Jeffrey B. Perry

Jeffrey B. Perry -- Slide Presentation/​Talk on
The Invention of the White Race (Verso Books) by Theodore W. Allen
with special emphasis on Vol. II: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America.
Hosted by “The Hubert Harrison and Theodore W. Allen Society”
Filmed by Fred Nguyen on January 31, 2013
Brecht Forum, New York City
.

"The Invention of the White Race"
Dr. Jeffrey Perry Discusses the New Expanded Edition The Invention of the White Race (Verso Books, 2012)
Interview by Gary Glennell Toms
January 29, 2013.

“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.

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.

“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.”
Theodore W. Allen
The Invention of the White Race, Vol. 1, 1994
(Written after searching through 885 county-years of Virginia’s colonial records)


“In the latter half of the seventeenth century, [in] Virginia and Maryland, the tobacco colonies . . . Afro-American and European-American proletarians made common cause in this struggle to an extent never duplicated in the three hundred years since.”
Theodore W. Allen
Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race, 1975

“ . . . the plantation bourgeoisie established a system of social control by the institutionalization of the ‘white’ race whereby the mass of poor whites was alienated from the black proletariat and enlisted as enforcers of bourgeois power.”
Theodore W. Allen
Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race, 1975


“ . . . the record indicates that laboring-class European-Americans in the continental plantation colonies showed little interest in ‘white identity’ before the institution of the system of ‘race’ privileges at the end of the seventeenth century.”
Theodore W. Allen
The Invention of the White Race, Vol. 1, 1994

“ . . . their (the poor “whites”) own position, vis–a-vis the rich and powerful . . . was not improved, but weakened, by the white-skin privilege system.”
Theodore W. Allen
Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race, 1975

“Given this understanding of slavery in Anglo-America as capitalism, and of the slaveholders as capitalists, it follows that the chattel bond-laborers were proletarians. Accordingly, the study of class consciousness as a sense the American workers have of their own class interests, must start with recognition of that fact.”
Theodore W. Allen
“On Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness,” 2001

“The most vulnerable point at which a decisive blow can be struck against bourgeois rule in the United States is white supremacy. White supremacy is both the keystone and the Achilles heel of U.S. bourgeois democracy, the historic font of bourgeois rule in the United States.”
Theodore W. Allen
“The Most Vulnerable Point,” 1972

“ . . . among the masses of white workers, the bourgeoisie established the dominance of race consciousness as against proletarian class consciousness.”
Theodore W. Allen
“Presentation for a Panel Discussion,” 1972

“All the while their white blindspot prevents them from seeing what we are talking about is . . . the ‘white question,’ the white question of questions – the centrality of the problem of white supremacy and the white-skin privilege which have historically frustrated the struggle for democracy, progress and socialism in the US.”
Theodore W. Allen
“White Blindspot,” 1967

“(In) three periods of national crisis [Civil War and Reconstruction, Populist Revolt of 1890s, and the Great Depression of the 1930s] characterized by general confrontations between capital and urban and rural laboring classes . . . The key to the defeat of the forces of democracy, labor and socialism was in each case achieved by ruling-class appeals to white supremacism, basically by fostering white-skin privileges of laboring-class European-Americans.”
Theodore W. Allen
[New] “Introduction” to “The Kernel and the Meaning:
A Contribution to a Proletarian Critique of United States History,” 2003

“[This ‘white race’] . . . this all-class association of European-Americans held together by ‘racial’ privileges conferred on laboring class European-Americans relative to African-Americans – [has functioned] as the principal historic guarantor of ruling-class domination of national life”
Theodore W. Allen
“Summary of the Argument of The Invention of the White Race,” 1998

“The ‘white race’ is the historically most general form of ‘class collaboration.’”
Theodore W. Allen
Taped Interview with Chad Pearson, SUNY-Albany, May 13, 2004

“ . . . the ‘white race’ must be understood, not simply as a social construct, but as a ruling class social control formation.”
Theodore W. Allen
“Summary of the Argument of The Invention of the White Race,” 1998

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.