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Notes -
FWIW "Abolish whiteness" was an extremely common slogan during the Floyd Great Awakening, and the term itself was coined by a high-status Jew in the Academy, Noel Ignatiev:
The point is, when you criticize Jews in any capacity you are crossing the line too far into norms of civility, whereas Jews criticizing Whites is extremely prolific and high-status across all cultural and academic institutions.
A lot of the surge of anti-semitism is coming from the rejection of the notion that Jews deserve this special treatment, where the "norms of civility" means they are beyond any criticism in any similar measure they give to Whites.
The tweet said:
It should also be noted that Noel Ignatiev regarded anti-semitism as a "Crime against humanity." So according to Harvard professor Ignatiev there's a moral impetus to abolish the white race by any means necessary, but anti-semitism is a Crime against Humanity. The surge of anti-semitism is caused by the Noticing of this bitterly hostile social consensus. The actions of Israel are going a long way in revealing this social consensus for what it is.
It would probably be prudent to offer the full context here:
...
So, he's objecting to what he sees as specific Jewish privilege and is specifically answers the claim that this action would make him an anti-Semite. Seems like context that one would want to include and not just drop this one individual sentence here, whatever one things about Ignatiev's other statements.
Can you explain how the context contradicts my summary? He vocally supported ending the white race, while at the same time declaring anti-Semitism a Crime against Humanity. That was my statement, and your context does not refute that in any way. Sure, he made that affirmation in order to defend himself from the accusation of anti-Semitism for his position on Harvard food accommodations but that is no matter. What I have said is not changed whatsoever by the context you provided, he simultaneously held both positions exactly as I described.
You are being intentionally obtuse. You are obviously intelligent enough to parse Ignatiev’s actual beliefs, yet you intentionally flatten their nuance whenever they appear to deviate from your simplistic framing.
Let’s assume for a moment that Ignatiev is forthrightly representing his own beliefs. He wishes to abolish the cultural belief that appearance and ancestry should confer any prestige or preferential treatment upon any individual. He, like any committed critical theorist, believes that an inherent quality of “whiteness” — not simply a broadly European phenotype, but the cluster of meaning and historical importance retroactively applied to people with that phenotype — is a belief in a hierarchy in which white people are in some sense more important, more valuable, etc., than non-white people are.
In that sense, it is also true that he wants to “abolish the black race”; not to abolish the African phenotype, but to abolish the idea that anyone should care what ancestral group an individual appears to descend from. However, it means something different to lead with a call to abolish a powerful, hegemonically-empowered group than it does to lead with a call to abolish a more vulnerable, historically-persecuted group. When it comes to Jews, it makes sense for Ignatiev to say that Jewish people have just as much a right to their own private religious beliefs as anybody else, but that these religious beliefs should not be made into a template for policymaking, nor should Jews be treated as any more special than anyone else. (As they are in Israel, which is why Ignatiev has repeatedly expressed opposition to the existence of Israel.)
In this framing, anti-Semitism is bad specifically because it is one example of a larger category of beliefs: namely, that an individual’s ancestry or inherited religious beliefs should have any bearing on one’s treatment of, or expectations about, that individual. It happened that the context of the conversation Ignatiev was having centered around a Jewish-specific issue. (And one on which, as @Stefferi pointed out, Ignatiev came down on the side that did not advantage Jews rather than the one that did.) Had that conversation been about a black-centric issue, he would have said that anti-blackness is a crime against humanity.
Now, if all of these beliefs are his actual beliefs, there is no hypocrisy there at all. He is a standard-issue hardcore blank statist secular progressive who wants to abolish nations, dissolve unchosen bonds between individuals in order to liberate them to pursue a life of pure self-discovery and voluntary commitments. There’s no secret undercurrent of wanting to see Jewish people secretly privileging themselves while dissolving other macro-scale unchosen identities.
And of course you can say he’s lying, and that in fact his commitment to blank-slate liberated individualism does actually have a secret exception clause for Jews. (This appears to be your claim.) But then, if you’ve opened the door to accusing him of cynically lying, why are you certain that he’s honest about wanting to abolish whiteness, but also certain that he’s lying about not thinking anti-Semitism is any worse (or any better) than any other form of bigotry? Why couldn’t he be making a bombastic call to “abolish whiteness” because it’s catchy, provocative, and likely to get him a lot of attention, interview requests, and speaking engagements? Why is it that you believe Jews are liars, except when they say negative thing about white people?
Like, Ignatiev’s contention is that there is a society-wide belief that phenotypically-European people are more special than other races, and that’s it’s somehow important to keep them pure and make sure they continue to hold all the important positions of power in as many advanced first-world countries as possible, both because they’re entitled to those countries (“we built them”) and because they’re more qualified to competently run them, whereas other races would fuck it up. That’s what he means when he talks about “whiteness” and what he has explicitly argued for abolishing.
And this appears to be a pretty accurate descriptor of your beliefs! You do think those things about white people! When I’ve expressed enthusiasm about miscegenation between white people and East Asians, you’ve reacted with shock and horror, because you take it for granted that preserving the genetic purity of the white race is of considerable importance. When others have argued in favor of skilled non-white immigration into white countries, you’ve expressed fervent opposition because you don’t think non-whites would be responsible, capable, conscientious wielders of power within white countries. Basically you want non-white people to stay in the parts of the world that currently have all the non-white people, because you want them to stay separate from white people. You’ve made this explicit! The caricature of “whiteness” which Ignatiev attacks — one which, in truth, vanishingly few white people in the 21st century believe in — is the reality of your belief system.
If you want to claim that Ignatiev is making sone larger, more genocidal claim about wanting to directly harm all people of fair skin, or all people of European descent — and also that he wishes to exempt himself from this by retreating into a defensive and subversive Jewish identity — then you have to actually contend with the substance of his stated arguments.
Obviously I understand Ignatiev's beliefs, better than you apparently. No, I don't think Ignatiev is calling for a literal murder of all white people. Instead he is using his own non-negligible cultural influence to deconstruct and pathologize White Identity, in an effort to undermine it. I understand that perfectly well, I more than most here understand that you don't undermine a race by just committing murder, you do it at a symbolic and ultimately cultural level. It remains an expression of a strong ethnic hostility even if it's not actually advocating for physical violence.
Citation strongly needed! He regards the Black Race as a social construct also, but one that is sympathetic and he does not call to Abolish Blackness. If you're going to provide a claim for that, please provide evidence. While you're at it- provide evidence that he called to Abolish Jewry. Of course he did neither such thing, it is Whites who who receive the enmity of his ideological worldview and no other racial group.
Calling for the Abolition of Whiteness while simultaneously declaring anti-semitism as "Crime against Humanity" is a far more important demand for Jewish privilege than the question over whether Jews at Harvard should be given dedicated kitchens. He is demanding Jewish privilege by socially deconstructing White identity while declaring in-kind criticism of Jewish identity to be a Crime against Humanity. His position on dining at Harvard notwithstanding, which is entirely irrelevant to the question at hand.
Please provide evidence Ignatiev called for the Abolition of Blackness or Jewry. He did not. He called for the Abolition of Whiteness, and he declared anti-semitism to be a crime against humanity. Which is exactly what I said in my original post.
I challenged your absurdly naive notion that combining all the races of the world would magically combine all the relative strengths of each group into one superior specimen:
That was the juvenile claim you made which I challenged.
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