Abolishing whiteness has never been more urgent – by Mark Levine who teaches History at University of California.

Noel Ignatiev never set out to be a hero. His goal was quite the opposite: to be a “traitor” to a race that for much of his life would not accept him and whose inherent toxicity, he believed, would permanently impede the possibility of the United States living up to its ideals.

It is not a simple matter of doing the right thing, because whiteness obscures in our minds what the right thing is.

James Baldwin put it even more succinctly: “As long as you think you’re white, there’s no hope for you.”

Today, we would add that as long as 150 million Americans define themselves as white with all the expectations, privileges and violence that accrue to that identity, there is no hope for us as a nation. Of that, as Noel Ignatiev spent his life demonstrating, there can be little doubt.