The Invention of the White Race: The Origin of Racial Oppression

Theodore W. Allen (1919-2005) was an anti-white supremacist, working-class intellectual and activist who began his pioneering work on white skin privilege and white race privilege in 1965. He co-authored the influential White Blindspot (1967), authored Can White Workers Radicals Be Radicalized? (1969), and wrote the ground-breaking Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race (1975) before publication of his seminal two-volume classic The Invention of the White Race (1994, 1997).

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. Historical debate about the origin of racial slavery has focused on the status of the Negro in seventeenth-century Virginia and Maryland. However, as Theodore W. Allen argues in this magisterial work, what needs to be studied is the transformation of English, Scottish, Irish and other European colonists from their various statuses as servants, tenants, planters or merchants into a single new all-inclusive status: that of whites. This is the key to the paradox of American history, of a democracy resting on race assumptions.

 

Volume One of this two-volume work attempts to escape the 'white blind spot' which has distorted consecutive studies of the issue. It does so by looking in the mirror of Irish history for a definition of racial oppression and for an explanation of that phenomenon in terms of social control, free from the absurdities of classification by skin color. Compelling analogies are presented between the history of Anglo-Irish and British rule in Ireland and American White Supremacist oppression of Indians and African-Americans. But the relativity of race is shown in the sea change it entailed, whereby emigrating Irish haters of racial oppression were transformed into White Americans who defended it. The reasons for the differing outcomes of Catholic Emancipation and Negro Emancipation are considered and occasion is made to demonstrate Allen's distinction between racial and national oppression.

"A monumental study of the birth of racism in the American South which makes truly new and convincing points about one of the most critical problems in US history ... a highly original and seminal work."
--David Roediger

 

"A powerful and polemical study."
--Times Literary Supplement

 

"In a masterful two-volume work, Theodore Allen transforms the reader's understanding of race and racial oppression from what mainstream history often portrays as an unfortunate sideshow in U.S. history to a central feature in the construction of U.S. (and indeed global) capitalism ... more than a look at history; it is a foundation for a path toward social justice."
--Bill Fletcher Jr., coauthor of Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path Toward Social Justice

 

"A must read for all social justice activists, teachers, and scholars."
--Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie

 

"Decades before people made careers 'undoing racism, ' Ted Allen was working on this trailblazing study, which has become required reading."
--Noel Ignatiev, coeditor of Race Traitor, author of How the Irish Became White

 

"A real tour de force, a welcome return to empiricism in the subfield of race studies, and a timely reintroduction of class into the discourse on American exceptionalism."