Race traitor

Race traitor is a pejorative reference to a person who is perceived as supporting attitudes or positions thought to be against the interests or well-being of their own race. For example, one or both parties to an interracial relationship may be characterized as "race traitors." As another example, a person who supports affirmative action or other policies that allegedly benefit races other than his/her own may be characterized as a "race traitor." The term may indicate racialist attitudes on the part of those who use it.

The term is the source of the name of a quarterly magazine, Race Traitor, founded in 1993.

See also

References

Noel Ignatiev

Noel Ignatiev (born 1940) is an author and historian. He is best known for his work on race and social class and for his call to abolish "whiteness". Ignatiev is the co-founder and co-editor of the journal Race Traitor and the New Abolitionist Society, a journal that promotes the idea that "treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity". He also has written a book on antebellum northern xenophobia against Irish immigrants, How the Irish Became White. His publisher bills him as "one of America's leading and most controversial historians".

Early life and career

Ignatiev, the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia, was raised in Philadelphia. He attended the University of Pennsylvania but dropped out after three years.

Under the name Noel Ignatin, he joined the Communist Party USA in January 1958, but in August left (along with Theodore W. Allen and Harry Haywood) to help form the Provisional Organizing Committee to Reconstitute the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party (POC). He was expelled from the POC in 1966.