Theodore W. Allen

Theodore William Allen (August 23, 1919-January 19, 2005) was an independent, self-educated, working class intellectual, writer, and activist and the author of the two volume history "The Invention of the White Race." His many writings and seminal ideas challenging white supremacy and capitalism have continued to grow in influence since his death. [Jeffrey B. Perry, “Theodore W. Allen: In Memoriam,” "Cultural Logic," 2005 [http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/Perry.html] . Perry is Allen’s literary executor and is indexing and inventorying the Theodore W. Allen Papers.]

Allen’s main thesis in "The Invention of the White Race" was first articulated in February 1974.

*That the "white race" was invented as a ruling class social control formation in response to labor unrest manifested in the second (civil war) stage of Bacon's Rebellion of 1676-77

That thesis and two other related theses:

*That 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, and
*That the consequence was not only ruinous to the interests of the Afro-American workers but was also "disastrous" . . . for the "white" workers;

were developed most fully in a number of Allen’s writings including the 1975 pamphlet "Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race," [http://clogic.eserver.org/2006/allen.html] the two-volume work "The Invention of the White Race" (1994 [http://www.versobooks.com/books/ab/a-titles/allen_vol1_white_race.shtml] and 1997 [http://www.versobooks.com/books/ab/a-titles/allen_vol2_white_race.shtml] , and in Allen's "Summary of the Argument of "The Invention of the White Race" [http://clogic.eserver.org/1-2/allen.html] which is readily available online. [See Theodore W. Allen, “‘They Would Have Destroyed Me’: Slavery and the Origins of Racism,” in "Radical America," Vol. 9, no. 3 (May-June, 1975), 40-63 at [http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/spl/allenradamer75.pdf] and also at [http://www.sojournertruth.net/destroyedme.html] repr. with changes as Theodore William Allen, "Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race"(Hoboken, N.J.: HEP PO Box M-71, 1975), repr. as Theodore W. Allen, "Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race," Edited with an Introduction by Jeffrey B. Perry, at [http://clogic.eserver.org/2006/allen.html] ; Theodore W. Allen, "The Invention of the White Race," Vol. 1 of 2: "Racial Oppression and Social Control" (New York: Verso, 1994) and Theodore W. Allen, "The Invention of the White Race," Vol. 2 of 2: "The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America." (New York: Verso, 1997); and Theodore W. Allen, "Summary of the Argument of ‘The Invention of the White Race’" (Parts 1 and 2), in "Cultural Logic," Vol. 1, no. 2 (Spring, 1998) at [http://clogic.eserver.org/1-2/allen.html] and [http://clogic.eserver.org/1-2/allen2.html] .]

Personal and Intellectual Biography

Early Years and Personal Life

Theodore William Allen, the third child (after a sister Eula May and brother Tom) of Thomas E. and Almeda Earl Allen was born into a middle-class family August 23, 1919, in Indianapolis, Indiana. His father was a sales manager and his mother a housewife. In 1929 the family moved to Huntington, West Virginia, where Ted was, in his words, "proletarianized by the Great Depression." He attended college for a one day after high school, but didn't believe that setting encouraged independent thought, didn't think it was for him, and didn't go back. At age 17 he joined the American Federation of Musicians (Local 362) and served as its delegate to the Huntington Central Labor Union, AFL (American Federation of Labor). He continued work in the trade union movement as a coal miner in West Virginia for three years until he was forced to leave because of a back injury. During that period he belonged to [United Mine Workers] locals 5426 (Prenter, West Virginia), 6206 (Gary, West Virginia) where he was an organizer and Local President, and 4346 (Barrackville, West Virginia). He also was co-organizer of a trade union organizing program for the Marion County West Virginia Industrial Union Council, CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations). [Perry, “Theodore W. Allen: In Memoriam”]

Allen joined the Communist Party in his teens and was largely self-educated. He read widely in history, politics, economics, literature, music, math, and the sciences, and was an excellent Marxist trained economist and a superb self-trained historian. He is a prime example of the point made by the historian [George W. Stocking, Jr.] , that "Standing outside the normal process by which intellectual traditions are transmitted, the autodidact may embody the spirit of his age in an unusually direct way.” [ Perry, “Theodore W. Allen: In Memoriam" and George W. Stocking, Jr., "Victorian Anthropology" (New York: Free Press; London: Collier Macmillan, 1987) [http://www.simonsays.com/content/book.cfm?tab=1&pid=405827] p. 112.]

In 1938 Allen married Ruth Voithofer, one of eleven children in a coal-mining family, whom he first met in 1934. Ruth was active in organizing and educational work among mining families and women and, beginning in 1942, was a prominent organizer for the [United Electrical Workers] Union. They separated in the mid-1940s. He subsequently was married briefly to Phyllis Peterson in the mid-1940s and then to the poet Marie Strong from the 1950s until her tragic death in 1962. From the 1970s to the 1990s he lived with his dear friend, Linda Vidinha. [ Perry, “Theodore W. Allen: In Memoriam.”]

1950s

In 1948 Allen moved to New York. After coming to New York he taught classes in economics at the Communist Party's Jefferson School (1949-56). He was active in community, civil rights, trade union, and student organizing work; he also worked in a factory, as a retail clerk, as a mechanical design draftsman, as an elevator operator, and as a junior high school math teacher at the Grace Church School in Manhattan. [ Perry, “Theodore W. Allen: In Memoriam.”]

In the late 1950s the Communist Party went through major repression and internal struggle and Allen left the Party in order to help establish a new organization, the Provisional Organizing Committee to Reconstitute the Communist Party (POC). In this period he wrote a number of economic and political articles on the economic situation in the United States and he argued that neither United States nor Latin American workers benefited from imperialism.

1960s Writings on White Supremacy

By the mid 1960s, living in Brooklyn and increasingly affected by the political climate marked by the growing civil rights movement, struggles for national liberation and socialism, and opposition to the Vietnam War, Allen set about taking a fresh look at the world and at his former beliefs. Nothing was sacred.

In 1965 Allen began using the term “white skin privilege” in printed material. In 1966, during what he described as “the changed ambience of the African American Civil Rights struggle . . . [and] the peace movement,” Allen began his historical research. He was inspired by insights from W. E. B. Du Bois in "Black Reconstruction" that the South after the Civil War “presented the greatest opportunity for a real national labor movement which the nation ever saw” and that the organized labor movement failed to recognize “in black slavery and Reconstruction” could be found “the kernel and meaning of the labor movement in the United States.” [ W. E. B. Du Bois, "Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880" (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1935), pp. 353, 377.]

Allen’s work focused on a historical study of three crises in United States history in which there were general confrontations between the forces of capital and those from below. The crises were those of the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Populist Revolt of the 1890s, and the Great Depression of the 1930s. Drawing again on Du Bois and his notion of the blindspot of America, which Allen paraphrased as “the white blindspot,” he described the role of the theory and practice of white supremacy in shaping the outcomes of those struggles. [Theodore W. Allen, “The Kernel and the Meaning: A Contribution to a Proletarian Critique of United States History” (1972 [first draft version 1967] ), n.p.; J. H. Kagin (pseudonym for Theodore W. Allen and Noel Ignatin (Ignatiev) ), "White Blindspot" (Osawatomie Associates, 1967); Ted [Theodore W.] Allen, “Can White Workers Radicals be Radicalized?” in Noel Ignatin [Ignatiev] and Ted (Theodore W.) Allen, "White Blindspot & Can White Workers Radicals Be Radicalized?"(Detroit: Radical Education Project and New York: NYC Revolutionary Youth Movement, 1969), pp. 12-18. John Henry Kagi (1835-1859) was a largely self-educated abolitionist who was killed in the John Brown (abolitionist)-led raid on Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, October 17, 1859. He was listed as Secretary of War and second in command to Brown in the provisional government.]

His work focused on the role of the theory and practice of white supremacy in shaping those outcomes. He worked together with his friend, Esther Kusic, and his work influenced another friend, Noel Ignatin [Noel Ignatiev] . Ignatin and Allen provided the copy for an article entitled "White Blindspot," under Ignatin's name, and Allen wrote the article "Can White Workers Radicals Be Radicalized" and these were combined in an influential pamphlet often referred to as the "White Blindspot" pamphlet. [Theodore W. (Ted) Allen and Ignatin [Ignatiev] , Noel, “White Blindspot” (n.p.: Osawatomie Associates, 1967) repr. as Theodore W. Allen and Noel Ignatin [Ignatiev] , Noel, “‘White Blindspot’ and “Can White Workers Radicals Be Radicalized?’”]

Allen argued against what he referred to as the current consensus on U.S. labor history -- one which attributed the low level of class consciousness among American workers to such factors as the early development of civil liberties, the heterogeneity of the work force, the "safety valve" of homesteading opportunities in the West, the ease of social mobility, the relative shortage of labor, and the early development of "pure and simple trade unionism." He emphasized that each of these rationales had to be reinterpreted in terms of white supremacy, that white supremacy was reinforced by the white-skin privilege of white workers, and "that the white-skin privilege does not serve the real interests of the white workers." [Ted [Theodore W.] Allen, “Can White Workers Radicals Be Radicalized?’” [1969] ]

In his historical research Allen was really addressing the question of “Why No Socialism in the United States?” He argued that the “old consensus” was “seriously flawed . . . by erroneous assumptions, one-sidedness, exaggeration, and above all, by white-blindness.” He countered with his own theory--that white supremacy, reinforced among European-Americans by “white skin privilege,” was the main retardant of working class consciousness in the United States and that efforts at radical social change should direct principal efforts at challenging the system of white supremacy and “white skin privilege.” [Allen, “The Kernel and the Meaning,” p. 41 and Allen, “Can White Workers Radicals Be Radicalized?” pp. 12-14.]

The ’’White Blindspot‘‘ pamphlet, which issued a call to action--"to repudiate the white-skin privilege"--was published by the SDS-affiliated Radical Education Project and it had immediate effect on the left. It sharply posed the issues of how to fight white supremacy and whether, or not, that fight was in the interest of "white" workers. It also set the terms of discussion and debate for many activists within SDS and the emerging New Left. [ See Allen and Ignatin [Ignatiev] , “White Blindspot,” and Allen, “Can White Workers Radicals Be Radicalized?’”]

Influence on SDS and New Left

In the late 1960s, Allen significantly influenced the direction of both the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the New Left with his article co-authored with Noel Ignatin (Noel Ignatiev) entitled “White Blindspot” and with his article "Can White Workers Radicals Be Radicalized?” These pieces, printed together in a 1969 pamphlet, developed the arguments that white supremacy, reinforced among European Americans by the "white skin privilege," was the main retardant of working class consciousness in the United States and that efforts at radical social change should direct principal efforts at challenging the system of white supremacy and urging "repudiation of white skin privilege" by European Americans. [ Ted (Theodore W.) Allen and Noel Ignatin (Ignatiev), “White Blindspot” (n.p.: Osawatomie Associates, 1967) repr. as Theodore W. Allen and Noel Ignatin (Ignatiev) “‘White Blindspot’ and “Can White Workers Radicals Be Radicalized?’” at [http://www.sojournertruth.net/whiteblindspot.html] also at [http://newsds.org/wiki/index.php?title=White_Blindspot] (Note: Theodore W. Allen's seminal article “Can White Workers Radicals Be Radicalized?’” is not available on these sites.) ]

Years of Research

Over the next twenty-five years Allen did extensive primary research in the colonial records of pattern-setting Virginia and, with his eye for the conditions of labor, generated important (though still unpublished) book-length manuscripts including “The Genesis of the Chattel-Labor System in Continental Anglo-America” and “The Peculiar Seed: The Plantation of Bondage,” both of which dealt with the reduction of laborers and tenants to chattel-bond-servitude (a status under which workers could be bought and sold as chattel). This reduction was done primarily, at first, among European-American workers in 17th century Virginia. [ Theodore W. Allen, “The Genesis of the Chattel-Labor System in Continental Anglo-America,” (n. p., 1976) and Theodore W. Allen, “The Peculiar Seed: The Plantation of Bondage,” (n. p., 1974, 1976).]

Allen developed the analysis in his three crises research into a still unpublished book-length manuscript entitled “The Kernel and the Meaning: A Contribution to a Proletarian Critique of United States History” (1972), which argued that “white supremacism was the Achilles heel of the labor, democratic, and socialist movements in this country.” It was in the course of this work, and after publication of Winthrop Jordan’s influential "White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812" (1968) that Allen became convinced that the problems related to white supremacy couldn’t be resolved without a history of the plantation colonies of the 17th and 18th centuries. His reasoning was clear--white supremacy still ruled in the United States more than a century after the abolition of slavery and the reasons for that had to be explained. The racism-is-natural argument associated with Jordan would not do. Allen proceeded to search for a structural principle that was essential to the social order based on enslaved labor in the continental plantation colonies and was still essential to late twentieth-century America’s social order based on wage-labor. [ Theodore W. Allen, “History of My Book,” 3 July 2001, n.p. and Theodore W. Allen, “Development of the Labor Movement-–1 (Part 1-–1607-1750),” Outline of the Course (Fall 1974), p. 1, n.p.]

Living on Most Modest Means

Over his last forty years, while often living on most modest means on Brooklyn Avenue in Brooklyn, Allen worked as a factory worker, retail clerk, mechanical design draftsmen, postal mail handler(and member of Local 300 of the National Postal Mail Handlers Union), librarian and independent scholar. He also taught for one semester as an adjunct history instructor at Essex County Community College in Newark. Frequently at the edge of poverty his scholarship was remarkable for its dedication and tenacity in the face of great personal difficulties. [ Allen, to Rabinowitz Foundation, p. 9; Theodore W. Allen, Application for Admission to Goddard College Graduate Program,” 20 October 1974, pp. 1-5; Theodore W. Allen, Statement of Theodore William Allen in Support of His Request . . . to . . . Goddard College, 21 December 1974.]

Important Components of Allen’s Interpretation

In the 1975 pamphlet "Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race," Allen laid the basis for a class-conscious, anti-white-supremacist, counter narrative of American history. It would be, as he explained, a narrative that offered “a new and consistent interpretation of colonial history and the origin of racial slavery” with significant implications “for interpreting all subsequent periods” of United States history. [ Theodore W. Allen, to Louis M. Rabinowitz Foundation, 15 February 1976, p. 3.]

*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. (n. 63) In "The Invention of the White Race" Allen emphasized that "When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no white people there" and he added that he found "no instance of the official use of the word 'white' as a token of social status before its appearance in a Virginia law passed in 1691."
*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. [ Allen, to Rabinowitz Foundation, p. 2 and Allen, “Was It Capitalism?” 8 June 1996, n.p., p. 1, explains that in the plantation colonies the means of production were monopolized by one class, non-owners were reduced to absolute dependence upon the owners and could only live by the alienation of their labor, the products of the plantations took the form of commodities, and the aim of production was the accumulation and expansion of capital. On the deleterious effects of white supremacy for the working class see also Theodore W. Allen, “Slavery, Racism, and Democracy,” "Monthly Review", Vol. 29, no. 10 (March 1978), 57-63, esp. p. 60; Allen, "The Invention of the White Race,"2:246-55; Allen, "Summary of the Argument of "The Invention of the White Race," Part 2, Nos. 119-123 [http://clogic.eserver.org/1-2/allen2.html] ; Theodore W. Allen, “Discussion Materials: Session V—What Price ‘whiteness’?” (n.p., 1974), pp. 22-28; Allen, “Can White Workers Radicals be Radicalized?” pp 15-18; and Ted [Theodore W.] Allen, “The Most Vulnerable Point” (Harpers Ferry Organization, New York: 1972), pp. 2-4.]

All of this led up to his main work, the rigorously documented "The Invention of the White Race" (1994, 1997). In that two-volume work Allen develops all of the above points and details the systematic extension of privileges to European American laboring people, who were not promoted out of the working class, and describes how they came to participate in a new multi-class “white” formation” which was the necessary pre-condition for the development of racial slavery (the particular form of racial oppression that developed in the continental plantation colonies). All of these concepts, as well as discussions on comparative slavery, the development of a sociogenic approach to race, the nature of racial oppression, and the role of the social control buffer are developed more fully in "The Invention of the White Race" and in his easily accessible “Summary of the Argument of ‘'The Invention of the White Race.’" [Allen, "The Invention of the White Race," Vols. I and II and Allen, "Summary of the Argument of "The Invention of the White Race"Parts 1 and 2]

Contending Views

When the first volume of "The Invention of the White Race" appeared it drew on, and challenged, the work of some of America's leading colonial historians including Winthrop Jordan and Edmund S. Morgan. It offered important theoretical and historical insights in the struggle against white supremacy when it challenged what Allen considered to be the two major arguments that tend to undermine the struggle against white supremacy in the working class--the notion that racism is innate (as suggested by Jordan's "unthinking decision" explanation) and the notion that European-American workers benefit from racism (as suggested by Morgan's "there were too few free poor on hand to matter"). [ See Winthrop D. Jordan, "White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812" (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), Chapter 2 “Unthinking Decision: Enslavement of Negroes in America to 1700,” pp. 44-98, esp. p. 80 and Edmund Sears Morgan, "American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia" (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1975), 380, 386.]

"The Invention of the White Race" and Later Writings

In his later writings Allen was in the forefront in challenging phenotypical (physical appearance-based--see phenotype) definitions of race, in challenging "racism is innate" arguments, in challenging theories that the working class “benefits” from white supremacy, in calling attention to the crucial role and make-up of the buffer social control group and to the policy of proscription rather than promotion in racial (as distinct from national) oppression, in documenting and analyzing the development of the "white race" in the latter part of the seventeenth century, and in clarifying how "this all-class association of European-Americans held together by 'racial' privileges conferred on laboring class European-Americans relative to African-Americans-- [has served] as the principal historic guarantor of ruling-class domination of national life" in the United States. These contributions, crystallized in his magnum opus "The Invention of the White Race", distinguish his work from those who see the "white race" as a "social construction." As he explained, "the white race must be understood not simply as a social construct rather than a genetic phenomenon, but as a ruling-class social control formation...I shy away from the term 'whiteness'...it is an abstraction, it is an attribute of some people, it is not the role they play. And the white race is an actual objective thing...it has to be dealt with..." [ Allen, “Summary of the Argument,” Pt. 1, nos. 1, 9, and 15. In 1997 the Stanford University professor George M. Fredrickson asserted that “the proposition that race is ‘a social and cultural construction,’ has become an academic cliche.” See George M. Fredrickson, “America’s Caste System: Will It Change?” "New York Review of Books" (23 October 1997, 68-75, quote p. 68; Allen, interview by Pearson; and Allen, "On Roediger's "Wages of Whiteness"," "Cultural Logic", Vol. 4, No. 2 (Spring 2002). Though Allen chose to "shy away from the term whiteness," he did recognize that "much good work had been done under that heading."]

Allen challenged phenotypical understandings of race with his factual presentation and analysis, by providing a comprehensive alternate explanation, and by skillfully drawing on examples from Ireland (where a religio/racial oppression existed under the Protestant Ascendancy) and the Caribbean (where a different social control formation was developed based on promotion of "Mulattos" to petit-bourgeois status). He concluded that the codifications of the Penal Laws of the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland and the slave codes of white supremacy in continental Anglo-America presented four common defining characteristics of those two regimes:

#declassing legislation, directed at property-holding members of the oppressed group;
#the deprivation of civil rights;
#the illegalization of literacy;
#displacement of family rights and authorities.

This understanding of racial oppression led him to conclude that "a comparative study of Anglo-Norman rule and 'Protestant Ascendancy' in Ireland, and 'white supremacy' in continental Anglo-America (in both its colonial and regenerate United States forms) demonstrates that racial oppression is not dependent upon differences of 'phenotype,' i. e., of physical appearance of the oppressor and the oppressed." [ Allen, “Summary of the Argument of The Invention of the White Race,” Part 1, # 15.]

Allen's Introduction to Vol. I of "The Invention of the White Race" discusses "The Origins Debate" about whether the "difference in treatment of African-American and European American laborers . . . was by deliberately contrived ruling-class policy rather than some inborn or preconditioned 'race consciousnes'" and in so doing he reviews, and criticizes, both "The Psycho-Cultural Argument" (associated with Winthrop D. Jordan and Carl N. Degler) and "The Socio-Economic Argument" (associated with Edmund S. Morgan). He then takes "a long look into an Irish mirror" for, as he later explains, "insights into the nature of racial oppression and its implications for ruling-class social control in the United States." With "the conceptual groundwork laid, free of the 'White Blindspot,'" Allen is then able to turn his attention, in Vol. II, to the plantation colonies of Anglo-America from 1607-1750 and to his history and analysis of "the invntion of the white race," of racial slavery, and of racial oppression that he had developed over the preceding 20 years. [Allen, "The Invention of the White Race", Vol. I, pp. 1-24, esp. 3, 4, 15, 22,23, 159.]

After his introduction, Allen, as indicated, takes "a long look into an Irish mirror." [Allen, "The Invention of the White Race", Vol. I, p. 22.]

In Vol. I Allen writes that "when racial oppression is defined in terms of its operational principles, the exclusion of the Irish case is seen to be wholly arbitrary. The exclusion is especially deplorable when practiced by European-American scholars, because it ignores a case where 'white' consciousness on the part of the observer is least likely to affect the drawing of conclusions." [Allen, "The Invention of the White Race", Vol. I, p. 28.] In addition, Allen calls attention to the fact that the well-known Irish historian David Beers Quinn, in his 1966 book "The Elizabethans and the Irish," found that the Irish became the "standard of savage or outlandish" social behavior for interpreting African and American Indian societies. [Allen, "The Invention of the White Race", Vol. I, p. 31.]

Allen's emphasizes that "In its sameness with respect to the Irish and to American Indians and African-Americans, this ideology and practice was not concerned with 'phenotype,' color etc., but rather with the 'uncivilized ways' of the victims." [Allen, "The Invention of the White Race", Vol. I, p. 31. As an example of this, he cites an early English conquistador, Robert Dudley (1532-88), first Earl of Leicester, who said the Irish were "a barbarous people" and therefore the English should treat them as other Christian colonizers did with barbarians elsewhere in the world. "This theme," writes Allen, "supplied a continuing rationale for English oppression of the Irish." See Allen, "The Invention of the White Race", Vol. I, p. 31.] Thus he focuses "primarily not on why the bourgeoisie in continental Anglo-America" chose the course it did, "but rather on "how" they could establish and maintain for such a long period of time that degree of "social control" without which no motive or profit or prejudice could have had effect." [Allen, "The Invention of the White Race", Vol. I, p. 1.]

Allen demonstrates in this respect that that "the English in continental Anglo America had chosen the course of plantation monoculture and the combination of racial oppression with the chattel labor form, both of which ruled out the use of Indian labor" and that "the fateful option for tobacco monoculture required the continued expansion of the 'frontier' and displacement of the Indians from their ancestral lands...The option [chosen by the colonial elite] for bond-servitude rendered counterproductive the enslavement of Indians, which would have deprived Anglo-American employers of essential assistance in combatting the problems of runaway bond-laborers." [Allen, "The Invention of the White Race", Vol. I, p. 136.] Allen analyzes the 1813-14 Creek War in this light. He writes: "Every aspect of the Ulster Plantation policy aimed at destroying the tribal leadership and dispersing the tribe is matched by typical examples from Anglo-American and United States policy toward the indigenous population, the 'American Indians'--a policy we clearly recognize as racial oppression against 'the red man.'" [Allen, "The Invention of the White Race", Vol. I, pp. 136-137.]

A large part of Vol. I is taken up then with a systematic account of the racial character of English/British colonialism in Ireland, which began in the early thirteenth century and reached its high point in the Cromwellian English conquest in 1652 and the Penal Laws of the eighteenth-century Protestant Ascendancy. From this Irish vantage point, Allen is able to define clearly "the hallmark of racial oppression." He writes: "The assault upon the tribal affinities, customs, laws and institutions of the Africans, the American Indians and the Irish by English/British and Anglo-American colonialism reduced all members of the oppressed group to one undifferentiated social status, a status beneath that of any member of any social class within the colonizing population. "This is the hallmark of racial oppression" in its colonial origins, and it has persisted in subsequent historical contexts." [Allen, "The Invention of the White Race", Vol. I, p. 32.]

Built into Allen's "Irish Mirror" paradigm is the historical fact that ultimately the English invaders failed, except in Ulster, to establish a reliable social base in Ireland because the number of Protestant settlers was always too small, a fact "destined to be perpetuated as the historic Achilles heel of English social control policy in Ireland." [Allen, "The Invention of the White Race", Vol. I, p. 53.]

In Volume II of "The Invention of the White Race" Allen turns to Virginia, the first and pattern-setting Anglo-American continental colony, noting that "When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no white people there." In fact, in his research Allen found "no instance of the official use of the word 'white' as a token of social status before its appearance in a Virginia law passed in 1691." He also found that throughout most of the seventeenth century conditions for African-American and European-American laborers and bond-servants were very similar. Under such conditions solidarity among the laboring classes reached a peak during Bacon's Rebellion: the capitol (Jamestown) was burned; two thousand rebels forced the governor to flee across the Chesapeake Bay and controlled 6/7 of Virginia's land; and, in the latter stages of the struggle, "foure hundred English and Negroes in Arms" demanded their freedom from bondage. [Allen, “Summary of the Argument,” Pt. 1, nos. 4 and 73.]

To Allen, the social control problems highlighted by Bacon's Rebellion "demonstrated beyond question the lack of a sufficient intermediate stratum to stand between the ruling plantation elite and the mass of European-American and African-American laboring people, free and bond." He then detailed how, in the period after Bacon's Rebellion, the white race was invented as a ruling class social control formation in response to laboring class unrest. He described systematic ruling class policies, which extended privileges to European laborers and bond-servants and imposed and extended harsher disabilities and blocked normal class mobility for African-Americans. Thus, for example, 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," Allen emphasized that this was not an "unthinking decision"! (a phrase associated with the work of historian Winthrop Jordan). "Rather, it was a deliberate act by the plantation bourgeoisie; it proceeded from a conscious decision in the process of establishing a system of racial oppression, even though it meant repealing an electoral principle that had existed in Virginia for more than a century." [Allen, “Summary of the Argument . . .,” Pt. 1, nos. 70 and 84 and Perry, “Theodore William Allen: In Memoriam.” See also Winthrop D. Jordan, "White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812" (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), Chapter 2 “Unthinking Decision: Enslavement of Negroes in America to 1700,” pp. 44-98, esp. p. 80.] The key to understanding racial oppression, he argues, is in the formation of a social control buffer stratum--that group in society which helps to control workers in the service of ruling class elites. Thus in the case of white racial oppression in Virginia, any persons of discernible non-European ancestry in colonial Virginia after Bacon's Rebellion were denied a role in the social control buffer group, the bulk of which was made up of working-class "whites." [Allen, “Summary of the Argument . . . ,” Pt. 1, No. 14.] In the Caribbean, by contrast, "mulattos" were included in the social control group and were promoted into middle-class status. For Allen, this was "the key to the understanding the difference between Virginia 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)." The difference "was rooted in the objective fact that in the West Indies there were "too few" 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." (In 1676 in Virginia, for example, there were approximately 6,000 European-American [chattel] bond-laborers and 2,000 African-American chattel bond-laborers.) [Allen, “Summary of the Argument . . .” Pt. 1, no. 102.] In 1996, on radio station WBAI in New York, Allen discussed the subject of so-called "American Exceptionalism" and the much-vaunted "immunity" of the United States to proletarian class-consciousness and its effects. His explanation for the relatively low level of class consciousness was that social control in the United States was guaranteed, not primarily by the class privileges of a petit bourgeoisie, but by the white-skin privileges of laboring class whites; that the ruling class co-opts European-American workers into the buffer social control system against the interests of the working class to which they belong; and that the "white race" by its all-class form, conceals the operation of the ruling class social control system by providing it with a majoritarian "democratic" facade. [ Theodore W. Allen, The Historical Roots of “American Exceptionalism”: The “Race-not-class” Principle,” Draft for a Presentation on Radio Station WBAI in New York, 15 February 1996.]

In his very important 1998 "Summary of the Argument of The Invention of the White Race," Allen argues (Part 1, #8) "The logic of 'race as a social construct' must be tightened and the focus sharpened. Just as it is unhelpful, to say the least, to euphemize racial slavery in continental Anglo-America as "the Peculiar Institution," instead of identifying the "white race," itself, as the truly peculiar institution governing the life of the country after emancipation as it did in slavery times; just as it is not "race" in general, that must be understood, but the "white race," in particular; so 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" (Part 1)," "Cultural Logic," Vol. 1, no. 2, (Spring, 1998).] [http://clogic.eserver.org/1-2/allen.html] Allen felt that these and other writings over his last forty years provided a solid basis for the class struggle interpretation of United States history and society.

Last Writings and Towards the Future

In his last years Allen was near completion of his final major work, a book length manuscript entitled "Toward a Revolution in Labor History". In this work Allen challenges what he calls the prevalent assumptions of American labor historiography, namely the notion that only "free labor" can be “proletarian," that the African American workers' two centuries of struggle against chattel slavery isn't “labor” history, and that "American labor history" is essentially the story of European-American workers, with African Americans playing a marginal, auxiliary role in "the class struggle." "Toward a Revolution in Labor History" calls attention to the ways in which the “white blind-spot” has led to ignoring or marginalizing the Black laboring class as a proletarian component in the history of the American working class and to disregarding the origin and nature of "white" identity. It further argues that the main barrier to class consciousness in the U.S. is “the incubus of ‘white’ identity of the European-American workers.” [Theodore W. Allen, “Toward a Revolution in Labor History: Outline of a book to be written by Theodore W. Allen,” 5 January 2004, n.p.]

In his last year Allen produced a piece on the dialectics of the individual and the collective titled “Notes on Base and Superstructure and the Socialist Perspective," which he presented at a 2004 conference at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. [This lecture was published with an introduction by Jonathan Scott in "Socialism and Democracy", Issue 43, Vol. 21, No. 1 (March 2007), pp. 75-89 [http://www.sdonline.org/43/scott.htm] .]

Allen charted four important tasks ahead concerning the need for historical research and theory to counter the arguments that support white supremacy, most particularly the (natural racism) argument that racism is “innate” and the argument what workers “benefit” from white supremacy. What was needed, he concluded, was that they be confronted by a self-standing completely opposite theory. This work requires taking up four basic challenges:

* First, to show that white supremacism is not an inherited attribute of the European-American personality.
* Second, to demonstrate that white-supremacism has not served the interests of the laboring-class European-Americans.
* Third, to account for the prevalence of white-supremacism within the ranks of laboring-class European-Americans.
* Fourth, by the light of history, to consider ways whereby European-American laboring people may cast off the stifling incubus of "white" identity.

Allen’s literary works have been left to his literary executor, Jeffrey B. Perry, and plans are underway to publish and disseminate his writings and to place the Theodore W. Allen Papers with a repository. A "Theodore W. Allen Scholar Program" has been established at the Center for Study of Working Class Life of the Economics Department of the State University of New York, Stony Brook. [ For the Center for the Study of Working Class Life, SUNY, Stony Brook, webpage see [http://www.sunysb.edu/workingclass/] ]

ummary of Allen’s Major Contributions

*History of the invention of the "white race";
*Analysis of the “white race” as a “ruling-class social control formation”;
*Analysis of white supremacy as principal retardant of class-consciousness in the United States;
*Analysis of the centrality of the struggle against white supremacy in the struggle for socialism in the US;
*Originator of the “white-skin privilege” analysis;
*Emphasis that chattel-bond-servitude in Virginia was not an adaptation of English practice;
*Analysis of the differences between racial and national oppression with emphasis on differences in the recruitment of the social control group and differences in policy (proscription vs. promotion)towards the oppressed group;
*Analysis of the development of racial slavery in Virginia as a particular form of racial oppression and explanation of how it differed from slavery in the Caribbean, especially in recruitment of, and policies towards, the social control group;
*Understanding that "the white race" is "the truly peculiar institution governing the life of the country after emancipation as it did in slavery times."
*Understanding that "Irish history presents a case of "racial oppression without reference to alleged skin color" and "looking into an Irish mirror for insights into the nature of racial oppression and its implications for ruling-class social control in the United States."

elected Writings of Theodore W. Allen

*Allen, Ted (Theodore W.). “A Call . . . John Brown Memorial Pilgrimage . . . December 4, 1965.” John Brown Commemoration Committee, 1965.
*Allen, Theodore W. (Ted) and Ignatin (Ignatiev), Noel. "White Blindspot." Osawatomie Associates, 1967, repr. as Theodore W. Allen and Noel Ignatin (Ignatiev), Noel, "White Blindspot" and "Can White Workers Radicals Be Radicalized?"” [1969] [http://www.sojournertruth.net/whiteblindspot.html] [http://newsds.org/wiki/index.php?title=White_Blindspot] (Note: Theodore W. Allen's seminal article “Can White Workers Radicals Be Radicalized?’” is not available on these sites.)
*Allen, Ted (Theodore William). “Nixon’s ‘Southern Strategy.’” "The Guardian," 22 November 1969, 9.
*Allen, Theodore William. “The Kernel and the Meaning . . .,’ A Contribution to a Proletarian Critique of United States Historiography. Part One--Civil War and Reconstruction: Crisis and Resolution.” N.p., 1972.
*Allen, Ted (Theodore William). “The Most Vulnerable Point.” New York: Harper’s Ferry Organization, 1972.
*Allen, Ted (Theodore William). “Contradictions in Keynesian Economics: "The Unstable Economy, Booms and Recessions in the United States Since 1945," by Victor Perlo.” Review Part I. "The Guardian," 11 April 1973.
*Allen, Ted. “The Contradictions of Keynes and Perlo: "The Unstable Economy, Booms and Recessions in the United States Since 1945," by Victor Perlo.” Review Part II. "The Guardian," 18 April 1973.
*Allen, Ted (Theodore William). “White Supremacy in U.S. History.” A Speech Delivered at the Guardian Forum on the National Question, April 28, 1973. [http://www.sojournertruth.net/whitesupremushist.html]
*Allen, Ted. “Some Thoughts on Proletarian Strategy.” N.p., 1974.
*Allen, Theodore W. “‘They Would Have Destroyed Me’: Slavery and the Origins of Racism.” "Radical America," Vol. 9, no. 3 (May-June, 1975), 40-63. [http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/spl/allenradamer75.pdf] [http://www.sojournertruth.net/destroyedme.html]
*Allen, Theodore William. "Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race." Hoboken, N.J.: HEP PO Box M-71, 1975, repr. as Theodore W. Allen, “Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race,” Edited with an Introduction by Jeffrey B. Perry. [http://clogic.eserver.org/2006/allen.html]
*Allen, Theodore William. “Slavery, Racism, and Democracy.” "Monthly Review," 29, no. 10 (March 1978): 57-63.
*Allen, Theodore William. "The Invention of the White Race," Vol. 1 of 2: "Racial Oppression and Social Control." New York: Verso, 1994.
*Allen, Theodore W. “Be Fair: Reverse Discrimination.” "Z Magazine," June 1995, 8-10. [http://72.14.205.104/search?q=cache:c1vBne7N7N0J:www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/june95allen.htm+%22Be+Fair:+Reverse+discrimination%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us]
*Allen, Theodore William. “Remarks on White Supremacy and Male Supremacy.” "Minnesota Review (a Journal of Committed Writings)," c. July 1996, 2 p.
*Allen, Theodore William. "The Invention of the White Race." Vol. 2 of 2: "The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America." New York: Verso, 1997.
*Allen, Theodore W. "Summary of the Argument of the Invention of the White Race" (Parts 1 and 2)." "Cultural Logic," Vol. 1, no. 2, (Spring, 1998), Pt. 1 [http://clogic.eserver.org/1-2/allen.html] and Pt. 2 [http://clogic.eserver.org/1-2/allen2.html]
*Allen, Theodore W. "On Roediger's Wages of Whiteness," "Cultural Logic," Vol. 4, no. 2 (Spring, 2001). [http://clogic.eserver.org/4-2/allen.html]
*Allen, Theodore W. "'Race' and 'Ethnicity': History and the 2000 Census." "Cultural Logic," Vol. 3, nos. 1 and 2 (2000). [http://clogic.eserver.org/3-1%262/allen.html]
*Allen, Theodore W. “In Defense of Affirmative Action in Employment." "Culural Logic," Vol. 1, no. 2 (Spring, 1998). [http://clogic.eserver.org/1-2/affirmative.html]
*Allen, Theodore W. "Commentary on István Mészáros's Beyond Capital,” "Cultural Logic," 2005. [http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/allen.html] .
*Allen, Theodore W. “Notes on Base and Superstructure and the Socialist Perspective for a Panel Presentation by Theodore Allen on ‘Base and Superstructure and the Socialist Perspective’ at the Conference on ‘How Class Works,’ to be Held at New York State University at Stony Brook, June 10-12, 2004, repr. as “Base and Superstructure and the Socialist Perspective,” in "Socialism and Democracy," Issue 43, Vol. 21, no. 1. [http://www.sdonline.org/43/allen.htm]
*Allen, Theodore, W. “Toward a Revolution in Labor History.” N.p.: 2004.
*Palmer, Milton (pseud for Theodore W. Allen). “Economic Situation USA.” "Vanguard"(February-October 1959).
*Palmer, Milton (pseud for Theodore W. Allen). “Two Roads for American Communists.” New York, 1958.
*Pitcher, Molly (pseud for Theodore W. Allen). "“The Main Thing . . . .”" New York, 1957.

Links

* [http://72.14.205.104/search?q=cache:5a3H7YMbg6cJ:www.zmag.org/Zmag/articles/june95allen.htm+%22theodore+w.+allen%22+be+fair+reverse+discrimination&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=4&gl=us Allen, Theodore W., “Be Fair: Reverse Discrimination.” "Z Magazine," June 1995, 8-10.]
* [http://clogic.eserver.org/2006/allen.html Allen, Theodore William, "Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race." Hoboken, N.J.: HEP PO Box M-71, 1975, repr. as Theodore W. Allen, “Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race,” Edited with an Introduction by Jeffrey B. Perry.]
* [http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/allen.html Allen, Theodore W., "Commentary on István Mészáros's Beyond Capital,” "Cultural Logic," 2005.]
* [http://clogic.eserver.org/1-2/affirmative.html Allen, Theodore W., “In Defense of Affirmative Action in Employment." "Culural Logic," Vol. 1, no. 2 (Spring, 1998).]
* [http://www.sdonline.org/43/allen.htm Allen, Theodore W., “Notes on Base and Superstructure and the Socialist Perspective for a Panel Presentation by Theodore Allen on ‘Base and Superstructure and the Socialist Perspective’ at the Conference on ‘How Class Works,’ to be Held at New York State University at Stony Brook, June 10-12, 2004, repr. as “Base and Superstructure and the Socialist Perspective,” in "Socialism and Democracy," Issue 43, Vol. 21, no. 1.]
* [http://clogic.eserver.org/3-1%262/allen.html Allen, Theodore W., "'Race' and 'Ethnicity': History and the 2000 Census." "Cultural Logic," Vol. 3, nos. 1 and 2 (2000).]
* [http://clogic.eserver.org/4-2/allen.html Allen, Theodore W., "On Roediger's Wages of Whiteness," "Cultural Logic," Vol. 4, no. 2 (Spring, 2001).]
* [http://clogic.eserver.org/1-2/allen.html Allen, Theodore W., "Summary of the Argument of the Invention of the White Race" (Part 1)," "Cultural Logic," Vol. 1, no. 2, (Spring, 1998).]
* [http://clogic.eserver.org/1-2/allen2.html Allen, Theodore W., "Summary of the Argument of the Invention of the White Race" (Part 2)." "Cultural Logic," Vol. 1, no. 2, (Spring, 1998).]
* [http://www.sojournertruth.net/destroyedme.html Allen, Theodore W., “‘They Would Have Destroyed Me’: Slavery and the Origins of Racism.” "Radical America," Vol. 9, no. 3 (May-June, 1975), 40-63.]
* [http://www.sojournertruth.net/whiteblindspot.html (Allen, Theodore W. and) Ignatin (Ignatiev), Noel. "White Blindspot." Osawatomie Associates, 1967, repr. as Theodore W. Allen and Noel Ignatin (Ignatiev), Noel, "White Blindspot" and "Can White Workers Radicals Be Radicalized?"” (1969) This entry includes Theodore W. Allen's "A Letter of Support," but does not include Theodore W. Allen's seminal article “Can White Workers Radicals Be Radicalized?’”]
* [http://www.sojournertruth.net/whitesupremushist.html Allen, Ted (Theodore William), “White Supremacy in U.S. History.” A Speech Delivered at the Guardian Forum on the National Question, April 28, 1973.]
* [http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2005/is_n1_v29/ai_17612979/pg_1 Ignatin (Ignatiev), Noel, “"The Invention of the White Race," vol. 1, "Racial Oppression and Social Control"”, a review, "Journal of Social History," Fall 1995. Between 1994 and 1996 Allen’s "The Invention of the White Race" was reviewed in numerous academic journals and other publications. This 1995 review by Ignatin was one of the earliest.]
* [http://albany.edu/talkinghistory/arch2004jan-june.html Pearson, Chad, "Theodore W. Allen Interview on "The Invention of the White Race"," audio interview in two parts, May 13 and 20, 2004 (scroll down to May 13, 2004 for Part 1 and May 20, 2004 for Part 2).]
* [http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/Perry.html Perry, Jeffrey B., "In Memoriam: Theodore W. Allen (1919-2005)," "Cultural Logic," 2005]
* [http://www.theminnesotareview.org/journal/ns47/index.shtml Scott, Jonathan, "Inside the White Race Corral," "Minnesota Review", Vol. 47 (Fall 1996)]
* [http://clogic.eserver.org/1-2/allen%20interview.html Scott, Jonathan and Greg Meyerson, "An Interview with Theodore W. Allen," "Cultural Logic", Vol. 1, No. 2 (Spring 1998)]
* [http://www.sdonline.org//35/peculiarrelations.htm Scott, Jonathan, "Peculiar Relations: White Identity and Imaginative Literature," "Socialism and Democracy", Vol. 18, No. 1 (June 2004)]
* [http://www.blackcommentator.com/129/129_guest_pbs_slavery.html Scott, Jonathan, "PBS Says American Slavery was Natural: Eradicating Bacon's Rebellion from Popular Memory," "Black Commentator", Issue 129 (March 10, 2005)]
* [http://www.sdonline.org/43/scott.htm Scott, Jonathan, "Introduction to Theodore Allen's Notes on Base and Superstructure," "Socialism and Democracy", Vol. 21, No. 1 (March 2007)]
* [http://www.sdonline.org. Scott, Jonathan, "Why Fascism When They Have White Supremacy?" "Socialism and Democracy", Vol. 22, No. 2 (Summer 2008)]

References