Word: ignatiev
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...reader will note that I have written a book about racial oppression without using the term 'racism,'" concludes Harvard Lecturer Noel Ignatiev in his new book How the Irish Became White. Contrary to the implication, this feat of catapulting over the single most divisive 'ism' in the English language required no linguistic acrobatics, only a careful scrutiny of the historical record. As theorists have long since suggested, the elevation of whiteness above blackness in America's northern cities originated in economic greed, developed into wage competition, and then sustained itself with bogus 'race' theories only after black degradation was already...
...Ignatiev's heavily researched study goes beyond historicizing concepts of whiteness to locate their crystalization in the unique experience of Irish immigration. No other European ethnicity began so penniless, oppressed and spurned as the Irish Catholics did when they first arrived, or worked and languished in worse conditions. Irish considered themselves the blacks of Europe and black freedmen viewed themselves, according to some literature of the day, comfortably superior in position to that of the Irishman. Somewhere in the crucible of New England urban labor competition, the Irish forged a new white identity for themselves to ensure their place next...
...steam with his sometimes-well-thought-out, sometimes-off-the-cuff statements. Of all of the campus figures I've known in my ephemeral time at Harvard, he's the one who's done the most to make students think. (Of course, second prize goes to "Toaster Tutor" Noel Ignatiev, who criticized an appliance and left hundreds of discussions in his wake. And he's a Marxist...
Last May, students and tutors became outraged after Noel Ignatiev, a nonresident tutor in the house, was not rehired after voicing his strong objections to a kosher toaster paid for out of University funds...
...beyond the institutional questions, there is an even larger problem at Dunster House: Karel Liem. His handling of the Nobel Ignatiev case last spring was despicable, too. When Ignatiev, a non-resident tutor, spoke out about, of all things, a kosher toaster, he was, as Liem would say, "non-rehired"--the tutorial equivalent of a firing...