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Allen sought to challenge what he considered to be the two main arguments that undermine and disarm the struggle against white supremacy in the working class:
1. the argument that racism is innate, and
2. the argument that European-American workers benefit from racism.
The first argument is associated with the "unthinking decision" explanation for the development of racial slavery offered by historian Winthrop Jordan in his influential, National Book Award-winning, "White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812." The second argument is associated with historian Edmund S. Morgan's similarly influential, triple-award-winning, "American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia", which maintains that, as racial slavery developed, "there were too few free poor [European-Americans] on hand to matter."
Morgan, a past president of the Organization of American Historians and recipient of the 2000 National Humanities Medal for "extraordinary contributions to American cultural life and thought," went even further in "American Slavery, American Freedom" and in his 1972 article "Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox." In these writings he offered a master narrative, which Allen described as "an assessment of white supremacism in relation to the foundation of the United States as a republic in a positive light." Its essence, to Allen, was "the thesis . . . that democracy and equality as represented in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of 1789, were, . . . made possible by racial oppression"; or, as Morgan stated it, "the slavery of Afro-Americans made possible, indeed was essential for, the emergence of the notion of equality as the fundamental constitutional principle of the United States." Allen considered Morgan's thesis to be both inaccurate and a hindrance to the struggle against white supremacy.
Allen was convinced, however, that it was not enough to simply counter Morgan's thesis and the arguments that racism is innate and that workers benefit from racism. What was needed, he concluded, was "a self-standing completely opposite theory." That is the task that "Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race" begins. Allen's new theory is built, as he explains, on "three essential bearing-points" that challenge both Jordan and Morgan and "from which it cannot be toppled":
First, racial slavery and white supremacy in this country was a ruling-class response to a problem of labor solidarity. Second, a system of racial privileges for white workers was deliberately instituted in order to define and establish the "white race" as a social control formation. Third, the consequence was not only ruinous to the interests of the Afro-American workers but was also "disastrous" . . . for the white worker.
"White supremacism was the Achilles heel of the labor, democratic, and socialist movements in this country."
Melissa Anyiwo
Hosted Allen Class
Curry College
Milton, Mass.
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“When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no ‘white’ people there; nor, according to colonial records, would there be for another sixty years” writes Theodore W. Allen on the back cover of Volume 1 of his seminal, two-volume, "The Invention of the White Race." Allen meticulously details how the “white race” was invented as a ruling-class social control formation in response to labor unrest in the wake of Bacon’s Rebellion (1676-77), how it was created and maintained through “white race” privileges conferred on laboring class European Americans relative to African Americans, how these privileges were not in the interest of African Americans or laboring class European Americans, and how the “white race” has been the principal historic guarantor of ruling-class domination in America.
Since publication in the mid-1990s, "Invention" has been recognized as a “classic.” Volume One reviews the origin of racism debate and utilizes the "mirror" of Irish history to show the relativity of “race” and racial oppression as a form of social control not based on “phenotype.” Volume Two focuses on colonial Virginia and describes the invention of the “white race” as a ruling class social control formation and the development of racial oppression and racial slavery in Anglo-America.
“The Developing Conjuncture and Some Insights From Hubert Harrison and Theodore W. Allen on the Centrality of the Fight Against White Supremacy” by Jeffrey B. Perry is now available at http://www.jeffreybperry.net/works.htm (top left)
This is a pre-publication version of an article that will appear online in "Cultural Logic"
When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no "white" people there; nor, according to the colonial records, would there be for another sixty years.
Throughout much of the seventeenth century conditions in Virginia were quite similar for Afro-American and Euro-American laboring people and the "white race" did not exist.
There were many significant instances of labor unrest and solidarity in Virginia, especially during the 1660s and 1670s, and it is of transcendent importance that "foure hundred English and Negroes in Arms" fought together demanding freedom from bondage in the latter stages of Bacon's Rebellion.
The "white race" was invented as a ruling class social control formation in response to the labor unrest in the latter (civil war) stages of Bacon's Rebellion of 1676-77.
The "white race" was developed and maintained through the systematic extension of "a privileged status" by the ruling class to European-American laboring people who were not promoted out of the working class, but came to participate in this new multi-class "white" formation.
The non-enslavement of European-American laborers was the necessary pre-condition for the development of racial slavery [the particular form of racial oppression that developed in the continental plantation colonies].
The "white race" social control formation, racial slavery, the system of white supremacy, and white racial privileges were ruinous to the class interests of working people and workers' "own position, vis-à-vis the rich and powerful . . . was not improved, but weakened, by the white-skin-privilege system."
Slavery in the continental colonies was capitalism, the slaveholders were capitalists, and the chattel bond servants (including those enslaved), were proletarians.
Shortly before his death, Allen, as both an intellectual and an activist, posed four basic challenges for the work ahead:
1. To show that white supremacism is not an inherited attribute of the European-American personality.
2. To demonstrate that white-supremacism has not served the interests of the laboring-class European-Americans.
3. To account for the prevalence of white-supremacism within the ranks of laboring-class European-Americans.
4. By the light of history, to consider ways whereby European-American laboring people may cast off the stifling incubus of "white" identity.
Rudolph Lewis in his Chicken Bones: A Journal website dedicates a section to "Theodore W. Allen and His Insights"
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