Noel Ignatiev, persistent voice against white privilege, dies at 78

Noel Ignatiev, a provocative scholar who argued that the idea of a white race is a false construct that society would be better off without, died Saturday in Tucson, Arizona, where he was visiting a family member. He was 78.

His son, John, said the cause was complications of a chronic illness.

Ignatiev — who came to the academic world after two decades as a factory worker — made a splash in 1995 with his book “How the Irish Became White,” which looked at the assimilation of the Irish Catholics who emigrated to the United States in the 1800s. Ill treated in their home country, they started out at the bottom of the economic ladder in the United States as well, competing with free black laborers for the worst jobs in the North and, in the South, being relegated to work deemed too dangerous to risk the life of a valuable slave.

“This book looks at how one group of people became white,” Ignatiev wrote in the introduction. “Put another way, it asks how the Catholic Irish, an oppressed race in Ireland, became part of an oppressing race in America.”

Beneath the case study was an idea that Ignatiev had long been exploring, including in Race Traitor, a journal that he and John Garvey founded in 1992. The publication’s aim, Ignatiev once put it, was “to explore how people who had been brought up as white might become unwhite” — that is, renounce the privileges that came with the label “white,” like favored access to good jobs and neighborhoods.

“How the Irish Became White” is among a group of books that have been foundational to what became known as whiteness studies, a field that examines the structures that produce white privilege.

“Many academics today study whiteness,” Adam Sabra, a history professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a longtime friend, said by email. “Noel Ignatiev wanted to abolish it.”

But, as Ignatiev always felt compelled to point out, he was not advocating some sort of mass extermination, just a change in presumptions.

“There is youth culture and drug culture and queer culture; but there is no such thing as white culture,” Ignatiev said at a 1997 conference at the University of California, Berkeley. “Without the privileges attached to it, the white race would not exist, and white skin would have no more social significance than big feet.”

When interviewers would ask why he, a white man, was seeming to argue for canceling his own race, he would rebel at the very label.

“That’s not a term I like to have applied to myself,” he told CNN in 2002. “I want to get rid of it, because I think that the price that it extracts from us is greater than the benefit it brings.”

Ignatiev lived in Connecticut at his death. In addition to his son, his survivors include a brother, Wendell Ignatin; a sister, Amy Sanders; and a daughter, Rachel Edwards; and three grandchildren.