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*100^th Anniversary of The Birth of Theodore W. Allen*
*His Major Collection of Papers is Now Available at UMass-Amherst
(alongside those of W.E.B. Du Bois) and an initial Inventory is at
http://scua.library.umass.edu/umarmot/allen-theodore-w-1919-2005/
*
Theodore W. “Ted” Allen (1919-2005) was an anti-white supremacist,
working class intellectual and activist. He developed his pioneering
class struggle-based analysis of “white skin privilege” beginning in the
mid-1960s; authored the seminal two-volume /The Invention of the White
Race/ in the 1990s; and consistently maintained that the struggle
against white supremacy was central to efforts at radical social change
in the United States. Born on August 23, 1919, in Indianapolis,
Indiana, he grew up in Paintsville, Kentucky and Huntington, West
Virginia and, after moving to New York City, lived his last fifty-plus
years in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn.
Allen's two-volume /The Invention of the White Race/ (1994, 1997: Verso
Books, new expanded edition 2012) with its focus on racial oppression
and social control is one of the twentieth-century's major contributions
to historical understanding. It presents a full-scale challenge to what
he refers to as "The Great White Assumption" -- the unquestioning
acceptance of the "white race" and "white" identity as skin color-based
and natural attributes rather than as social and political
constructions. Its thesis on the origin, nature, and maintenance of the
"white race" and its understanding that slavery in the Anglo-American
plantation colonies was capitalist and enslaved Black laborers were
proletarians, contain the basis of a revolutionary approach to United
States labor history.
On the back cover of the 1994 edition of Volume 1, subtitled /Racial
Oppression and Social Control/, Allen boldly asserted "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 statement, based on 20-plus years of primary
research in Virginia's colonial records, reflected the fact that Allen
found no instance of the official use of the word "white" as a token of
social status prior to its appearance in a Virginia law passed in 1691.
As he later 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."
In this context he offers his major thesis -- that the "white race" was
invented as a ruling class social control formation in response to labor
solidarity as manifested in the latter (civil war) stages of Bacon's
Rebellion (1676-77). To this he adds two important corollaries: 1) the
ruling elite deliberately instituted a system of racial privileges to
define and maintain the "white race" and to implement a system of racial
oppression, and 2) the consequence was not only ruinous to the interest
of African Americans, it was also disastrous for European-American workers.
In Volume II, on /The Origin of Racial Oppression in
Anglo-America/, Allen tells the story of the invention of the “white
race” and the development of the system of racial oppression 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 reduction of tenants and
wage-laborers in the majority English labor force to chattel
bond-servants in the 1620s. In so doing, he emphasizes that this 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 indeterminate
(because it was still being fought out) and he details the similarity of
conditions for African-American and European-American laborers and
bond-servants. He also documents many significant instances of labor
solidarity and unrest, especially during the 1660s and 1670s. Of great
significance is his analysis of the civil war stage of Bacon’s Rebellion
when thousands of laboring people took up arms against the ruling
plantation elite, the capital (Jamestown) was burned to the ground,
rebels controlled 6/7 of the Virginia colony, and Afro- and
Euro-American bond-servants fought side-by-side demanding an end to
their bondage.
It was in the period after Bacon's Rebellion 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 free 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.
Key to understanding the virulent racial oppression that develops in
Virginia, Allen argues, is the formation of the intermediate social
control buffer stratum, which serves the interests of the ruling class.
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. This difference was rooted in a number of
social control-related factors, one of the most important of which was
that in the Anglo-Caribbean 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.
In /The Invention of the White Race /Allen challenges what he considers
to be two main ideological props of white supremacy -- the argument that
"racism" is innate (and it is therefore useless to challenge it) and the
argument that European-American workers “benefit” from "white race"
privileges and white supremacy (and that it is therefore not in their
interest to oppose them).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:
American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812/. The second argument is
associated with historian Edmund S. Morgan’s influential /American
Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia, /which
maintains that in Virginia, as slavery developed in the eighteenth
century, “there were too few free poor [European-Americans] on hand to
matter.” Allen points out that what Morgan said about “too few” free
poor was true in the eighteenth century Anglo-Caribbean, but not in
Virginia.
"The Developing Conjuncture and Some Insights From Hubert Harrison and
Theodore W. Allen on the Centrality of the Fight Against White
Supremacy" (/Cultural Logic/, 2010) describes key components of Allen's
analysis of "white race" privilege. The article explains that as he
developed the "white race" privilege concept, Allen emphasized that
these privileges were a "poison bait" (like a shot of “heroin”) and he
explained that they "do not permit" the masses of European American
workers nor their children "to escape" from that class. "It is not that
the ordinary white worker gets more than he must have to support
himself," but "the Black worker gets less than the white worker." By,
thus "inducing, reinforcing and perpetuating racist attitudes on the
part of the white workers, the present-day power masters get the
political support of the rank-and-file of the white workers in critical
situations, and without having to share with them their super profits in
the slightest measure."
As one example, to support his position, Allen provided
statistics showing that in the South where race privilege "has always
been most emphasized . . . the white workers have fared worse than the
white workers in the rest of the country."
Probing more deeply, Allen offered additional important insights into
why these race privileges are conferred by the ruling class. He pointed
out that "the ideology of white racism" is "not appropriate to the white
workers" because it is "contrary to their class interests." Because of
this "the bourgeoisie could not long have maintained this ideological
influence over the white proletarians by mere racist ideology." Under
these circumstances white supremacist thought is "given a material basis
in the form of the deliberately contrived system of race privileges for
white workers." Thus, writes Allen, "history has shown that the
white-skin privilege does not serve the real interests of the white
workers, it also shows that the concomitant racist ideology has blinded
them to that fact."
Allen added, "the white supremacist system that had originally been
designed in around 1700 by the plantation bourgeoisie to protect the
base, the chattel bond labor relation of production" also served "as a
part of the 'legal and political' superstructure of the United States
government that, until the Civil War, was dominated by the slaveholders
with the complicity of the majority of the European-American workers."
Then, after emancipation, "the industrial and financial bourgeoisie
found that it could be serviceable to their program of social control,
anachronistic as it was, and incorporated it into their own 'legal and
political' superstructure."
Allen felt that two essential points must be kept in mind. First, "the
race-privilege policy is deliberate bourgeois class policy." Second,
"the race-privilege policy is, contrary to surface appearance, contrary
to the interests, short range as well as long range interests of not
only the Black workers but of the white workers as well." He repeatedly
emphasized that "the day-to-day real interests" of the European-American
worker "is not the white skin privileges, but in the development of an
ever-expanding union of class conscious workers." He emphasized,
"'Solidarity forever!' means 'Privileges never!'" He elsewhere pointed
out, "The Wobblies [the Industrial Workers of the World] caught the
essence of it in their slogan: 'An injury to one is an injury to all.'"
Throughout his work Allen stresses that "the initiator and the ultimate
guarantor of the white skin privileges of the white worker is not the
white worker, but the white worker's masters" and the masters do this
because it is "an indispensable necessity for their continued class
rule." He describes how "an all-pervasive system of racial privileges
was conferred on laboring-class European-Americans, rural and urban,
exploited and insecure though they themselves were" and how "its
threads, woven into the fabric of every aspect of daily life, of family,
church, and state, have constituted the main historical guarantee of the
rule of the 'Titans,' damping down anti-capitalist pressures, by making
'race, and not class, the distinction in social life.'" That, "more than
any other factor," he argues, "has shaped the contours of American
history -- from the Constitutional Convention of 1787 to the Civil War,
to the overthrow of Reconstruction, to the Populist Revolt of the 1890s,
to the Great Depression, to the civil rights struggle and 'white
backlash' of our own day."
Allen also addressed the issue of strategy for social change. He
emphasized, “The most vulnerable point at which a decisive blow can be
struck against bourgeois rule in the United States is white supremacy.”
He considered “white supremacy” to be “both the keystone and the
Achilles heel of U.S. bourgeois democracy.” Based on this analysis Allen
maintained, “the first main strategic blow must be aimed at the most
vulnerable point at which a decisive blow can be struck, namely, white
supremacism.” This, he argued, was the conclusion to be drawn from a
study of three great social crises in U.S. history – “the Civil War and
Reconstruction, the Populist Revolt of the 1890s, and the Great
Depression of the 1930s.” In each of these cases “the prospects for a
stable broad front against capital has foundered on the shoals of white
supremacism, most specifically on the corruption of the
European-American workers by racial privilege.”
Ted Allen died on January 19, 2005, and a memorial
service was held for him at the Brooklyn Public Library where he had
worked. Then on October 8, 2005, his ashes, as per his request, were
spread in the York River (near West Point, Virginia) close to its
convergence with the Pamunkey and Mattaponi Rivers – the location where
the final armed holdouts, "Eighty Negroes and Twenty English," refused
to surrender in the last stages of Bacon’s Rebellion.
Allen’s historical work hasprofound implications for
American History, African-American History, Labor History, Left History,
American Studies, and “Whiteness” Studies and it offers important
insights in the areas of Caribbean History, Irish History, and African
Diaspora Studies. With its meticulous primary research, equalitarian
motif, emphasis on the class struggle dimension of history, and
groundbreaking analysis his work continues to grow in influence and
importance.
For writings, audios, and videos by and about Theodore W. Allen and his
work see
http://www.jeffreybperry.net/4__theodore_w__allen_br___b___font___font___center__86151.htm
For information on /The Invention of the White Race/ Vol. I: /Racial
Oppression and Social Control/ [Verso Books] (including comments from
scholars and activists and Table of Contents) see
http://www.jeffreybperry.net/5__the_invention_of_the_br_white_race__b___font___font___i__br_volume_1__br__i_ra_116386.htm
For information on /The Invention of the White Race/ Vol. II: /The
Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo America/ (including comments from
scholars and activists and Table of Contents) see
http://www.jeffreybperry.net/6__the_invention_of_the_br_white_race__b___font___font___i__br_volume_2__br__i_th_116387.htm
For the fullest treatment of the development of Theodore W. Allen’s
thought see “The Developing Conjuncture and Some Insights from Hubert
Harrison and Theodore W. Allen on the Centrality of the Fight Against
White Supremacy” at
http://www.jeffreybperry.net/attachments/Perry.pdf
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