Ignatiev was raised in Philadelphia, the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia. He attended the University of Pennsylvania but dropped out after three years. He worked in a steel mill in Chicago and in factories manufacturing farm equipment and electrical parts for two decades. Ignatiev was a Marxist activist and helped organize strikes and protests by the predominantly black work force at the steel mill. He was laid off from the steel mill in 1984, a year after he was arrested on charges of throwing a paint bomb at a strike-breaker's car.

Ignatiev set up Marxist discussion groups in the early 1980s. In 1985, Mr. Ignatiev was accepted to the Harvard Graduate School of Education without an undergraduate degree. After earning his master's, he joined the Harvard faculty as a lecturer and worked toward a doctorate in U.S. history.

Under the name Noel Ignatin, he joined the Communist Party USA in January 1958, but in August left (along with Theodore W. Allen and Harry Haywood) to help form the Provisional Organizing Committee to Reconstitute the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party (POC). He was expelled from the POC in 1966.

Later he became involved in the Students for a Democratic Society. When that organization split, Ignatiev became part of the Third-worldist and Maoist New Communist Movement, forming the group Sojourner Truth Organization in 1970. Unlike other groups in the New Communist Movement, the STO and Ignatiev were also heavily influenced by the ideas of C.L.R. James.

Ignatiev was a graduate student at Harvard University where he earned his Ph.D. in 1995. He taught courses there before moving to the Massachusetts College of Art, where he currently teaches. His academic work is linked to his call to "abolish" the white race, a controversial slogan whose meaning is not always agreed upon by those who debate his work. His dissertation, published by Routledge as the book How the Irish Became White, was advised by prominent social historian of American race and ethnicity Stephan Thernstrom. Ignatiev is the co-founder and co-editor of the journal Race Traitor and the New Abolitionist Society.

Views of race

Ignatiev is part of a group of social scientists and geneticists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries who view race distinctions and race itself as a social construct, not a scientific reality. In his study of Irish immigrants in the nineteenth-century United States, Ignatiev recounts the Irish triumph over nativism and shows how that triumph marked the incorporation of the Irish into the dominant group of American society. Ignatiev asserts that the Irish were not initially accepted by native-born Americans of Anglo-Saxon descent as white. He claims that only through their own violence against free blacks and support of slavery did the Irish gain acceptance as white. Ignatiev defines whiteness as the access to white privilege, which according to Ignatiev gains people perceived to have "white" skin admission to certain neighborhoods, schools, and jobs. In the nineteenth century it was strongly associated with political power, especially suffrage.

Ignatiev states that attempts to give race a biological foundation have only led to absurdities, as in the common example that a white woman could give birth to a black child, but a black woman could never give birth to a white child. Ignatiev asserts that the only logical explanation for this notion is that people are members of different racial categories because society assigns people to these categories.

"New Abolition" and the "White Race"

Ignatiev's academic views of race are not necessarily as controversial as his statements about the abolition of the white race. Though often misunderstood as a call for the physical elimination of people characterized or who identify as "white," Ignatiev has repeatedly explained that what he is calling for is the abolition of white privilege and race identity.

Ignatiev's web site and publication Race Traitor display the motto "treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity". In response to a letter to the site which understood the motto as meaning that the authors "hated" white people because of their "white skin," Ignatiev and the other editors responded:

Harvard tutorship

From 1986 until 1992, Ignatiev served as a tutor (academic advisor) for Dunster House at Harvard University. In early 1992, Ignatiev objected to the University's purchase of a toaster oven for the Dunster House dining hall that would be designated for kosher use only. He insisted that cooking utensils with restricted use should be paid for by private funds. In a letter to the Harvard student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, Ignatiev wrote that "I regard anti-Semitism, like all forms of religious, ethnic and racial bigotry, as a crime against humanity and whoever calls me an anti-Semite will face a libel suit."

Dunster House subsequently declined to renew Ignatiev's contract, saying that his conduct during the dispute was "unbecoming of a Harvard tutor." Dunster co-master Hetty Liem said it was the job of a tutor "to foster a sense of community and tolerance and to serve as a role model for the students," and that Ignatiev had not done so.

Encyclopedia of Race and Racism Controversy

In 2008, the American Jewish Committee objected to an encyclopedia article on Zionism that Ignatiev wrote for The Encyclopedia of Race and Racism. In the article, Ignatiev described Israel as a "racial state, where rights are assigned on the basis of ascribed descent or the approval of the superior race" and likened it to Nazi Germany and the Southern United States before the civil rights movement.

The American Jewish Committee cited numerous "factual and historical inaccuracies" in Ignatiev's article. The American Jewish Committee also questioned why the encyclopedia included an entry about Zionism, noting that it was the only nationalist movement with an article in the encyclopedia. Gideon Shimoni, Professor Emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, criticized the article as a "litany of errors and distortions of fact."

On Dec. 17, the publisher respond to "concerns from several organizations" over "the accuracy of, and support for, certain statements in the Zionism article" by announcing the appointment of an independent committee to investigate "the factual accuracy, scholarly basis, coverage, scope, and balance of every article." In a further response to the Ignatiev article, Gale published a 10-part composite article, "Nationalism and Ethnicity," which includes evaluations of cultural nationalism in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, North America and the Middle East, and Pan Arabism in addition to having a new article on Zionism available free of cost to all purchasers of the encyclopedia.