Mark LeVine teaches history at the University of California and is a member of the Jewish Voice for Peace academic council.

Al Jazeera:

“Noel Ignatiev never set out to be a hero. His goal was quite the opposite: to be a “traitor” to a race that for much of his life would not accept him and whose inherent toxicity, he believed, would permanently impede the possibility of the United States living up to its ideals.

On November 9, the historian died, leaving behind a body of work explaining why and how Americans ought to abolish “whiteness”. As the country faces a surge in white supremacist violence and rhetoric, there may be no better time to engage with – and embrace – his ideas.

Ignatiev was born and raised in the same progressive – and for some, radical – American Jewish tradition that moulded Bernie Sanders (who was born less than a year before him). He grew up in a mixed-race area of Philadelphia where he witnessed the extent and depth of anti-black racism. In the late 1950s, he enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, but dropped out after three years and focused on leftist activism. …

Ignatiev was a member of the last generation of Jews who experienced what it meant to be considered less than white in the US – at least until the present generation experienced a sharp rise in anti-Semitic attacks after the election of Donald Trump. He understood the malleability of race and its reality as a social, ideological and political, rather than biological, construct. …

This should not surprise us. While whiteness and its avatar, “Western civilisation”, have for centuries declared themselves to be the epitome of Enlightenment and freedom, historians have demonstrated not only the historicity of whiteness and its contingency, but that whiteness emerged directly and almost exclusively through its connection to imperialism/colonialism, slavery, genocide and modern-day racism.

We need only think of all those smiling white faces in photos of lynchings across the American south – what WEB Du Bois described as “the writing of human hatred, a deep and passionate hatred … on the pale, white faces” – to understand how the ontological pleasure gained from participating in the humiliation and extermination of black people is the most enduring identifying marker of whiteness.

One would have better luck taking wetness away from water – at least you can freeze it – than to rip the racism out of whiteness. …”