. The teacher’s approach put to action John Dewey’s progressive premise that classroom learning should be a form of democratic life in which students actively demonstrate their knowledge and skills by immediately using them to improve society (Wigginton, 1985).

Foxfire was perhaps the best example of this premise for its time. Said researcher Julie Oliver about the school, “Foxfire is distinctive in the history of American education owing to its legacy of . . . student work outside the classroom. One might argue that Foxfire did this as well as any other pedagogical program for public school students in the history of American education” (Oliver, 2011, p. 125-126.).

The Foxfire magazine was intended to help preserve local Appalachian culture including history, labor, music, crafts, arts, and spiritual and religious beliefs. Students contributed feature articles, interviews, drawings, and photos of neighbors and family members to the magazine. The first magazine sold for 50 cents, and the cost of production was 65 cents. The classroom experiment would soon go broke, but after positive reviews by editors of local and state newspapers, increases in price, and grants from local merchants, the project was saved.

By 1972, the magazine had attracted widespread interest from outsiders who wanted to know more about living on the land, self-sustaining farming, and the pioneer ways of everyday life. That year, students selected their best stories from previous issues and compiled them into what was to become an annual Foxfire book published by Doubleday Press. The first volume made The New York Times best-seller list.

Then came more best-selling books (over 9 million copies sold), a nationally distributed movie, a 32-building Foxfire Museum and Heritage Center on Black Rock Mountain in Georgia, multiple archived collections of Appalachian life, and three decades of courses and workshops on the Foxfire Approach to Teaching and Learning for teacher education students, practicing teachers, and school leaders across the country. Royalties and donations over the years have accounted for more than $1 million in college scholarships to Rabun County high school students, and new scholarships continue to be given every year. Foxfire — both the magazine and the broader part of its work — became a national phenomenon with a well-endowed, nonprofit organization to support its work. But later tumultuous times threatened to wipe out the organization.

Foxfire had an enormous influence on the students in Rabun County, Oliver said. “Foxfire provided . . . extraordinary opportunities for students to build communication skills. By requiring students to conduct interviews, speak on behalf of Foxfire at various organizations, . . . students were given opportunities that most high school students would never receive in a more conventional curriculum program. . . . Students learned, through their work with Foxfire, to appreciate and better understand the older generations and the past. . . . Students developed a greater appreciation for their native culture and with that developed the confidence that they could carry themselves proudly as mountain people anywhere. The result was that Foxfire students became more productive citizens in our democracy” (Oliver, 2011, p. 208).

Evaluating Foxfire

I returned to Black Rock Mountain recently after an absence of more than 20 years and couldn’t help but think about the issues of sustainability in education and whether Foxfire could be judged as a success or failure. In the mid-1980s, I headed a University of Georgia network of public schools called the Georgia League of Professional Schools, which focused on democracy, education, and public purpose (Glickman, 1993). We partnered with Foxfire to provide professional development to K-12 classroom teachers eager to engage their students in learning activities that extended into their communities. That collaboration with Foxfire continued until 1992.

In every education endeavor, unilateral claims of success and failure are highly suspect. Education is a social science, not a hard science of strictly controlled studies, and a major element is the period of time in which the program is evaluated — its first five, 15, 30, or 50 years. I chose the longest term since this year marks Foxfire’s 50th anniversary. So has Foxfire’s approach to education been a success?

As Oliver pointed out, Foxfire clearly benefited many students in Rabun County and continues to do so today. As an outreach effort to influence classrooms and schools throughout the nation, according to teacher survey responses, Foxfire had a major effect on individual classrooms in schools that were members of the Foxfire Regional Networks in the 1980s and 1990s. But today, the name Foxfire is no longer used to describe education practices that support student activity, audience, and service to the community. I reviewed the research on current activity-centered programs that have kinship to the core practices of Foxfire. Those programs have titles such as project-based learning, place-based education, deep learning, academic service learning, experiential learning, and civic learning. These programs boast many examples and studies showing student success in academic achievement, higher interest in learning, lower dropout rates, and progress beyond school in both higher education and professional careers, and greater participation as adult citizens in local and state affairs. Few of them, however, credit Foxfire with showing that these practices could work in real schools.

Can an education approach to learning be successful if nobody uses its name? I think the answer is yes. Foxfire influenced many of the current, progressive education practices. The downside is that these practices have not become as widespread as they should. Educational approaches that promote student engagement and student contribution remain a glaring need for all students. Unfortunately, such experiential, inquiry-oriented learning is often only found in honors classes or in those with gifted students and in schools with a preponderance of students from middle to high socioeconomic backgrounds. The students who need an active and contributory education most are the ones who receive it least (Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools, 2011; Levinson, 2012; Levine, 2007).

Navigating troubled waters

I alluded to tumultuous times with Foxfire. How these difficulties have been navigated is particularly relevant to education and schools and communities of the future.

For many reasons, Foxfire has no business to be still standing and planning for its next 50 years. After Foxfire reached its national iconic stature, Wigginton was named Georgia Teacher of the Year in 1986 and received the MacArthur “genius” award in 1989. But, in 1992, he was indicted for child molestation, pleaded guilty, served prison time, and was ordered out of state, and removed from any further involvement with the program. He was convicted on a single count, but prosecutors contended that his victims numbered many more.


Due to public outrage, Foxfire was nearly disbanded. But current and former students took it upon themselves to post notices on the windows of downtown businesses asking the community to keep the program and museum alive.

It was tough going for many years. A Foxfire board member volunteered his time to negotiate legal settlements, which helped the organization avoid bankruptcy. But then the program encountered other financial problems, which forced former students, staff, community and board members to make difficult cuts in Foxfire’s expenses and to reorganize staff to protect the Foxfire Museum and Heritage Center, the Foxfire class in the local high school, and a different, trimmed-down education program for teachers taken over by nearby Piedmont College. The essence of the Foxfire premise survived (Rechtman, 2015). The local community, students, and Foxfire board and staff never stopped believing in the worth of their students who have made such a difference in preserving the past and countering the negative stereotypes of mountain people.

I surmise that Foxfire, less known nationally as a reform approach to teaching and learning, will remain vibrant in the place it was created. It belongs to the community as an irreplaceable contribution to the world showing the staying power of students, classrooms, and schools partnering with their community to make education a contribution to both. This past October, Foxfire received a 2015 Georgia Governor’s Award for the Arts and Humanities for its sustained contributions to the welfare of schools and communities. It is unrealistic to think that every classroom and school along with its community could replicate what happened over 50 years ago in Rabun County resulting in best-selling journals and books and a vast museum. Yet it is realistic and imperative to expect that students today can apply what they are learning in English, math, science, history, and the arts to making their communities healthier, more caring, economically viable, and aesthetically better places to live. That would be the ultimate success for Foxfire and for our country.

References

Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools. (2011). Guardian of democracy: Report of the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools. Silver Spring, MD: Author. www.civicmissionofschools.org.

Glickman, C. (1993). Renewing America’s schools: A guide for school-based action. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Levine, P. (2007). The future of democracy: Developing the next generation of American citizens. Medford, MA: Tufts University Press.

Levinson, M. (2012). No citizen left behind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Oliver, J. (2011). The story and legacy of the Foxfire cultural journalism program (Doctoral dissertation). University of Georgia, Athens, Ga.

Rechtman, J. (2015, November 2). Jamil’s Georgia: Foxfire, still aglow — after catastrophic event, an organization’s lessons learned. The Saporta Report. http://saportareport.com/foxfire-still-aglow-after-catastrophic-event-an-organizations-lessons-learned/

Wigginton, E. (1985). Sometimes a shining moment: The Foxfire experience, 20 years teaching in a high school classroom. New York, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday.



Foxfire Core Practices

Modified over the years, the Foxfire Core Practices include these:From the beginning, learner choice, design, and revision infuses the work teachers and learners do together to fulfill all curricula givens.
The teacher serves as facilitator and collaborator.
The work teachers and learners do together clearly manifests the attributes of the academic disciplines involved, so those attributes become habits of mind.
The work teachers and learners do together enables learners to make connections between classroom work, the surrounding communities, and the world beyond their communities.
Active learning, in an atmosphere of trust and equity, characterizes classroom activities.
The learning process entails imagination and creativity.
Classroom work includes peer teaching, small group work, and teamwork.
The work of the classroom serves audiences beyond the teacher, thereby evoking the best efforts by the learners and providing feedback for improving performances.
The work teachers and learners do together includes challenging, ongoing assessment and evaluation that then guide subsequent work toward higher levels of achievement and understanding.
Reflection, an essential activity, takes place at key points throughout the work.

Source: The Core Practices. http://paws.wce.edu/mherzog/foxfire.htm

Citation: Glickman, C. (2016). Whatever happened to Foxfire: Still glowing? Phi Delta Kappan, 97 (5), 55-59.

CARL GLICKMAN (cglick@uga.edu) is university professor emeritus of education, University of Georgia, Athens, Ga. He is a member of the board of the nonprofit Foxfire Fund, Inc. This essay is not an official position or statement of Foxfire Foundation.

On the 91-Year Anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre and the Ruthless Murder of George Floyd. Support Ethnic Studies

Today, May 31, 2020, in this moment of riots and cities on fire in the wake of George Floyd’s ruthless murder by white policemen a week ago on May 25 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, is also the 99-year anniversary of the Tulsa Riots that took place in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on May 31, 1921 that destroyed what had been previously known as "Black Wall Street."

See CNN news 5.31.2020

I recorded this segment of Ali Velshi's MSNBC report because more than anything I've seen on the news in these days of a frightening and deepening crisis, it points to the importance of Ethnic Studies of which African American Studies is an essential part to both heal wounds and grow the kind of critical consciousness necessary to begin to un-do this historic legacy of white violence, symbolic and real.

N.B. Ethnic Studies additionally consists of Asian American Studies, Native American Studies, and Mexican American Studies with close affinities to Women and Gender Studies and LGBTQ Studies.

Since we know that curriculum reproduces consciousness, then Ethnic Studies has to be part and parcel to undoing this history and legacy of white supremacy, anti-Black and Brown violence, accompanied by the systematic erasure of the knowledges, histories, stories, and identities of all minoritized communities as if the white, European-American imaginary were first and foremost, superior and exceptional, to all others. As the widely broadcast events of the past week suggest, this colonial, oppressive relationship to our shared experience as subalterns is hardly without consequence to domestic tranquility and society, as a whole.

As the Velshi interview of Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum below reveals, these arrogant and exclusive ways of knowing and being in the world that convert into lethal, structured silences are manifestly not sustainable. They never were.

Not only is no one harmed by Ethnic Studies, but all stand to benefit in the same spirit of the Biblical verse and widely-expressed adage, including at my institution, the University of Texas at Austin, that “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free."

Indeed, the potential of Ethnic Studies to begin undoing this venomous legacy of white supremacy and the systematic erasure and outright suppression of, and contempt toward, the knowledges, histories, stories, and identities of all minoritized communities, as a whole, strengthens the very possibility of living together peacefully on this planet.

To deny this history is to not only reproduce in durable ways white supremacy, but it also robs communities of color of their sense of agency, place in history, and opportunities for self-determination and well-being. They are further denied the very conceptual, experiential, and civic tools they need to defend themselves against this brutal regime of white, European supremacy whose first breaths on this continent date back to 1492, marked by ongoing campaigns, past and present, to commit genocide against native peoples, an agenda that horrifically continues into the present in many places, including in U.S. Indian Country and Brazil. This must end.

May this be a moment that ultimately proves beneficial not only for children of color via the teaching of Ethnic Studies and the truth of history, but for whites, as well, whose frequently caged consciousness of a false sense of entitlement in a world that validates their existence to the exclusion of all others, dehumanizes them, turning some—like Minnesota Police Officer Derek Chauvin—into monsters that commit heinous crimes against humanity.

Do learn about the Tulsa Race Massacre and do consider deeply its connection to the current moment that is playing out in vivid color on our television screens and let's root out these ways of knowing and being in the world that have been, and continue to be, profoundly harmful to society and the planet.

On Tuesday, November 3, 2020, let's get the Hatemonger in Chief out of office. And let's all also extend our support for Ethnic Studies as it promises to be beneficial to all in ways that far exceed traditional measures of achievement to include the potential for the kind of societal transformation and enlightened consciousness that we desperately need in, and for, these troubled times.

I always say that someday, Ethnic Studies will just be called a "good education."

Peace and justice / paz y justicia,

-Angela Valenzuela

#BlackLivesMatter #Whiteness #WhitePrivilege #WhiteSupremacy 

#BrownLivesMatter #CriticalThinking #AfricanAmericanStudies  #decolonize 

#EthnicStudiesNow #TxTABE #criticalpedagogy #AcademiaCuauhtli #protests2020 #COVID19 #GeorgeFloyd

I was sad to read about Dr. Noel Ignatiev's passing but happy to learn about his widespread influence in discrediting white supremacy and how the ideology of whiteness has functioned historically to divide and conquer the working class.  
Here is a key quote:

Ignatiev wrote. “White chauvinism is the ideological bulwark of the practice of white supremacy, the general oppression of blacks by whites.” He argued that it would be impossible to build true solidarity among the working class without addressing the question of race, because white workers could always be placated by whatever privileges, however meaningless, management dangled in front of them. The only way to change this was for white working-class people to reject whiteness altogether. “In the struggle for socialism,” Ignatiev wrote, white workers “have more to lose than their chains; they have also to ‘lose’ their white-skin privileges, the perquisites that separate them from the rest of the working class, that act as the material base for the split in the ranks of labor.”

I have used "How the Irish Became White," in my classes for many years.  It has some limits with respect to the Black-White binary it inadvertently reinscribes, but it captures quite well the seductive nature of whiteness, particularly for a group that in another context because of their own history with slavery, would have been vehemently opposed to racism against blacks.


https://www.radicalhistoryreview.org/abusablepast/?p=3537&fbclid=IwAR09mK4j6Sk_6c-RerMTyUSCbWGo9WsGD8PCUTRAWwOoMEqN4-eBK6DStyo

-Angela 

Noel Ignatiev’s Long Fight Against Whiteness

By Jay Caspian Kang

November 15, 2019

Noel Ignatiev, the author of “How the Irish Became White,” believed that whiteness was a fiction, and that true stories could dispel it.

Photograph by Pekah Pamella Wallace

In 1995, Noel Ignatiev, a recent graduate of the doctoral program in history at Harvard, published his dissertation with Routledge, an academic press. Many such books appear, then disappear, subsumed into the endless paper shuffling of the academic credentialling process. But Ignatiev was not a typical graduate student, and his book, “How the Irish Became White,” was not meant to stay within the academy. A fifty-four-year-old Marxist radical, Ignatiev had come to the academy after two decades of work in steel mills and factories. The provocative argument at the center of his book—that whiteness was not a biological fact but rather a social construction with boundaries that shifted over time—had emerged, in large part, out of his observations of how workers from every conceivable background had interacted on the factory floor. Ignatiev wasn’t merely describing these dynamics; he wanted to change them. If whiteness could be created, it could also be destroyed.

“How the Irish Became White” quickly broke out of the academic-publishing bubble. Writing in the Washington Post, the historian Nell Irvin Painter called it “the most interesting history book of 1995.” Mumia Abu-Jamal, the activist and death-row inmate, provided an enthusiastic back-cover blurb. Today, many of the ideas Ignatiev proposed or refined—about the nature of whiteness, and about the racial dynamics that unfold among immigrant workers—are taken for granted in classrooms; they influence films, literature, and art. But Ignatiev found it hard to accept the academic rewards that came with his book’s success. Committed to radicalism, he spent much of his time in academia doing what he had done on the factory floor: publishing leaflets and zines about the possibilities of revolutionary change.

He was still at it on October 27th, when Hard Crackers, a journal that Ignatiev edited with a collection of friends and old collaborators, threw a launch party for its latest issue, at Freddy’s Bar, in Brooklyn. Wearing a white Panama hat and a loose-fitting suit, Ignatiev spoke briefly: Hard Crackers, he said, had been founded with the conviction that American society was a “time bomb,” and that its salvation could only come through the stories and actions of ordinary people. In that spirit, the journal published short, memoir-driven portraits of working Americans, in the style of Joseph Mitchell’s “Up in the Old Hotel.” This portraiture served a political purpose. Ignatiev and his fellow-editors hoped to provoke small but potentially explosive moments of revelation in their readers—to create instants of autonomy which, they thought, might allow those readers to forge coalitions with other seekers of “a new society.” This philosophy, inspired by the work of the Trinidadian writer C. L. R. James, had run through all of Ignatiev’s work as a radical youth, a radical factory worker, and then, finally, a radical scholar.

Ignatiev’s speech was energetic, funny, and shot through with brio and irony. But it included a note of reflection. Ignatiev said that he had spent most of his life around people who vehemently disagreed with everything he said; he was confident that he had always been right, but also pretty sure that being right had amounted to nothing. He seemed to be posing a difficult question for those who believe, as Ignatiev did, in spontaneous revolutionary change: How do you measure success if the revolution hasn’t yet come? A few days later, Ignatiev flew out to Arizona to see his daughter and grandchildren. On November 9th, he died, at the age of seventy-eight.

The question of what Ignatiev accomplished is especially hard to answer because his radicalism took so many forms. He was born in 1940, in Philadelphia, into a family of working-class Russian Jews. By seventeen, he had joined the Communist Party; after dropping out of the University of Pennsylvania, he moved to Chicago to work in the steel mills. He would be a factory laborer for more than two decades, always with an eye toward provoking his fellow-workers into looking at their struggle in new ways. In 1967, he composed a letter to the Progressive Labor Party that outlined his views. “The greatest ideological barrier to the achievement of proletarian class consciousness, solidarity and political action is now, and has been historically, white chauvinism,” Ignatiev wrote. “White chauvinism is the ideological bulwark of the practice of white supremacy, the general oppression of blacks by whites.” He argued that it would be impossible to build true solidarity among the working class without addressing the question of race, because white workers could always be placated by whatever privileges, however meaningless, management dangled in front of them. The only way to change this was for white working-class people to reject whiteness altogether. “In the struggle for socialism,” Ignatiev wrote, white workers “have more to lose than their chains; they have also to ‘lose’ their white-skin privileges, the perquisites that separate them from the rest of the working class, that act as the material base for the split in the ranks of labor.”

Many scholars have cited Ignatiev’s letter as one of the first articulations of the modern idea of “white privilege.” But Ignatiev’s version differs from the one we often use today. In his conception, white privilege wasn’t an accounting tool used to compile inequalities; it was a shunt hammered into the minds of the white working class to make its members side with their masters instead of rising up with their black comrades. White privilege was a deceptive tactic wielded by bosses—a way of tricking exploited workers into believing that they were “white.”

In the late sixties, when Ignatiev was still working in steel mills and factories, he and a number of collaborators started the Sojourner Truth Organization, which aimed to approach labor organizing through the lens of race. S.T.O. members entered factories with two main goals: collaborating with black and Latino worker organizations, and putting Ignatiev’s theory of white-skin privileges into action. The white workers, Ignatiev believed, were capable of repudiating their whiteness; they needed only to be provoked into consciousness. The S.T.O. hoped to accomplish this through the dissemination of workplace publications, such as the Calumet Insurgent Worker, and constant conversation. In an essay titled “Black Worker, White Worker,” from 1972, Ignatiev examined what he called the “civil war” in the minds of his white colleagues in plants and steel mills. It begins with an anecdote:

In one department of a giant steel mill in northwest Indiana a foreman assigned a white worker to the job of operating a crane. The Black workers in the department felt that on the basis of seniority and job experience, one of them should have been given the job, which represented a promotion from the labor gang. They spent a few hours in the morning talking among themselves and agreed that they had a legitimate beef. Then they went and talked to the white workers in the department and got their support. After lunch the other crane operators mounted their cranes and proceeded to block in the crane of the newly promoted worker—one crane on each side of his—and run at the slowest possible speed, thus stopping work in the department. By the end of the day the foreman had gotten the message. He took the white worker off the crane and replaced him with a Black worker, and the cranes began to move again.

A few weeks after the slowdown, several of the white workers who had joined the black operators in protest took part in meetings in Glen Park, a virtually all-white section of Gary, with the aim of seceding from the city, in order to escape from the administration of the black mayor, Richard Hatcher. While the secessionists demanded, in their words, “the power to make the decisions which affect their lives,” it was clear that the effort was racially inspired.

To Ignatiev, these contradictions revealed a white mind perpetually battling with itself. On one side were the learned behaviors, expectations, and falsehoods associated with being “white”; on the other was the recognition, however suppressed and forbidden, that black and white workers’ concerns were aligned. The learned behaviors triumphed, Ignatiev thought, because of “the ideology and institution of white supremacy, which provides the illusion of common interests between the exploited white masses and the white ruling class.” In the workplace, Ignatiev had seen white people who seemed to be enforcing their whiteness only out of habit, or because they feared social rebuke, or suffered under the illusion that they might one day ascend to the ownership class. Their “civil war,” he thought, was winnable: one just had to show the white workers that their true enemies were the bosses.

Around that time, according to Ignatiev’s longtime friend and collaborator Kingsley Clarke, the steel industry had placed racist restrictions on black and Latino laborers, who were given dangerous jobs in blast furnaces and ovens and blocked from moving into safer and higher-paying positions within plants. The federal government eventually intervened, through an early iteration of the Affirmative Action program, and Ignatiev and the S.T.O. created smaller organizations that aimed to force the larger trade union to comply with the new law. Ignatiev found that many black workers were receptive to those efforts; he felt that he never quite broke through with whites. “The only white people who seemed to sympathize were the evangelical Christian types,” Clarke told me. “But when it came to asking them to open up the jobs for the black workers, none of them wanted to do that.” Ignatiev was discouraged; at the same time, Clarke never saw him waver in his beliefs. “Noel kept saying, look, if we can just change five people’s minds, we can change the world!”

In the eighties, the economy began to shift. Automation took root, and plants began laying off workers. Contemplating the large, industrial workforces of prior decades, Ignatiev had been able to imagine workers forming councils, seizing the means of production, and deposing their bosses. But, as factories emptied out, he no longer knew where to look. In his forties, he, too, was laid off. He decided to go back to school. A friend from S.T.O. who had been admitted to Harvard’s Graduate School of Education persuaded the administration to admit Ignatiev, despite the fact that he lacked a bachelor’s degree. Ignatiev enrolled, then transferred to the history department, where he worked toward his doctorate.

Ignatiev was now a student at the most prestigious university in the world. But he still believed in creating literary projects unencumbered by the traditional press and its credentialled demands. In 1993, he and his friend John Garvey, a former New York City cab driver whom he’d met on the radical labor circuit, started Race Traitor, a journal with the motto “Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.” John Brown, the white man who led a small militia of black men as they raided an arsenal, at Harpers Ferry, in hopes of sparking an armed slave rebellion, became their lodestar—an example of what it might look like to reject one’s whiteness. Ignatiev and Garvey, who is also an editor at Hard Crackers, called for an “abolition of the white race.” This prompted the expected outrage from right-wingers, who heard a call for extinction, but also upset liberals, who saw them as impractical troublemakers.

In 1995, Ignatiev finished the dissertation that would become “How the Irish Became White.” Not long ago, someone asked him why he had written the book. “The country is divided into masters and slaves,” Ignatiev wrote:

A big political problem is that many of the slaves think they are masters, or at least side with the masters at crucial moments—because they think they are white. I wanted to understand why the Irish, coming from conditions about as bad as could be imagined and thrown into low positions when they arrived, came to side with the oppressor rather than with the oppressed. Imagine how history might have been different had the Irish, the unskilled labor force of the north, and the slaves, the unskilled labor force of the South, been unified. I hoped that understanding why that didn’t happen in the past might open up new possibilities next time.

The book was a hit, by academic standards. Ignatiev now had a powerful platform. But he was also a decade removed from the steel mills, and he was unsure how much a book could really do. Privately, he questioned the value of his new life in the highest reaches of the academy. His on-campus provocations—which included a 1992 incident in which he called for the removal of a kosher toaster oven in a student dormitory—only caused bewilderment among students and administrators.

By 1998, it was time for him to move on. He accepted a post at Bowdoin College, a small school in Maine that mostly catered to white New England prep schoolers. The first class he taught there was a freshman seminar on the making of race; his most adoring student that semester was me, a naïve, vain eighteen-year-old Korean immigrant from North Carolina who desperately wanted to live outside the confines dictated by his race and his own privilege. Ignatiev, with his stories of working in the steel mills, his scorn for credentialled people, and his unwavering belief that a society free from white supremacy was possible, provided a model of a life worth living. I attended all of his office hours, learned to idolize John Brown, and read everything he put in front of me. In my dorm room and in the cafeteria, I talked excitedly to my confused friends about revolutionary politics and abolishing whiteness. At the end of that year, I dropped out and enrolled in Americorps, in hopes of becoming a radical.

I learned, ultimately, that I didn’t have the strength of his convictions. I could never see a new society in my co-workers or, perhaps more importantly, in myself. Even so, I kept looking for traces of what Ignatiev was talking about. There are moments—observing a seemingly small gesture of kindness between two protesters in St. Paul, or noticing the elegant design of the food halls at Standing Rock—when some great possibility seems to reveal itself. When that happens, I think immediately of Ignatiev and his belief in the revolutionary potential of ordinary Americans.

Acouple of months before he died, I drove up to see Ignatiev at his home, in Connecticut. His illness prevented him from swallowing, but he wanted to cook dinner for me in his back yard, where he had fitted a large wok over a rusty propane ring. “Even though I can’t eat anymore, I still find it relaxing to cook,” he told me. As we chopped up the vegetables in a light rain, we talked about all the things we had discussed in his office—John Brown, labor movements, the need to break away from credentialled society. Just as he would a few weeks later, at Freddy’s Bar, he expressed doubt about whether his work had amounted to anything.

I am not so vain as to believe that Noel’s influence on my life provides proof that his work, in fact, made a difference. If his ideas about whiteness and of “white privilege” became fashionable within the academy, they later took on forms he could barely recognize, and oftentimes, despised. He was bewildered by the rise of a style of identity politics that reified the fictions of race and, through its fixation on diversity in élite spaces, abandoned the working class. And as a lifelong radical he took little solace in the rise of a young, insurgent left drawn to the reformist revolution of Democratic Socialism. These movements, I imagine, must have felt like defeats to Ignatiev. We are very far from the abolition of the white race, and there are very few people who believe that changing the minds of five, much less five hundred thousand people, could potentially revolutionize the world.

And yet, from another perspective, there is no political or literary trend—or President—capable of derailing Ignatiev’s true lifelong project. In his writing, and in Race Traitor and Hard Crackers, 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. There is enduring power in the narratives he collected and shared—the stories of people he met as a child, in Philadelphia, or in the plants and mills of Chicago, or in his classrooms. My favorite of these stories is included in the introduction to “How the Irish Became White”:

On one occasion, many years ago, I was sitting on my front step when my neighbor came out of the house next door carrying her small child, whom she placed in her automobile. She turned away from him for a moment, and as she started to close the car door, I saw that the child had put his hand where it would be crushed when the door was closed. I shouted to the woman to stop. She halted in mid-motion, and when she realized what she had almost done, an amazing thing happened: she began laughing, then broke into tears and began hitting the child. It was the most intense and dramatic display of conflicting emotions I have ever beheld. My attitude toward the subjects of this study accommodates stresses similar to those I witnessed in that mother.

Sometimes, while walking around gentrifying Brooklyn, I will see young, white progressives talking to the people whom they are displacing. There’s an officiousness—an almost disingenuous toadying—to these interactions that I, with my modern, fashionable prejudices, find a bit funny and gross. Do they believe that the contradictions between their stated politics and their actual lives can be cleansed through ritualistic bonhomie? Or are they just saying an extended goodbye to their temporary neighbors? Ignatiev might have looked at those same conversations and seen people who desperately wanted to be saved from their whiteness. He might have walked by, with a generosity of spirit that I do not possess, and dropped a few leaflets at their feet, filled with enthusiastic, optimistic provocations, and unreasonable demands.

• Jay Caspian Kang was a news editor for newyorker.com in 2014.
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‘The Lowest White Man’ by Charles M. Blow

This 2018 piece by Charles M. Blow is an excellent complement to Umair Haque's "The Everyday Obscenity of American Collapse" article that I just posted. 

It has several zingers that are clearly directed at Christian fundamentalists that help explain Trump's unflagging popularity with them, including: 

"Trumpism is a religion founded on patriarchy and white supremacy."

"That is because Trump is man-as-message, man-as-messiah. Trump support isn’t philosophical but theological." 

Trump’s supporters are saying to us, screaming to us, that although he may be the “lowest white man,” he is still better than Barack Obama, the “best colored man.”

At the heart of this is actually not Trump himself, but the Trumpism or white supremacy that empowers him.  Spot on, Charles Blow.

-Angela Valenzuela

President Trump at the White House on Sunday.Credit...Eric Thayer for The New York Times

 Jan. 11, 2018 | New York Times

CHARLES M. BLOW

‘The Lowest White Man’

I guess Donald Trump was eager to counter the impression in Michael Wolff's book that he is irascible, mentally small and possibly insane.  On Tuesday, he allowed a bipartisan session the White House about immigration to be televised for nearly an hour.

Surely, he thought that he would be able to demonstrate to the world his lucidity and acumen, his grasp of the issues and his relish for rapprochement with his political adversaries.

But instead what came through was the image of a man who had absolutely no idea what he was talking about; a man who says things that are 180 degrees from the things he has said before; a man who has no clear line of reasoning; a man who is clearly out of his depth and willing to do and say anything to please the people in front of him.

He demonstrated once again that he is a man without principle, interested only in how good he can make himself look and how much money he can make.

Yes, he has an intrinsic hostility to people who are not white, particularly when they challenge him, but as a matter of policy, the whole idea of building a wall for which Mexico would pay was just a cheap campaign stunt to, once again, please the people in front of him.

Trump is not committed to that wall on principle. He is committed only to looking good as a result of whatever comes of it. Mexico is never going to pay for it, and he knows it. He has always known it. That was just another lie. Someone must have stuck the phrases “chain migration” and “diversity lottery” into his brain — easy buzzwords, you see — and he can now rail against those ideas for applause lines.

But he is completely malleable on actual immigration policy. He doesn’t have the stamina for that much reading. Learning about immigration would require reading more words than would fit on a television news chyron.

If Donald Trump follows through with what he said during that meeting, his base will once again be betrayed. He will have proved once again that he was saying anything to keep them angry, even telling lies. He will have demonstrated once again his incompetence and unfitness.

And once again, they won’t care.

That is because Trump is man-as-message, man-as-messiah. Trump support isn’t philosophical but theological.

Trumpism is a religion founded on patriarchy and white supremacy.

It is the belief that even the least qualified man is a better choice than the most qualified woman and a belief that the most vile, anti-intellectual, scandal-plagued simpleton of a white man is sufficient to follow in the presidential footsteps of the best educated, most eloquent, most affable black man.

As President Lyndon B. Johnson said in the 1960s to a young Bill Moyers: 

“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

Trump’s supporters are saying to us, screaming to us, that although he may be the “lowest white man,” he is still better than Barack Obama, the “best colored man.”

In a way, Donald Trump represents white people’s right to be wrong and still be right. He is the embodiment of the unassailability of white power and white privilege.

To abandon him is to give up on the pact that America has made with its white citizens from the beginning: The government will help to underwrite white safety and success, even at the expense of other people in this country, whether they be Native Americans, African-Americans or new immigrants.

But this idea of elevating the lowest white man over those more qualified or deserving didn’t begin with Johnson’s articulation and won’t end with Trump’s manifestation. This is woven into the fabric of the flag.

As I have written here before, when Alabama called a constitutional convention in 1901, Emmet O’Neal, who later became governor, argued that the state should “lay deep and strong and permanent in the fundamental law of the state the foundation of white supremacy forever in Alabama,” and as part of that strategy he argued:

“I don’t believe it is good policy to go up in the hills and tell them that Booker Washington or Councill or anybody else is allowed to vote because they are educated. The minute you do that every white man who is not educated is disfranchised on the same proposition.”

In his essay “Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880,” W.E.B. Du Bois discussed why poor whites didn’t make common cause with poor blacks and slaves but instead prized their roles as overseers and slave catchers, eagerly joining the Klan. This fed the white man’s “vanity because it associated him with the masters,” Du Bois wrote.

He continued:

“Slavery bred in the poor white a dislike of Negro toil of all sorts. He never regarded himself as a laborer, or as part of any labor movement. If he had any ambition at all it was to become a planter and to own ‘niggers.’ To these Negroes he transferred all the dislike and hatred which he had for the whole slave system. The result was that the system was held stable and intact by the poor white.”

For white supremacy to be made perfect, the lowest white man must be exalted above those who are black.

No matter how much of an embarrassment and a failure Trump proves to be, his exploits must be judged a success. He must be deemed a correction to Barack Obama and a superior choice to Hillary Clinton. White supremacy demands it. Patriarchy demands it. Trump’s supporters demand it.

I invite you to join me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter (@CharlesMBlow), or email me at chblow@nytimes.com.

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