Noel Ignatiev was born in Philadelphia, the son of two Russian-Jewish immigrants. He was a life long revolutionary, a long-time steel worker in Gary, Indiana, the author of How the Irish Became White, and co-editor of the journal Race Traitor, an anthology from which won an American Book Award. He spent years debating in the Students for a Democratic Society, where he coined the term "white skin privilege" before going on to agitate on the factory floor for twenty years with the Sojourner Truth Organization. Later, he became an unlikely Harvard PhD grad, a renowned historian, and an untempered firebrand on the main political and cultural issues of our time.