Race Traitor brings together voices ranging from tenured university professors to skinheads and prison inmates to discuss the "white question" in America.

Working from the premise that the white race has been socially constructed, Race Traitor is a call for the disruption of white conformity and the formation of a New Abolitionism to dissolve it.

In a time when white supremicist thinking seems to be gaining momentum, Race Traitor brings together voices ranging from tenured university professors to skinheads and prison inmates to discuss the "white question" in America. Through popular culture, current events, history and personal life stories, the essays analyze the forces that hold the white race together--and those that promise to tear it apart. When a critical mass of people come together who, though they look white, have ceased to act white, the white race will undergo fission and former whites will be able to take part in building a new human community.

About the Author

Noel Ignatiev is the author of How the Irish Became White (Routledge, 1995). John Garvey works in the Office of Academic Affairs at City University of New York. Together they are the founders and editors of Race Traitor: AJournal of the New Abolitionism.

Reviews

"[T]he clarity and frankness with which Race Traitor holds its racial nominalism forth is probably unmatched in the widening congregation of critical work on whiteness." -- Postmodern Culture
"The value of Race Traitor comes from its confessional quality, a view of repentant and sometimes angry whites kneeling at the rail to purge their souls of all racist taint." -- Quarterly Black Review of Books
"Race Traitor is among the strongest, funniest and most politically charged critiques of whiteness to appear since slave storytellers spun out the "Master and John" tales. Throughout its brief existence as a just-above-ground journal, it has combined penetrating articles on the history and sociology of race with inspired manifest telling cultural commentaries and frontline reports from the struggle to abolish whiteness." -- David R. Roediger, University of Minnesota, author of The Wages of Whiteness
"In the tradition of John Brown, whose epithet and agenda Race Traitor controversially memorializes in its title, the articles collected here do violence to liberal complacency and scholarly apathy. More such race treachery, such loyalty to mankind, to bend John Brown's motto, needs to be committed--not subsumed into academic or belle lettrestic discourse." -- Kathryne V. Lindberg, Wayne State University
"Race Traitor is the most revolutionary challenge to racism made by American-European intellectuals in my lifetime." -- Ishmael Reed
"Thrilling to read! Required reading for all white hip-hop fans." -- Upski, author of Bomb the Suburbs
"...its operative principle is simple: to break the power of whiteness in this country by encouraging people to renounce the wages of whiteness." -- Lingua Franca, Oct.1996

Book Information
ISBN 9780415913935
Author Noel Ignatiev
Format Paperback
Page Count 294
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Weight(grams) 900g