This excerpt from When Race Becomes Real: Black and White Writers Confront Their Personal Histories, edited by Bernestine Singley, appeared in 2002 as part of Harvard Magazine’s coverage of recent books by Harvard affiliates. The excerpt concerns author Noel Ignatiev’s role in launching a journal “to chronicle and analyze the making, remaking, and unmaking of whiteness.”
“THE GOOD NEWS is that there are now a host of writers and a growing number of courses and workshops designed to enlighten white people as to the real benefits and the great cost of their property in whiteness,” writes former Harvard Law School professor Derrick Bell in his epilogue to When Race Becomes Real: Black and White Writers Confront Their Personal Histories,edited by Bernestine Singley, LL.M. ’76 (Lawrence Hill Books, $26.95). Many of those engaged in this Herculean task are white, Bell notes, among them Noel Ignatiev, Ed.M. ’85, Ph.D. ’94, C.A.S. ’95, author of How the Irish Became White and a fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, who writes:
IN THE INTERESTS of survival, Afro-Americans have always studied whiteness. There is a long tradition among them that the white race is a peculiar sort of social formation, one that depends on its members’ willingness to conform to the institutions and behavior patterns that reproduce it. By the early 1900s…it was becoming commonplace in the academy to speak of race, along with class and gender, as a social construct….