Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho — Comrade Ignatiev's Got to Go!

By Isabel Lyman

Meet Noel Ignatiev. He's a fellow at Harvard's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute who makes a living trash talking white folks.

In 1996, his book - How the Irish Became White - was published. Ignatiev argued that a group of Catholic Irish immigrants were part of a vast white-wing conspiracy who went from "being members of an oppressed race in Ireland to being members of an oppressing race in the United States."

Fast forward to fall 2002. In the September-October issue of Harvard Magazine, Dr. Ignatiev (who is also the founding father of a journal called Race Traitor) writes, "The goal of abolishing the white race is, on its face, so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed white supremacists."

Why? "Every group within white America has at one time or another advanced its particular and narrowly defined interests at the expense of black people as a race."

Well, that would be big news to my Costa Rican dad who, for three decades, has primarily hired minorities to help him run his built-from-scratch shipping business in South Florida.

Noel Ignatiev's take-no-prisoners crusade for social justice, however, has no room for historical accuracy or for showing mercy. "Make no mistake about it: we intend to keep bashing the dead white males, and the live ones, and the females too, until the social construct known as 'the white race' is destroyed - not 'deconstructed,' but destroyed."

Destroyed? Sheesh. Ignatiev would be burned in effigy at Harvard Yard if he had made the case for 'eradicating the social category known as Asians.' But the type of ethnic cleansing he champions is perfectly acceptable in the diversity-crazed halls of academia because, as syndicated columnist Paul Craig Roberts has observed, "Getting rid of whiteness is not controversial at Harvard, because it is the business of American universities."

Indeed, the Du Bois Institute is a sanctuary for the race baiters. Henry Louis Gates, a humanities professor, is an outspoken proponent of reparations. His former colleague, Cornel West, left Harvard in a huff after the school's president Lawrence Sommers scolded him for his non-scholarly pursuit - a spoken-word compact disc. The CD featured a "song" with this memorable line: "From the heights of rich African humanity. To the depths of sick American barbarity. In the whirlwinds of white supremacy. Black people preserved their sanity and dignity."

So, the hoi polloi want to know: Why has this bunk become the business of the country's most prestigious university?

One answer. The school is jam packed with cultural Marxists who think like conspiracy theorists. In this ring, we have a group of oppressors - the white, heterosexual, capitalistic males (boo!). And in the other we have the victims - special interest groups who are partial to socialism (yeah!). For all their blather about academic freedom, these autocrats demand that the bad guys and their culture be knocked out. Alas, the sane voices in this class-and-race bacchanal at Cambridge are few.

Former leftist David Horowitz, for example, bluntly made the following observation: "But while white Christians make up 73% of the American population, they are only 17% of the population at Harvard. Like the exclusion of conservatives from Harvard's faculty, this does not happen by accident, but by ideological design." The Luntz Research Companies survey of 151 professors from the social sciences and the humanities at Ivy League universities found that only 3% of the academics polled identified themselves as Republicans.

In such a biased atmosphere, it is a crying shame that the solons of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute will probably never give cutting-edge racial and ethnic issues their scholarly attention. For instance …
*African Cathy Buckle's first-person accounts about how the Zimbabwe government has confiscated the land and homes of white farmers and the horrific food crisis that has ensued. "Zimbabwe's small towns are dying," writes Buckle. "Her people are starving, dirty and desperate, and President (Robert) Mugabe tells the world to keep out of 'his Zimbabwe.'"

*The great shift in immigration patterns in the Northeast. An Associated Press article reported that in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, for example, the previously dominant German culture is on the wane, being replaced by one with a lively Hispanic flavor. "Immigration from northern and western Europe has decreased to a trickle compared to the 19th and 20th centuries," notes the AP story.

*The emotional correspondence that Jesse Lee Peterson, a black minister who helps the urban poor of Los Angeles, publishes in his newsletter, BOND. In the Aug/Sept issue, Rev. Peterson shared a poignant e-mail he received from Melanie in Atlanta, Georgia. "I fear for the young white children that are being raised to be ashamed of their heritage that has been wrongly vilified."

Wrongly vilified, indeed. Time for taxpayers and Crimson alums to raise a rumpus about the academic charlatans who have occupied Harvard University and transformed it into bunker of hate. Or, to paraphrase a popular chant heard at left-wing protests: "Hey, hey, ho, ho. Comrade Ignatiev has got to go."

Isabel Lyman is a freelance journalist and author of The Homeschooling Revolution.