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| Noel Ignatiev |
Uncomfortable truths emerge from our academics, this doesn’t give a license for anyone to disrespect or dehumanise their profession or working practice. Although with Prof Gopal the insolent, illogical abomination (s) is now in judicial hands and will go due process. Unbelievably, there are still pickle-head charlatans stoking the ire during this sensitive period of cultural division.
Indeed, eye-wateringly ignorant to what is a serious social criminality that’ll have dire consequences. Academics are historically the first to receive unwarranted wrath and the abuse when a state is deteriorating or is rigged to a formulaic ideology. The main principle for engineering intellectualism is anchoring independent nuances; this is the scholar’s bread and butter.
Now, it’s the norm
to be systematically ridiculed for being an informant of democratic policy, government
bills and underlining agreed treaties with familiar goals and prospects. Yet,
the populists are on this road to destruction – hell bent on denunciation, even
when the divider, hater, the culprit is sitting in a mirror. When this is
pointed out, disdain erupts and next you’re a conspiracy theorist, one of them – regretfully, an
opportunity lost, to get to the matter in hand and it’s an important one, the
origins of ‘Abolish whiteness.’
Yes, one of those
uncomfortable truths that has been already worked on by Noel Ignatiev who sadly
passed away late last year (2019). Ironically, the generational phase has done
a full circle, and if the timing was different Ignatiev in his own words
could’ve dosed down the present racism and embarked on relaying the foundations
for social awareness just as he did in 1972, four years after the assassination
of Martin Luther King, to great effect. Notably, the shock-aspect / freshness
of the Martin Luther King’s assassination were still prevalent in the national
psyche, this was the social catalysis surrounding the 1972 study / essay
called: ‘Black Workers, White Workers,’ for
the scholar offered compelling evidence of
social failures, institutional tribalism within workplaces. The set was a
giant steel mill in northwest Indiana.
Here is a ‘Black Workers, White Workers’ studied
extract by Noel Ignatiev
“A
foreman assigned a white worker to the job of operating a crane. The Black
workers in the department felt that on the basis of seniority and job
experience, one of them should have been given the job, which represented a
promotion from the labor gang. They spent a few hours in the morning talking
among themselves and agreed that they had a legitimate beef. Then they went and
talked to the white workers in the department and got their support. After
lunch the other crane operators mounted their cranes and proceeded to block in
the crane of the newly promoted worker—one crane on each side of his—and run at
the slowest possible speed, thus stopping work in the department. By the end of
the day the foreman had gotten the message. He took the white worker off the
crane and replaced him with a Black worker, and the cranes began to move again.
A few weeks after the slowdown, several
of the white workers who had joined the black operators in protest took part in
meetings in Glen Park, a virtually all-white section of Gary, with the aim of
seceding from the city, in order to escape from the administration of the black
mayor, Richard Hatcher. While the secessionists demanded, in their words, “the
power to make the decisions which affect their lives,” it was clear that the
effort was racially inspired.”
Those who’re aware of Ignatiev’s works can derive a
correlation with cross-generational racialism, prevalent from the start of the
industrial age. Contradictions unveil a startling common-denominator that the
social construct subconsciously or consciously has been battling with itself under
an illusion of white dominance / supremacy. By what rights has this social
disorder been allowed to prosper? Much of the learned behaviours have triumphed
through to an undisclosed ideology to which Ignatiev and his theorists expose
as being institutionized, to the point it provides the illusion of common
interests via skin pigmentation – notably, the selected exploited and chosen ruling
class within the workplace. For many decades there was a valid
understanding that this ‘caste war’ was winnable: the notion was to show the white
workers that their true enemies were the bosses, the ownership class - now promulgated
elitism has flipped the social clime / agenda in its entirety.
Quite
honestly the contradictions have unveiled a white mind-set’s internal mêlée –
and it has been prevalent, today, and easily accessible, furthermore has caused
a storm in their tea-cup. This is nothing new, the learned behaviours,
anticipations, irregular self-importance affiliated with being white concluded
to Ignatiev’s abolishing ‘whiteness’ as this was key to configuring a cooperation
technique, a level field… based on superlative humanism… the issue was the
white man’s subliminal psyche’s illicit suppression is habitually intergenerational.
And broadly laid dormant until such a day arrived as it did with the Germany’s
national assembly after Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated; also unpardonably within a
decade Stefan Zweig wrote that civilization had been swallowed in darkness –
see Zweig’s memoir, ‘The World of
Yesterday,’ (1941).
Our
social cohesion levelling process requires a community traction, directive,
possible mandate – preferably what
Professor Gopal and Noel Ignatiev supports… i.e. a conscious politics-free
humanity zone, that avidly prioritizes ourselves equally, without preconceptions
or prejudices or finger-pointing, while simultaneously deregulating human rights.
This forecastable construct would be a revitalizing societal concept.
Workable
examples have been studied by Afro-Americans as a means of survival, therefore,
probably worthy of a comment that there’s a long tradition among their own
learning that the white race is an idiosyncratic formulated social foundation,
one that depends on its member’s willingness to conform to institutions /
establishment behavioural patterns that just so happens to reproduce, white social formations. It’s by no means
a new finding; lessons haven’t been applied, let alone implemented since the Battle
of Palmito Ranch in (1865). A sharpened focus on abolishing ‘whiteness’
requires an airing and its wider relevance today, instead adopt anti-militarism,
approach a critical eye over imperialism.
Notably,
the West’s imbalances won’t be addressed by engaging in victimhood or appeasing
it - certainly not a protectionist principle. You can be absolutely certain, our
mistakes will be judged harshly this is why we ill-afford to ignore Noel Ignatiev’s
life’s works – first and foremost vital that the West cancels racism and
protectionism to readdress the imbalances.
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