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Summary of the Argument of
The Invention of the White Race

by its author, Theodore W. Allen

(Part One)



Book Cover: Invention 1. The two-volume work presents a historical treatment of a few precisely defined concepts: of the essential nature of the social control structure of class societies; of racial oppression without reference to "phenotype" factors; of racial slavery in continental Anglo-America as a particular form of racial oppression; of the "white race"--an all-class association of European-Americans held together by "racial" privileges conferred on laboring-class European-Americans relative to African-Americans--as the principal historic guarantor of ruling-class domination of national life.

I

On the misleading concept of "race"

2. The concept of "race," in the scientific sense of particular group-identifying characteristics resulting from aeons of inbreeding in isolation, has nothing to do with "race relations," whatever that term may be taken to mean, in the four thousand years of recorded human history; certainly not in the nano-second of evolutionary time represented by the four hundred years since the founding of Jamestown in 1607. We have the assurance of eminent authorities in the fields of physical anthropology, genetics and biology, such as Stanley M. Garn and Theodosius Dobzhansky, that the study of evolution has nothing but disclaimers to contribute to the understanding of "racism" as a historical phenomenon; as Dobzhansky puts it: "The mighty vision of human equality belongs to the realm of ethics and politics, not to that of biology."2 With greater particularity, Garn writes that Race "has nothing to do with racism, which is simply the attempt to deny some people deserved opportunities simply because of their origin, or to accord other people certain undeserved opportunities only because of their origin."3

3. The assertion that opens Chapter I of Volume One of The Invention of the White Race is altogether consistent with those disclaimers: "However one may choose to define the term 'racial'-- it concerns the historian only as it relates to a pattern of oppression (subordination, subjugation, exploitation) of one group of human beings by another."4

4. When, therefore, a group of human beings from "multiracial" (the anthropologists' term) Europe goes to North American or South Africa, and there, by constitutional fiat, incorporates itself as the "white race," that is no part of genetic evolution. It is, rather, a political act: the invention of "the white race." Thus it lies within the proper sphere of social scientists, and is an appropriate objective for alteration by social activists.

II

On "race as a social construct"

5. Taking note of the earlier insights into "race" in America provided by African-American social critics such as W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, and Langston Hughes," the Chronicle of Higher Education in September 1995 reported that "Scholars from a variety of disciplines, "sociology, history, and legal, cultural, and literary studies," are attempting to lift the veil from whiteness."5 Just two years later, Stanford University professor George M. Frederickson, well-known teacher and writer on the history of relations between persons of African descent and those of European descent, asserted that "the proposition that race is 'a social and cultural construction,' has become an academic cliché."6

6. This trend, although it will surely experience a critical sorting-out of various interpretations it has produced, represents a great leap forward toward reducing the subject to rational dimensions as it concerns social scientists, by objectifying "whiteness," as a historical, rather than a biological category.

7. Nevertheless, the thesis of "race as a social construct," as it now stands, despite its value in objectifying "whiteness," is an insufficient basis for refutation of white-supremacist apologetics. For, what is to be the reply to the socio-biologist and historian Carl N. Degler who simply says that, "...blacks will be discriminated against whenever nonblacks have the power and incentive to do so...[because] it is human to have prejudice against those who are different."?7 Or, what if the socio-biologists say, "Fine, we can agree that racial ideology is a social construct, but what is your 'social construct' but an expression of genetic determinants--another version of Winthrop Jordan's 'unthinking decision'"?8

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.

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http://clogic.eserver.org/1-2/allen.html

In Memoriam: Theodore W. Allen

Jeffrey B. Perry

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Theodore W. Allen
Photo courtesy of Jeffrey B. Perry

Theodore W. Allen, a working class intellectual and activist and author of the influential two-volume history The Invention of the White Race (Verso:1994, 1997), died on January 19, 2005, surrounded by friends in his apartment at 97 Brooklyn Avenue in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. He was 85. The cause of death was cancer, which he had battled for 15 years. Announcement of the death was made by his close friend Linda Vidinha.

Allen, an ardent opponent of white supremacy, spent much of his last forty years researching the role of white supremacy in United States history and examining records of colonial Virginia as he documented and analyzed the development of the "white race" in the latter part of the seventeenth century. His main thesis, that the "white race" developed as a ruling class social control formation in response to labor unrest as manifest in Bacon's Rebellion of 1676-77, was first articulated in February 1974 in a talk he delivered at a Union of Radical Political Economists meeting in New Haven. Versions of that talk were published in 1975 in Radical America and in pamphlet form as "Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race."

In the 1960s "Ted" Allen significantly influenced the direction of the student movement and the new left with an article entitled "Can White Radicals Be Radicalized?" which developed the argument 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.

Allen was in the forefront in challenging phenotypical (physical appearance-based) 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 of the buffer social control group in racial 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 differentiate his work from many writers in the rapidly growing white race as "a social and cultural construction" ranks, which his writings helped to spawn.

In The Invention of the White Race Allen focused on Virginia, the first and pattern-setting continental colony. He 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." He also found, similar to historian Lerone Bennett, Jr., 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.

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 bourgeois social control formation in response to [such] 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"! "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."

For Allen, "The hallmark, the informing principle, of racial oppression in its colonial origins and as it has persisted in subsequent historical contexts, is the reduction of all members of the oppressed group to one undifferentiated social status, beneath that of any member of the oppressor group." The key to understanding racial oppression, he wrote, is the social control buffer -- that group in society, which helps to control the poor for the rich. Under 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." In contrast, Allen explained, in the Caribbean "Mulattos" were included in the social control group and were promoted into middle-class status. For him, 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 bond-laborers and 2,000 African-American bond-laborers.)

In 1996, on radio station WBAI in New York, Allen discussed the subject of "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.

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http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/perry.html

Thanx to anax for introducing me to this character

Interesting stuff there. The work's concentration on Virginia makes me wonder how this worked in SC, a different place with even seedier origins. At that time the colonists at Charlestown were busy making war on the locals when they weren't copping buckskin from them.

This is very much of a piece with Anax's Libertarian work. They just make this shit up, in the mid 20th century or the late 17th century. Gets you to wondering what other truisms are conscious constructs. Paranoid, naw.

Allen challenged these ideas 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: 1) declassing legislation, directed at property-holding members of the oppressed group; 2) the deprivation of civil rights; 3) the illegalization of literacy; and 4) displacement of family rights and authorities. This understanding of racial oppression led him to conclude that a comparative study of "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."

"Hierarchy" he mumbles, " the imposition of fuckin hierarchy."

First let me issue a couple of disclaimers.

One- I’m gonna play devil’s advocate for the sake of getting you to write some of your own thoughts.

Two- I suspect it is threads like this that are beginning to make some people a bit antsy. RI is a free for all to a certain extent and that is one of the wonderful things about a context like this. But… it would be nice if the general conversation was a little more heavily weighted toward Jeff’s themes. Not that folks don’t care about these issues and certainly I am not suggesting I am speaking for Jeff., but…

Having said that and hopefully you will not take any offense where none was intended…

4. When, therefore, a group of human beings from "multiracial" (the anthropologists' term) Europe goes to North American or South Africa, and there, by constitutional fiat, incorporates itself as the "white race," that is no part of genetic evolution. It is, rather, a political act: the invention of "the white race." Thus it lies within the proper sphere of social scientists, and is an appropriate objective for alteration by social activists.

I agree with this 100 percent. But what the hell is the following? (which actually precedes the above)

2. The concept of "race," in the scientific sense of particular group-identifying characteristics resulting from aeons of inbreeding in isolation, has nothing to do with "race relations," whatever that term may be taken to mean, in the four thousand years of recorded human history; certainly not in the nano-second of evolutionary time represented by the four hundred years since the founding of Jamestown in 1607. We have the assurance of eminent authorities in the fields of physical anthropology, genetics and biology, such as Stanley M. Garn and Theodosius Dobzhansky, that the study of evolution has nothing but disclaimers to contribute to the understanding of "racism" as a historical phenomenon; as Dobzhansky puts it: "The mighty vision of human equality belongs to the realm of ethics and politics, not to that of biology."2

Red flags always go up for me when I hear words like “We have the assurance of eminent authorities in the fields of physical anthropology, genetics and biology, such as Stanley M. Garn and Theodosius Dobzhansky….” I’d much rather hear “there is a wide consensus of opinion….yadda, yadda, yadda”.

With greater particularity, Garn writes that Race "has nothing to do with racism, which is simply the attempt to deny some people deserved opportunities simply because of their origin, or to accord other people certain undeserved opportunities only because of their origin."3

If we substitute the term “race” where Garn writes “origin” does this make any sense anymore? If origin means literally country of origin then I would agree with this statement. If origin on the other hand means primary originating gene pool, phenotype, then I’d say no. And when is it ever the case that racism is the sole cause that deserving and undeserving people don’t and do get what they deserve, respectively, unless I accept Allen’s definitions? Isn’t it always the case that there are other factors involved or do I just have to accept Allen’s definition which narrows racism down to a point? This borders on “because I say so” thinking. What other factors?, you might be asking. It may be the case that we are hardwired to identify with “like” and respond with fear and suspicion to “unlike”. That’s as simple as I can put it. This is perhaps the only argument that can contribute more than a disclaimer to the notion that racism has as its sole origin sociogenic causes.

3. The assertion that opens Chapter I of Volume One of The Invention of the White Race is altogether consistent with those disclaimers: "However one may choose to define the term 'racial'-- it concerns the historian only as it relates to a pattern of oppression (subordination, subjugation, exploitation) of one group of human beings by another."4

So, if Allen, Garn, and Dobzhansky are correct then the following statement must also be correct:

Even if we had all been indistinguishable from one another for the period of recorded human history the same patterns of oppression would have played out in the same way and we would have arrived exactly where we are today.

Since I don’t believe that is correct, then there is something wrong with the way Allen is so narrowly construing “racism”.
Everything up to this- 15. 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. makes sense to me.

He should say “… demonstrates that racial oppression IN THESE instances is not dependent upon…”

26. Given the common constitutional principles of the three cases--the Irish, the American Indian, and the African-American--the abundant parallels they present are more than suggestive; they constitute a compelling argument for the sociogenic theory of racial oppression.

Agreed, except Allen should say “…PRIMARILY sociogenic…”

Winthrop D.Jordan, author of White Over Black found that, "After about 1680, taking the colonies as a whole, a new term appeared--white." During my own study of page after page of Virginia county records, reel after reel of microfilm prepared by the Virginia Colonial Records Project, and other seventeenth-century sources, I have 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, referring to "English or other white women."55 When considered in the context of events, these linguistic details are seen to reflect the reality of social relations as they existed in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake.

This is fascinating and was unknown to me.

69. The English in 1667, under the Treaty of Breda at the end of the Second Dutch War gained permanent direct access to African labor. Five years later, the Royal African Company was formed to systematize the supply of African bond-laborers to Anglo-American colonies. But, given the English superstructural obstacles and the already marked resistance of the African-Americans to lifetime hereditary bondage; given the general discontent of the laboring classes, African-American and European-American, bond and free; given the absence of a reliable intermediate stratum - what hope could there be for imposing social control on this "Volatile Society," if masses of kidnapped Africans were now added to the ranks of the bond-laborers already at the bottom of the heap?

It’s this intermediate stratum that makes the whole thing work. The poor do not struggle with the rich. They struggle against the middle class. The middle class keeps the poor in their place for favors from the ruling class and for protection from the people they oppress.

76. In January 1677, as Bacon's Rebellion was ending in Virginia, Maryland Governor Notley, who had been anxiously watching events in the neighboring province, sounded a warning. "There must be an alteration though not of the Government yet in the Government" in Virginia, to a manner of rule that would "agree with the common people." Otherwise, in a short while, he said, under another audacious leader, "the Commons of Virginia would Emmire themselves as deep in Rebellion as ever they did in Bacon's time."114 He repeated the warning four months later:
if the ould Course be taken, and if Coll. Jeoffreys [Herbert Jeffreys, Berkeley's successor as Royal Governor of Virginia] build his proceedings upon the ould foundation its neither him nor all his Majesties Souldiers in Virginia will either satisfy or rule those people.115

77. But what sort of "alteration in the Government" could be fashioned that would "agree with the common people" enough that it could rule them?

78. Virginia's mystic transition from the era of "the volatile society" of the seventeenth century to "the Golden Age of the Chesapeake" in the middle quarters of the eighteenth century is a much studied phenomenon. It was during that period that the ruling plantocracy replaced "the ould foundation" that Governor Notley had warned them of, in order to "build their proceedings" on a new one, a process that historian John C. Rainbolt, titled "The Alteration in the Relationship between Leadership and Constituents in Virginia."116

79. One of the most venerated commentators on the Virginia colonial records, historian, Philip Alexander Bruce, concluded that, "toward the end of the seventeenth century," there occurred "a marked tendency to promote a pride of race among the members of every class of white people; to be white gave the distinction of color even to the agricultural [European-American limited-term bond-] servants, whose condition, in some respects was not much removed from that of actual slavery..." A contemporary of Bruce, Lyon G. Tyler, long-time editor of The William and Mary Quarterly,117 remarked: "race, and not class, [was] the distinction in social life in eighteenth-century Virginia." Neither of these historians ventured to speculate, however, on why this dominance of "white race" consciousness appeared at that particular time, and not before.

80. Whatever may have been their reasons for neglecting the matter, these were questions that were actually posed by contemporaneous observers of the trend. In September 1723 an African-American wrote from Virginia a letter of protest and appeal to Edmund Gibson, the Bishop of London, whose see included Virginia. On behalf of observant Christians of mixed Anglo-African descent, who were nevertheless bound by "a Law or act which keeps and makes them and there seed SLaves forever," the letter asked for the Bishop's help and that of the King "and the rest of the Rullers," in ending their cruel bondage.118

81. Aspects of discrimination against free African-Americans also bothered British Attorney-General Richard West, who had the responsibility of advising the Lords of Trade and Plantations whether laws passed in colonial legislatures merited approval, or should be rejected in whole or in part as being prejudicial or contradictory to the laws of England.119 In due course, West had occasion to examine a measure that had been passed by the Virginia Assembly in May 1723, entitled: "An Act directing the trial of Slaves, committing capital crimes; and for the more effectual punishing conspiracies and insurrections of them; and for the better government of Negros, Mulattos, and Indians, bond or free." Article 23 of that 24-article law provided that:
no free negro, mulatto, or indian whatsoever, shall have any vote at the election of burgesses, or any other election whatsoever."120

82. The Attorney-General made the following categoric objection:
I cannot see why one freeman should be used worse than another, merely upon account of his complexion...; to vote at elections of officers, either for a county, or parish, &c. is incident to every freeman, who is possessed of a certain proportion of property, and, therefore, when several negroes have merited their freedom, and obtained it, and by their industry, have acquired that proportion of property, so that the above-mentioned incidental rights of liberty are actually vested in them, for my own part, I am persuaded, that it cannot be just, by a general law, without any allegation of crime, or other demerit whatsoever, to strip all free persons, of a black complexion (some of whom may, perhaps be of considerable substance,) from those rights, which are so justly valuable to every freeman.121

83. The Lords of Trade and Plantations "had Occasion to look into the said Act, and as it carrie[d] an Appearance of Hardship towards certain Freemen meerely upon Account of their Complection, who would otherwise enjoy every Priviledge belonging to Freemen [they wanted to know] what were the Reasons which induced the Assembly to pass this Act."122

84. Governor William Gooch to whom the question was ultimately referred declared that the Virginia Assembly had decided upon this curtailment of the franchise in order "to fix a perpetual Brand upon Free Negros & Mulattos...."123 Surely that was no "unthinking decision"! 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 century.

They were scared and with good reason. “Unthinking decisions” cannot ever be proven to have existed. But “unthinking decisions” or subconscious decisions can be proven to have a large effect on the way we interrelate with each other and the world. The plantocracy was engaging in the conscious decision to create schisms. But why did they choose the fault lines that they did? And what of fear and the role it plays in cognition? How does the reptilian complex (biology), which has no voice, effect the way we perceive each other and our discernible differences which amount to no more than superficial environmental adaptations. Is there no connection? No effect whatsoever? Damn that Rumsfeld…. Absence of proof is not proof of absence. Arguing the Devil’s side here is a bit tougher. Allen is correct, that from an historian’s perspective all that matters relative to racism as he defines it is that it is a social construct designed to perpetuate an oppressive class structure. The two, as Tom Wise points out in some other articles you have posted, cannot be separated.

Fascinating history and history that I am slightly ashamed to say I was largely unaware.

Ultimately since the argument that the origins of racism may have a biologocal component cannot be proven I would rather believe that biology has little or no effect. I would rather live in a world where we all believe that we are responsible for our actions and defenses for man's inhumanity to man like "unthinking decisions" are not allowed.

Part two will have to wait.


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