A periodical that was established
in 1992, Race
Traitor: Journal of the New Abolitionism
(RT) was guided by the core belief that “treason to whiteness is loyalty
to humanity.” Defining the white race as “a
historically constructed social formation” consisting of “all
those who partake of the privileges” associated with being white, RT lamented that “white influence permeates every issue, domestic and
foreign, in U.S. society.” To address this situation, RT held that “the key to solving
the social problems of our age is to abolish the white race, which
means no more and no less than abolishing the privileges of the white
skin.” This does “not mean we want to exterminate people with
fair skin,” RT emphasized,
but rather “that we want to do away with the social meaning of skin
color, thereby abolishing the white race as a social category.”
Such a perspective was akin, said RT, to rejecting the legitimacy of
any privileges associated with royalty, while not “wanting to kill
the king.” “Whiteness has a lot in common with royalty,” RT
elaborated. “They are both social formations that carry unearned
advantages.”
RT aimed
“to serve as an intellectual center” for likeminded individuals, or
“abolitionists,” who shared the worldview and objectives
summarized above. Toward that end, the publication sought “to
challenge,
disrupt and eventually overturn the institutions and behavior
patterns that reproduce the privileges of whiteness, including the
schools, job and housing markets, and the criminal justice system.”
By RT's reckoning, abolitionists by definition “do not limit
themselves to socially acceptable means of protest,” and they
“reject in advance no [potential] means of attaining their
goal.”
RT
co-founder and co-editor Noel
Ignatiev joined the Communist
Party USA
in January 1958 under the name Noel
Ignatin,
but left the party soon thereafter to help establish the Provisional
Organizing Committee to Reconstitute the Marxist-Leninist Communist
Party. He subsequently became involved in the Students
for a Democratic Society in the 1960s.
When that group later dissolved, Ignatiev joined the New Communist
Movement and helped form the Sojourner Truth Organization in
1970.
Ignatiev contends
that
“the United States, like every capitalist society, is composed of
masters and slaves.” The latter are not only blacks, he says, but
poor people of all colors who are exploited by wealthy whites. By
Ignatiev's telling, RT and its abolitionists “attac[ked] whiteness”
not only for the purpose of advancing racial justice, but also “to
undermine the main pillar of capitalist rule in this country.” The
ultimate “aim” of abolitionism, he acknowledges, “is not racial
harmony but class war” that will result in capitalism's demise and
socialism's ascendancy.
Viewing
the white race as morally defective and in need of wholesale
transformation, Ignatiev maintains
that “white people must commit suicide as whites in order to come
alive as workers, or youth, or women, or whatever other identity can
induce them to change from the miserable, petulant, subordinated
creatures they now are into freely associated, fully developed human
subjects.”
“The
white race is a club,” says
Ignatiev. “Certain people are enrolled in it at birth, without
their consent, and brought up according to its rules. For the most
part they go through life accepting the privileges of membership,
without reflecting on the costs.”
Ignatiev contends
that police brutality against African Americans stems from the fact
that “the cops look at a person and then decide on the basis of
color whether that person is loyal to the system they are sworn to
serve and protect. They don’t stop to think if the black person
whose head they are whipping is an enemy; they assume it.”
RT, which ceased publication in 2005,
was endorsed
by the late Professor Derrick
Bell, the founder of critical
race theory.