Noel Ignatiev is an American author and historian.
Background
Ethnicity:
Ignatiev is the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia.
Noel Ignatiev was born on December 27, 1940 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, in the family of Irv and Carrier (Glass) Ignatiev.
Education
Noel attended the University of Pennsylvania but dropped out after three years. In 1985, Ignatiev was accepted to the Harvard Graduate School of Education without an undergraduate degree. After earning his master's degree, he joined the Harvard faculty as a lecturer and worked toward a doctorate in U.S. history. Ignatiev was a graduate student at Harvard University where he earned his Doctor of Philosophy in 1995.
Career
For 20 years, Ignatiev worked in a Chicago steel mill in the manufacturing of farming equipment and electrical components. In 1984, he was laid off from the steel mill, approximately a year after an arrest on charges of attacking a strike-breaker's car with a paint bomb.
After earning his master's degree, he joined the Harvard faculty as a lecturer and worked toward a doctorate in U.S. history. He taught courses at Harward before moving to the Massachusetts College of Art.
Under the name Noel Ignatin, he joined the Communist Party USA in January 1958, but in August left to help form the Provisional Organizing Committee to Reconstitute the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party (POC).
Later he became involved in the Students for a Democratic Society. When that organization fractured in the late 1960s, Ignatiev became part of the Third-worldist and Maoist New Communist Movement, forming the group Sojourner Truth Organization in 1970.
Views
Ignatiev views race distinctions and race itself as a social construct, not a scientific reality. Ignatiev defines whiteness as the access to white privilege, which according to Ignatiev gains people perceived to have "white" skin admission to certain neighborhoods, schools, and jobs.
Quotations:
I regard anti-Semitism, like all forms of religious, ethnic and racial bigotry, as a crime against humanity and whoever calls me an anti-Semite will face a libel suit.
Connections
Noel is a father of two children: Rachel and John Henry.