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Jeffrey B. Perry Blog

Re : "white" Workers

“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 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--

“…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 ‘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--

“ . . . 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--

These quotes are from From Jeffrey B. Perry, “The Developing Conjuncture and Some Insights From Hubert Harrison and Theodore W. Allen On the Centrality of the Fight Against White Supremacy” (120 pp., forthcoming online by August 23, 2011, at "Cultural Logic")
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