Theodore W. Allen’s The Invention of the White
Race
http://zcomm.org/znetarticle/theodore-w-allen-s-the-invention-of-the-white-race-by-jeffrey-b-perry/
May 3, 2013
The Invention of the White Race, Vol. I: Racial Oppression and Social
Control (New Expanded Edition,
Verso Books, November 2012)
Theodore W. Allen’s
two-volume The Invention of the White Race, republished by Verso
Books in a New Expanded Edition, presents a full-scale challenge to what Allen
refers to as “The Great White Assumption” – “the unquestioning, indeed
unthinking acceptance of the ‘white’ identity of European-Americans of all
classes as a natural attribute rather than a social construct.” Its thesis on
the origin and nature of the “white race” contains the root of a new and
radical approach to United States history, one that challenges master
narratives taught in the media and in schools, colleges, and universities. With
its equalitarian motif and emphasis on class struggle it speaks to people today
who strive for change worldwide.
Allen’s original
700-pages magnum opus, already recognized as a “classic” by
scholars such as Audrey Smedley, Wilson J. Moses, Nell Painter, and Gerald
Horne, included extensive notes and appendices based on his twenty-plus years
of primary source research. The November 2012 Verso edition adds
new front and back matter, expanded indexes, and internal study guides for use
by individuals, classes, and study groups. Invention is a
major contribution to our historical understanding, it is meant to stand the
test of time, and it can be expected to grow in importance in the 21st century.
“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.”
That arresting
statement, printed on the back cover of the first (1994) volume, reflected the
fact that, after pouring through 885 county-years of Virginia’s colonial
records, Allen found “no instance of the official use of the word ‘white’ as a
token of social status” prior to its appearance in a 1691 law. As he explained,
“Others living in the colony at that time were English; they had been English
when they left England, and naturally they and their Virginia-born children
were English, they were not ‘white.’” “White identity had to be
carefully taught, and it would be only after the passage of some six crucial decades”
that the word “would appear as a synonym for European-American.”
Allen was not merely
speaking of word usage, however. His probing research led him to conclude –
based on the commonality of experience and demonstrated solidarity between
African-American and European-American laboring people, the lack of a
substantial intermediate buffer social control stratum, and the “indeterminate”
status of African-Americans – that the “white race” was not, and could not have
been, functioning in early Virginia.
It is in the context
of such findings that he offers his major thesis — the “white race” was
invented as a ruling class social control formation in response to labor
solidarity as manifested in the later, civil war stages of Bacon's Rebellion
(1676-77). To this he adds two important corollaries: 1) the ruling
elite, in its own class interest, deliberately instituted a system of racial
privileges to define and maintain the “white race” and 2) the consequences were
not only ruinous to the interests of African-Americans, they were also
“disastrous” for European-American workers, whose class interests differed
fundamentally from those of the ruling elite.
In Volume I Allen
offers a critical examination of the two main lines of historiography on the
slavery and racism debate: the psycho-cultural approach, which he strongly
criticizes; and the socio-economic approach, which he seeks to free from
certain apparent weaknesses. He then proceeds to develop a definition of racial
oppression in terms of social control, a definition not based on “phenotype,”
or classification by complexion. In the process, he offers compelling analogies
between the oppression of the Irish in Ireland (under Anglo-Norman rule and
under “Protestant Ascendancy”) and white supremacist oppression of African
Americans and Indians.
Allen emphasizes that
maximizing profit and maintaining social control are two priority tasks of the
ruling class. He describes how racial oppression is one form of ruling class
response to the problem of social control and national oppression is
another. The difference centers on whether the key component of the
intermediate social control stratum are members of the oppressor group (racial
oppression) or the oppressed group (national oppression).
With stunning international
and domestic examples he shows how racial oppression (particularly in the form
of religio-racial oppression) was developed and maintained by the
phenotypically-similar British against the Irish Catholics in Ireland; how a
phenotypically-similar Anglo bourgeoisie established national oppression in the
Anglo-Caribbean and racial oppression in the continental Anglo-American
plantation colonies; how racial oppression was transformed into national
oppression due to ruling class social control needs in Ireland (while racial
oppression was maintained in Ulster); how the same people who were victims of
racial oppression in Ireland became “white American” defenders of racial
oppression in the United States; and how in America racial oppression took the
form of racial slavery, yet when racial slavery ended racial oppression
remained and was re-constituted in new form.
In Volume II, on The
Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America, Allen tells the
story of the invention of the “white race” in the late seventeenth- and early
eighteenth-century Anglo-American plantation colonies. His primary focus is on
the pattern-setting Virginia colony, and he pays special attention to the fact
that England alone, of all the European colonizing powers, exported so many of
its own surplus poor laboring population. He also pays particular attention to
the process by which tenants and wage-laborers in the majority English labor
force in Virginia were reduced to chattel bond-servants in the 1620s. In so
doing, he emphasizes that this reduction was a qualitative break from the
condition of laborers in England and from long established English labor law,
that it was not a feudal carryover, that it was imposed under capitalism, and
that it was an essential precondition of the emergence of the lifetime
hereditary chattel bond-servitude imposed upon African-American laborers under
the system of racial slavery.
Allen describes how,
throughout much of the seventeenth century, the status of African-Americans was
being fought out and he documents significant instances of labor solidarity and
unrest, especially during the 1660s and 1670s. Most important is his analysis
of the civil war stage of Bacon’s Rebellion when, in the final stages,
"foure hundred English and Negroes in Arms" fought together demanding
freedom from bondage.
It was in the period
after Bacon's Rebellion, in response to class struggle, that the “white race”
was invented as a ruling-class social control formation. Allen describes
systematic ruling-class policies, which conferred “white race” privileges on
European-Americans while imposing harsher disabilities on African-Americans
resulting in a system of racial slavery, a form of racial oppression that also
imposed severe racial proscriptions on free African-Americans. He emphasizes
that when African-Americans were deprived of their long-held right to vote in
Virginia and Governor William Gooch explained in 1735 that the Virginia
Assembly had decided upon this curtailment of the franchise in order "to
fix a perpetual Brand upon Free Negros & Mulattos," it was not an
"unthinking decision." Rather, it was a deliberate act by the
plantation bourgeoisie and was a conscious decision in the process of
establishing a system of racial oppression, even though it entailed repealing
an electoral principle that had existed in Virginia for more than a
century.
The key to
understanding racial oppression, Allen argues, is in the formation of the
intermediate social control buffer stratum, which serves the interests of the
ruling class. In the case of racial oppression in Virginia, any persons of
discernible non-European ancestry after Bacon's Rebellion were denied a role in
the social control buffer group, the bulk of which was made up of
laboring-class "whites." In the Anglo-Caribbean, by contrast, under a
similar Anglo- ruling elite, "mulattos" were included in the social
control stratum and were promoted into middle-class status. For Allen, this was
the key to understanding the difference between Virginia’s ruling-class policy
of “fixing a perpetual brand” on African-Americans, and the policy of the
West Indian planters of formally recognizing the middle-class status “colored”
descendant and other Afro-Caribbeans who earned special merit by their service
to the regime. This difference, between racial oppression and national
oppression, was rooted in a number of social control-related factors, one of
the most important of which was that in the West Indies there were “too few”
poor and laboring-class Europeans to embody an adequate petit bourgeoisie,
while in the continental colonies there were '’too many’' to be accommodated in
the ranks of that class.
The references to an
“unthinking decision” and “too few” poor and laboring class Europeans are
consistent with Allen's repeated efforts 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 white supremacism is
innate, and (2) the argument that European-American workers “benefit” from
“white race” privileges and that it is in their interest not to oppose them and
not to oppose white supremacy. These two arguments, opposed by Allen, are
related to two master historical narratives rooted in writings on the colonial
period. The first argument is associated with the “unthinking decision”
explanation for the development of racial slavery offered by historian Winthrop
D. Jordan in his influential, White Over Black. The second argument
is associated with historian Edmund S. Morgan’s similarly influential, American
Slavery, American Freedom, which maintains that, as racial slavery
developed, “there were too few free poor [European-Americans] on hand to
matter.” Allen’s work directly challenges both the “unthinking decision”
contention of Jordan and the “too few free poor” contention of Morgan. Allen
convincingly argues that the “white race” privileges conferred by the ruling
class on European-Americans were not only ruinous to the interests of
African-Americans; they were also against the class interest of
European-American workers.
The Invention of the
White Race is a compelling work that re-examines
centuries of history. It also offers Allen’s glimpse of “the future in the
distance.” When he completed Volume II sixteen years ago, the 78-years-old
Allen, in words that resonate today, ended by describing “unmistakable signs of
maturing social conflict” between “the common people” and “the Titans.” He
suggested that “Perhaps, in the impending . . . struggle,” influenced by the
“indelible stamp of the African-American civil rights struggle of the 1960s,”
the “white-skin privileges may finally come to be seen and rejected by
laboring-class European-Americans as the incubus that for three centuries has
paralyzed their will in defense of their class interests vis-à-vis those of the
ruling class.” It was with that prospect in mind, with its profound
implications for radical social change, that the independent, working class
intellectual/activist Theodore W. Allen (1919-2005) concluded The Invention
of the White Race.
