Edited by Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey
Routledge
4/30/1996, paperback
SKU: 9780415913935
A classic on race and whiteness
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.
Reviews:
"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
"Race Traitor is the most revolutionary challenge to racism made by American-European intellectuals in my lifetime." --Ishmael Reed
"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 Book"
About the Editors:
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: A Journal of the New Abolitionism.