Is abolishing white skin privileges a liberal or a radical position?

I came across a news story about one Michael Ignatieff, a Canadian political scientist who taught at Harvard for 20 years and recently returned to Canada to run for Parliament. I wondered, is this the same Ignatieff from Harvard who says the white race should be abolished? I googled “Ignatieff” and “white race” and found an article written in 2000 by Michael Levin at American Renaissance about Noel Ignatieff, an English instructor at Harvard who publishes the quarterly Race Traitor, the charming slogan of which is “Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.” Noel Ignatieff ought to get together with Alex Linder, the editor of the Vanguard News Network, a pro-Nazi website the slogan of which is, “No Jews, Just Right.” They are mirror images of each other.

According to Levin, Race Traitor’s call for the abolition of the white race makes the publication seem very radical, but in reality what Ignatieff means by this idea is not that whites should be eliminated but simply that there should be no white skin privileges, which, as Levin points out, is simply the standard liberal view on race. Ignatieff is thus a liberal pretending to be a radical. However, I think Levin understates how radical the mainstream liberal view on race really is. Abolishing “white skin privilege” means that there should be no concept of the white race, since it’s the very concept of whiteness that gives whiteness privileges, and therefore whites should not even think of themselves as being white, but only as individual humans. Many people believe this today, including “conservatives.” It follows further that whites must not feel any respect for or allegiance to the white race and its historic nations and civilization, since the white race is a false concept. Of course, this imperative only applies to whites.

So, while Ignatieff’s position may be no more radical than mainstream liberalism, mainstream liberalism is extremely radical, since it aims to eliminate the ability of whites to defend themselves as whites or even to think of themselves as whites, which means the destruction of the white race as the white race, along with its civilization, though of course individual whites may survive.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 07, 2006 01:23 PM | Send