Posted on 09/06/2002 9:09:57 AM PDT by mark_interrupted
The Day Whitey Died By Lowell Ponte FrontPageMagazine.com | September 6, 2002
WHEN ABOLISHING THE WHITE RACE was first proposed by a Harvard University professor, the idea seemed absurd.
But looking backward from our more enlightened, homogenized world in 2022, we owe this Fellow at Harvard's Black Studies department, the W.E.B. DuBois Institute, our gratitude for all he has done to erase all diversity in human skin color.
What makes Marxist Noel Ignatiev's achievement all the greater is that he was born with white skin. He was an abolitionist who set out to abolish himself — and as we now know, he succeeded.
"The white race is like a private club based on one huge assumption that all those who look white are, whatever their complaints or reservations, fundamentally loyal to the race," proclaimed Ignatiev, founder of the journal Race Traitor, in Harvard Magazine. "We want to dissolve that club."
At first Ignatiev aimed at persuading fellow Caucasians to abandon their racial loyalty and, with it, their privileged position. "Treason to whiteness," read the motto of Race Traitor, "is loyalty to humanity."
But then his thinking evolved to a higher level. Ignatiev recognized that cultural identity could shift. He first came to public attention with his 1995 book How the Irish Became White, a study of how these ethnic immigrants to America — originally targets of discrimination — became "oppressors" by putting self-identification with their skin color above all else.
The Irish did this more than a century ago, back when suntanned skin was the debased mark of people who labored out in the sun. Many ladies in that era drank highly-diluted arsenic because doing so gave their skin a then-fashionable pallid icy whiteness.
In the same September 2002 that his call for the abolition of the white race was sparking commentaries, Ignatiev was browsing the BBC online when he came upon an amazing news story. At Monash University near Melbourne, Australia, scientists were developing "Melanotan," a drug that boosts the body's production of the hormone melanin.
Melanin is the dark pigment that makes the skin of black people black and, in lesser amount, the skin of brown people brown. It evolved as a natural umbrella the body uses to shield itself from the sun's harmful rays.
Melanin is also the chemical that makes white people the chameleons of our species, bleaching out in winter so that the Caucasian skin can drink in scant winter sunshine at far northern latitudes and increasing in summer so that the George Hamiltons of the world can acquire protective, attractive tans.
The scientists at Monash University were developing Melanotan as a kind of cosmetic worn inside the skin, a way to acquire a genuine tan that would enhance what today our culture sees as a sign of health. These scientists, of course, know that in a Caucasian a tan is a sign of unhealth — of the body putting up shields against already-excessive exposure to sunlight. But by creating a dark tan before someone went sunning, Melanotan could reduce the epidemic rate of skin cancer suffered by whites in Australia and elsewhere.
Ignatiev in a blinding flash of insight saw that Melanotan could also abolish white skin itself and hence all the ills he saw in it.
If all Caucasians were required to take Melanotan, this would be like giving all whites a race transplant operation.
The same drug that in Australian experiments turned light-furred dogs and rats dark could turn every one of the world's whites into "people of color."
Ignatiev picked up his telephone and volunteered to fly to Australia and become a guinea pig for the Monash University scientists. Six months later, looking into his mirror Ignatiev saw that his fondest wish had come true. He had shed the white skin that had made him hate himself so much.
(Or perhaps his hatred of whites was what Sigmund Freud called "projection," with Ignatiev semi-consciously ascribing to all those of his color the Marxist totalitarian evil that lurked in his own heart.)
Ignatiev decided to write a book about his transformation and what it taught him about racism. He planned to call his book Black Like Me, but was shocked when told that just such a book with that title had been published in 1961 by John Howard Griffin. Griffin had darkened his own white skin in 1959 to experience what being a black was like in the then-segregated South.
The next day, to his horror, in the mirror Ignatiev saw his own whiteness returning. This was normal, the scientists reminded him. He was overdue for his monthly injection of time-release Melanotan, nicknamed the "Barbie Drug" (no, not as in "Slip another shrimp on the Barbie") beneath his skin.
Ignatiev pulled out his pencil and paper and began to calculate as he talked to himself: "America has 285 million people. Seventy-five percent of these, or about 214 million, are officially categorized as "white" (although a large share of Hispanics think of their skin as white, too). At an expected cost of $100 per dose each month, or $1,200 per year, this means that the cost of using Melanotan to extinguish every white skin will be about $256.8 billion per year.
"But it's worth it," muttered Ignatiev to himself. "Until genetic engineering or intermarriage lets us eradicate white skin forever, we'll just have to require whites to take their mandatory Melanotan shots every month.
"And, anyway," Ignatiev chuckled dementedly to himself as his megalomania spiraled upward, "we're protecting these Caucasians from the skin cancer their white flesh is heir to. They should be grateful. And we can pay for these shots with a tax on white people, because in the government computers they will still be recorded by race as Bill Clinton and Al Gore required. Maybe white skin is just an outward sign of an inner genetic defect that melanin can conceal but not cure. Maybe some black leaders inherited this defect from the white side of their milk chocolate ancestry. Maybe…."
Ignatiev would suffer another blow on that fateful afternoon. He had applied to the Guinness Book of World Records to be recognized as the world's first "race transplant" recipient.
He was heartbroken that day to receive a letter informing him that this title already belonged to singer Michael Jackson, a trans-racial traveler in the opposite direction.
"It seems fascinating," this prophetic letter read, "that with so many whites cultivating natural tans and taking Melanotan, and with so many African-Americans continuing efforts to lighten their own and their children's skins, humankind appears destined to homogenize into a single café latte skin hue that soon will make our species as diverse and exciting as beige."
But looking back, we salute Noel Ignatiev as humanity's true pioneer in trans-racial travel. He spearheaded the political use of Melanotan, now commonplace today in 2022, that has made extinct the very idea of whiteness.
And he was the first human guinea pig for gene therapy to make permanent his own skin color change. It's sad that he reacted so self-destructively when things went awry and the resulting strange color was not to his liking. At least he was no longer white. It's a shame he had to dye.
More like hundreds of thousands of dollars after all the financing interest.
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