Race Traitor

From RationalWiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search
The colorful pseudoscience
Race & Racialism
Icon race.svg
Hating thy neighbour
Divide and conquer
Dog-whistlers
[John] BrownWikipedia was apparently not sophisticated enough to realize that holding opinions about blacks made him a white supremacist.
—One of the saner contributors to Race Traitor[1]

Race Traitor was a journal published from 1993 to 2005, lasting for sixteen issues.[2][3] Contributors included Noel Ignatiev, John Garvey, Beth Henson, and others.

The journal was dedicated to the idea of abolishing whiteness as a subject position, and summarized its central philosophy with the slogan "treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity." An editorial in the first issue clarified that the idea of abolishing the white race did not involve the literal killing of white people; instead, the journal called for the idea of a white race to be abandoned, on the grounds that white privilege would cease to exist as a result.[2] However, the journal did on one occasion advocate the "bashing" of individuals for being white: "we intend to keep bashing the dead white males, and the live ones, and the females too, until the social construct known as ‘the white race’ is destroyed — not ‘deconstructed’ but destroyed."[4]

This rather crankish journal appears to have had little influence. Its most notable legacy seems to lie in its adoption by white nationalists as evidence that all anti-racists are secretly anti-white bigots who are plotting the genocide of the white race.

Diversity Chronicle[edit]

In November 2013, the blog Diversity Chronicle ran a satirical attack on Noel Ignatiev that jokingly claimed that he had ended his university tenure by telling all white males in his class to commit suicide.[5] Despite the blog having a disclaimer identifying its content as "largely satirical"[6] various sources reported its piece on Ignatiev as fact; these include Gateway Pundit,[7] the Bolton BNP blog,[8] and Conservapedia.[9]

References[edit]