Hyde Park Herald on Release of Acceptable Men

For the Hyde Park Herald, Jennifer Bamburg reported on the release event of Acceptable Men in Miller Beach:

“The event’s roster includes former co-workers from Gary Works, members of the Sojourner Truth Organization, and younger activists involved in similar struggles today. “I'm excited to see some steelworker families. It'll be different than your typical Chicago lefty event in that regard,” says Kingsley Clarke, Ignatiev’s closest friend, former Sojourner Truth Organization member, and member of the Kerr Press board of directors. 

Acceptable Men describes the everyday ways that workers subverted the power of racist management in the mills, from work evasion to writing collective statements, filing lawsuits and staging wildcat strikes.  …

 “The mainstream left's attitude on anti-racism at the time, however, was summarized as ‘Black and white unite and fight,’” says John Clegg, an organizer of the event who is working with a new group to help expand the press. “Noel and the Sojourner Truth Organization wanted to support Black autonomous organizing, not simply to integrate this Black workforce into traditional unions, but rather to support their independent organizing in the workplace with a vision of socialism.”

It was there in the mill and while working with the STO that Ignatiev began to theorize about structural racism and white privilege, and developed his goal to abolish the construct of whiteness itself. He later went on to found the journal “Race Traitor” in 1992 which declared on the spine of every issue, “Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.” 

The Sojourner Truth Organization operated their worker center out of an office on 88th and Exchange in South Chicago, and collective members provided legal aid to workers involved in local struggles. Ignatiev lived in Gary for the majority of his time working in the mill, but moved to 57th Street and Blackstone Avenue in Hyde Park in the late 1970s before eventually ending up closer to the worker center. 

“He was interested in the wider significance of workplace struggles,” says Clegg, “and wrote extensively about the role of Black struggles in American history. Eventually he would end up writing a book, ‘How the Irish Became White,’ about the emergence of racial division in the American working class.” 

Clarke, who was Ignatiev’s best friend, shows up in the memoir as the attorney with a “scraggly beard and cut jeans” who represented Black workers fighting for affirmative action in the mill. “It was a very important part politically, both in the memoir and in Noel’s history,” says Clarke.

The memoir is a brief glimpse into Ignatiev’s life, and ends when he leaves the steel mill and enters Harvard University in his mid-40s on a full ride. “He imagines (how his comrades in the steel plant) would both be very skeptical of his new life, but also appreciate the advantages that it has over working in this very dangerous steel plant,” says Clegg. 

This isn’t the first time Kerr Press has published Ignatiev’s works. In the 1990s he collaborated with the Kerr Press editors Penelope Rosemont and Franklin D. Rosemont, who guest edited and published a surrealist issue of “Race Traitor.” 

Kerr Press was founded in Chicago in 1886, making it the oldest left-wing publisher in the US. “Today, we hope that we can play a role in what we see is a revival of radical movements across the United States, especially since last summer's rebellion. We've seen a kind of upsurge in radical political thinking in the US. We hope that Kerr can be a conduit for that.” says Clegg. …