The Invention of the White Race, Volume I: Racial Oppression and Social Control

The Haymarket Series

by Theodore W. Allen, Jeffrey B. Perry (Introduction)

When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no “white” people there. Nor, according to colonial records, would there be for another sixty years. In this seminal two-volume work, The Invention of the White Race , Theodore W. Allen tells the story of how America’s ruling classes created the category of the “white race” as a means of social control. Since that early invention, white privileges have enforced the myth of racial superiority, and that fact has been central to maintaining ruling-class domination over ordinary working people of all colors throughout American history.

Volume I draws lessons from Irish history, comparing British rule in Ireland with the “white” oppression of Native Americans and African Americans. Allen details how Irish immigrants fleeing persecution learned to spread racial oppression in their adoptive country as part of white America.

Since publication in the mid-nineties, The Invention of the White Race has become indispensable in debates on the origins of racial oppression in America. In this updated edition, scholar Jeffrey B. Perry provides a new introduction, a short biography of the author and a study guide.

Genres: History, Race, Nonfiction, Politics, Sociology, Social Justice, Anti Racist

372 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1994

About the author

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

Reviews

[Carl · Rating 5 out of 5]

You have to work to get through these two volumes, but once you do, it will change your life and outlook forever. You simply can't understand America and who we are without this book, although with DuBois 'Black Reconstruction' and Amiri Baraka's (LeRoi Jones) 'Blues People'. Just knuckle down and do it.

[Charlotte Kersten]

Just finished my reading challenge for the year with this one!! It combined an analysis of British colonialism in Ireland with parallels to oppression in the United States. I've read several books on this topic so far and I think I might stop soon because I haven't learned anything especially helpful for my story.

[Clare · Rating 2 out of 5]

Gives the story of British rule in Ireland and the different strategies of trying to colonize that island. The history of British colonial rule in Ireland gives credence to the fact that the racial category of white has nothing to do with skin color(what the author calls phenotype). This history is put side by side with African-American slavery in the North American Colonies. The conclusion is that class and property rights play more of a bigger part in the separation of people. That white as a status is given to people or groups to buffer the rich or ruling class from rest of the masses keeping them divided and fighting amongst themselves instead of the capitalist that control and exploit their labor. This status has nothing to do with skin color but privileges given to what the author calls the buffer social control stratum, which to me is akin to the "house Negro" in comparison to the rest of the slaves known as "field Negroes". It seems in history people are divided by picking out a group for a particular common feature and elevating that group above the rest. It is an enforced hierarchy that creates division and allows for colonizing of land but also minds with a mentality of differentiation based on arbitrary stereotypical characteristics creating a superiority and inferiority complex in its "cast(e)ing of humans".

[Terence · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are easier to read books on the creation of the "white race" (for example Audrey Smedley's Race in North America}, but The Invention of the White Race (two volumes) is in my opinion, the classic, fundamental work on the subject. It destroys the widely held and totally wrong view that race determines character, is a biological reality, etc, in two important ways 1) documenting exactly how the idea of a Negro race was invented in America after Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, and 2) by demonstrating the links between how the Irish were conceived of and treated as an inferior "race" by the English and how English colonialists in America invented and treated the "inferior races" here.

[Simon B · Rating 5 out of 5]

Makes a powerful case that white supremacy in the US originated and endured as a form of social control in answer to the threat of labour solidarity in the early years of the colonies. At heart, it's an attempt to explain the stubborn prevalence of class collaboration in US history. It also suggests that any radical social change in the US is tied up very closely with confronting and eliminating white supremacy. Racism and white supremacy are neither natural or inevitable: they are elite political strategies that have been key to stabilising bourgeois rule. Much of the book focuses on the 'mirror' history of British colonisation in Ireland, which furnishes an example of systemic racial oppression that is not based on skin pigmentation. Strikingly, most of the hitherto oppressed Irish Catholics who emigrated to the United States in the 19th century fell victim to white supremacist ideas, embracing the relative privileges of their newfound 'whiteness'. Allen makes a useful distinction between racial oppression, in which the oppressors deny any social distinctions within the oppressed group (e.g. chattel slavery in the US or the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland), and national oppression, in which the oppressors encourage the emergence of social distinctions in the oppressed group and seeks collaborators among the upper strata.

[Loni · Rating 4 out of 5]

Theodore Allen did not fuck around. This was by far one of the most informative works I've read on this topic, and while it's rather dry it makes up for it by both being incredibly meticulous in it's research and also holding zero punches against his fellow academics.

[Jeffrey B. Perry · Rating 5 out of 5]

See Other Reviewers' Comments Here

Theodore W. Allen’s "The Invention of the White Race", with its focus on racial oppression and social control, is one of the 20th-century’s major contributions to historical understanding. Its thesis on the origin and nature of the “white race” contains the root of a new and radical approach to United States history. Its influence on our understanding of American, African American, and labor history will continue to grow in the twenty-first century.

Readers of the first edition of "The Invention of the White Race" were startled by Allen’s bold assertion on the back cover: “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 twenty-plus years of research of 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.

Allen was not merely speaking of word usage, however. His probing research led him to conclude – based on the commonality of experience and demonstrated solidarity between African-American and European-American laboring people, the lack of a substantial intermediate buffer social control stratum, and the indeterminate status of African-Americans – that the “white race” was not, and could not have been, functioning in early Virginia.

It is in the context of such findings that he offers his major thesis -- the “white race” was invented as a ruling class social control formation in response to labor solidarity as manifested in the later, civil war stages of Bacon's Rebellion (1676-77). To this he adds two important corollaries: 1) the ruling elite, in its own class interest, deliberately instituted a system of racial privileges to define and maintain the “white race” and 2) the consequences were not only ruinous to the interests of African-Americans, they were also “disastrous” for European-American workers, whose class interests differed fundamentally from those of the ruling elite.

Allen shows how racial oppression (particularly in the form of religio-racial oppression) was developed and maintained by the phenotypically-similar British against the Irish Catholics in Ireland; how the phenotypically-similar Anglo bourgeoisie established national oppression in the Anglo-Caribbean and racial oppression in the continental Anglo-American plantation colonies; how racial oppression was transformed into national oppression due to ruling class social control needs in Ireland (while racial oppression was maintained in Ulster); how the same people who were victims of racial oppression in Ireland became “white American” defenders of racial oppression; and how in America racial oppression took the form of racial slavery, yet when racial slavery ended racial oppression remained and was re-constituted in new form.

To assist individual readers, study groups, and classes this new edition includes a new introduction, some new appendices with background on Allen and his other writings, an expanded index, and a new internal study guide. The internal study guide follows the volume chapter-by-chapter and the index includes entries from Allen's extensive notes based on twenty years of primary research.

Extraordinary praise for this work is offered from such scholars and labor, left, and anti-white supremacist activists as Audrey Smedley, Bill Fletcher, Jr., Tim Wise, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Gene Bruskin, Tami Gold, Muriel Tillinghast, Joe Berry, George Schmidt, Noel Inatiev, Carl Davidson, Mark Solomon, Gerald Horne, Dorothy Salem, Wilson Moses, David Roediger Joe Wilson, Charles Lumpkins, Michael Zweig, Margery Freeman, Michael Goldfield, Spencer Sunshine, Ed Peeples, Russell Dale, Gwen-Midlo Hall, Sam Anderson, Gregory Meyerson, Younes Abouyoub, Peter Bohmer, Dennis O’Neill, Ted Pearson, Juliet Ucelli, Stella Winston, Sean J. Connolly, Vivien Sandlund, Dave Marsh, Russell R. Menard, Jonathan Scott, John D. Brewer, Richard Williams, William L. Vanderburg, Rodney Barker, and Matthew Frye Jacobson. See These Comments Here

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliantly constructed, and it rewards the effort put into the dense text rather handsomely. Although I was tempted to "tune out" a tad during the early chapters because the Irish-Catholic plight in Ireland didn't pique my interest as much as the early Anglo-Americas, my advice is: I'm glad I didn't, and therefore, do not do so. Allen worked on this thesis for twenty-five years, and that fact is reflected in its doggedly researched, impeccably traced arguments. Everything that is in here does fit just right, and it is sometimes a text that requires patience. But the text takes off by Chapter 5 (Ulster), and the accumulation of information that came before starts to build to an avalanche of awakening, realization, and a sense of a tragic betrayal.

There's so much to admire in here and the myths it deconstructs. I loved how much this book put the lie to the "black strike-breakers" scapegoating, for example; it is so thoroughly astute about its observations that many of them are in concurrence with the insights in another book I'm currently reading, Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning. I enjoyed how well it navigates racial tension and religio-racial tension, and not just the parallels between, but the hypocrisies across. The creation of a white sub-stratum in denial about the hard truth that their wages and status would've ascended had they been staunch abolitionists for the freedom of all labor, but no such luck.

The expectation that a culture that should have been all too ready to empathize, given their history and experience, is a faulty and illusory expectation; why we shouldn't act surprised at this any more, or even people voting against their own self-interest, is covered in this book. It opens my eyes further into the heart of what's at America in the same way Baldwin did, but through a different form, for a different time and place in America and in the world. Absolutely thrilled for Volume 2, and I agree: it is definitely a very vital book to understanding the reverberations of black slavery and white yeomanry, or in turn, the creation of a "social buffer of poor white people" and its impact on the wars across race and class being fought today. This is a text that feels, and is, crucial to a sense of understanding.

[Malcolm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Utterly and thoroughly impressive. Allen starts from the basic point that when the first African bond labourers arrived in North America in the early 17th century, there were no white people there, and there would be until the end of that century – at least according to colonial records. This is a powerful attack on the notion that 'race' is a natural thing to reveal the ways that the class differences of European colonists ('masters', servants, and so forth) were overcome in the 17th and early 18th centuries by a newly emerging language and practice of race – they became white, and thus distinct from the African bond-labourers with whom many of the 'whites' shared their work and worlds. The most impressive element of a potent case is his analysis of the transformation of Irish America from opponents of racial oppression to it defenders through the creation of the Irish as 'white'. So it's not an easy read – but it is an incredibly important read.

[David Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is mandatory reading for all anti-racist progressives. Will open your eyes and change your life and your view of American history and society. Vol. I is a detailed examination of the similarities between English law and custom governing the Irish and the slave codes applied in the American South as a way of demonstrating that racial oppression as a means of social control actually has little to do with apparent differences of phenotype (skin color, etc.). (Vol. II will then detail the creation of the white race in the US in law and custom and how that led to white skin privilege and white supremacy.)

[Adriano · Rating 5 out of 5]

Een noodzakelijk boek om racisme in de Verenigde Staten van Amerika te begrijpen!

[Left_coast_reads · Rating 3 out of 5]

Historian and Trinidadian leader Eric Williams once said that "slavery was not born of racism; rather, racism was the consequence of slavery." In The Invention of the White Race, Theodore Allen makes the related but no less eye-opening claim that when the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no "white" people there. The social category of white was created later as part of elite efforts at social control.

The fascinating thing about this book is that it focuses most on Ireland. Allen considered the Emerald Isle a mirror to better understand the system of white supremacy in the US. This is Volume 1. Volume 2 focuses more on the US.

Ireland is a perfect example to use because it demonstrates the "general principle of 'relativity of race' as a function of ruling class control." When facing threats of insurrection, elites will incorporate some portion of the oppressed group into an intermediate buffer which Allen calls a social control stratum. In the case of Ireland, it was the Catholic bourgeoisie.

But when Irish people moved to the US in large numbers, the strategy of elite control stipulated that they be recruited into the ranks of the "white" race. Side by side with Protestant Anglo-Americans, the Irish immigrants embraced their privileged position vis-a-vis the oppressed black population.

In all these instances, what elites fear most is a united laboring class. When colonizers encounter an indigenous population with existing social class hierarchies, they will attempt to co-opt a portion of the indigenous elites. When there are no such hierarchies, they will attempt to eliminate or exile the entire population. Sometimes a combination is required, especially if there is a large settler population vulnerable to reprisals.

This book was challenging without much background knowledge of events in the UK and Ireland in the 17th-19th centuries. I've been very busy lately and admittedly struggled to make consistent progress on this one, but I do want to read Volume 2.

[Frederick · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoy rounding out my understanding of historical events and trends by reading not only conventional historians but also historians from different backgrounds. For instance, I've found that leftists and communists can be very eye-opening and thought-provoking in the way they draw the facts together even if their conclusions can often be 'beyond the Pale.' When they are disappointing they are disappointing in a big way, missing opportunities to enlighten and wasting the facts they draw together so expertly. In other words, they may have great primary sources and then just not hit anything out of the park, so to speak, as in Saul Landau and Paul Jacobs' terribly disappointing, 'To Serve the Devil' volumes which started out so promising but accomplished so little. However, this first volume of Allen's landmark work is terrific, in the way that E.P. Thompson's 'The Making of the English Working Class' was. Allen's analysis of the way the Irish were treated in their homeland by the British and the similarities between that and British and American treatment of African-American slaves is very enlightening, thorough, and well-sourced. This is one of those works of history that really makes you think and consider and teaches you things that you maybe never imagined. It is well worth the read even if you disagree with his conclusions. He states something and backs it up thoroughly, so thoroughly its hard for me to find any fault except maybe he goes too far in his conclusions. But, extremists politically tend to be extreme so I understand where he is coming from. This book is well-worth the open-minded read. You will learn a lot about how the Irish suffered under British subjugation and how that whole mindset was followed in the purchase and enslavement of kidnapped Africans. I would say, "READ THIS BOOK!"

[Nathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is interesting in that so many slavery defenders use the Irish as examples of "worse" treatment. Comparing the long-term history of the Irish under English persecution, going back hundreds of years, is a better grounds for comparison - though there were some ways in which the Irish were treated more like the American Indians, and some ways in which it makes sense to look at Scottish slavery, all of which Allen does.

The tragic thing becomes that even though the Irish in America had plenty of reasons to understand about prejudice and how damaging it could be, they quickly aligned with it as a way of protecting their own position. It is tragic that now and then people will still not see that allowing the oppression of one group may make your own status look better in comparison, but also holds you down.

The material is still very timely, even though we should have had time and opportunity enough to be better by now.

[Marlo · Rating 3 out of 5]

The thesis is solid, the writing is nearly impenetrable. While it is obtuse it certainly rewards. Packed with more historical references than there are people in India.

[Nikhil P. Freeman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Origins of the "filthy aristocracy of skin" privilege and the conception of white supremacy.

[Tom]

Just ordered this door-stop (two large volumes) because I've given up on waiting for our society to get over it.

[Connor Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some things need to be laid out in excruciating detail in order to have any value. (As an aside, compare the difference in stature between short stories and novels.) This work essentially aims to show that the twin concepts of “white people” and “anti-black racism” are social constructs rather than eternal absolutes - such a claim is bold even now 25 years later; so if ever excruciating detail were called for, this would be one of those cases. The main argument of this volume - and likely the ace in the hole for the argument as a whole - is the similarity between the systematic oppression of the Blacks in America and the Irish in Ireland. As detailed in this book, these events occur roughly contemporaneously and they share a remarkable amount of similarity in their systematic nature. Similarity that is, except for the notable fact that the Blacks were black and the Irish were “white.”

This is an interesting argument, but if one were to briefly present it at a dinner party it may be absentmindedly swept away. Not so here: it’s the tremendous level of detail provided that gives this argument credence. It’s one thing to grasp the high-level idea of the argument, and completely another to see it developed date by date, year by year.

However I won’t lie, reading this can be a bit of a slog. While the detail is exhaustive, so is the reading as the author jumps around in time more than Sam Beckett in Quantum Leap: at least in Quantum Leap each episode took place in the same year, but here you’re lucky when a subsection maintains chronological order. It is tiring trying to place everything into broader threads of thought, and the author is not especially invested in doing it for you either. It is for these general readability concerns that I give it four stars rather than five.

Presently I have just finished the first volume, and thus it would seem improper to discuss the argument as a whole. I will remark that this volume leaves you on a bit of a weird note: you’ve seen how the Irish were oppressed and you’ve had a bit of a taste for what’s been going on in America - these constitute roughly equal amounts of the book - but there’s no real hint of a conclusion. Even the idea that the experience of the Irish and the Blacks is similar is not explicitly noted, although it is likely implied. (Although this would be a strange silence given the emphasis in the introduction and the overwhelming detail given to culminate in a silent implication.). Still, given the reviews here and the two volume’s ratings, I expect everything will be concluded quite satisfactorily.

[Keegan Webster · Rating 5 out of 5]

Borrowed this from a friend, it took me being asked to return to finally get around to finishing it. Well worth the read, a bit dry at times but the author balances that out with some dry humour here and there. Laying out the parallels between racial oppression in Ireland and colonial America was interesting, especially so the "sea-change" chapters at the end of the book detailing how, after hundreds of years of racial oppression in their homeland, the Irish-American immigrants were successfully baptized by whiteness and made to uphold slavery in the interest of preserving their newfound privilege. I plan to read the second volume eventually.

The transition from racial oppression to national oppression in Ireland was also covered, as one of the points of divergence between the USA and Ireland. Aside from the work about the specifics of racial oppression in both case studies, general work on social control, and having a "buffer" middle class was also quite interesting, especially the struggle to create that buffer class in order to defuse more violent reactions or the overthrow of the entire system of racial oppression (in reference to Ireland late 18th century).

[Frederick Widdowson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some scholars of a communist leaning write most excellent, thought-provoking histories, especially when they stick to the evidence rather than go off on a rant. Like E.P. Thompson and his landmark 'The Making of the English Working Class' Allen pulls massive amounts of evidence together to form his conclusions. In this volume he outlines how the American colonial treatment of African-Americans evolved and was strikingly similar to the way the Irish were treated by the English in their own land. He not only explains how racial slavery imitated and was patterned after the way the Irish were treated but he shows just how the Irish immigrants to America could be included as oppressors inheriting all of the privilege of 'whiteness'. This is a very important work and this is why I have just read it a second time so I could take the time to review sources and think carefully through the author's conclusions. This is good and you will have a hard time arguing with it.

[Kris Deters · Rating 5 out of 5]

The read is challenging but well worth the effort. Allen spends the introduction decrying the claim that racial bigotry has a genetic dimension specific to Europeans. He brings forth extensive histories of pre-colonial Virginia, English oppression of the Irish, and how crossing from Ireland into America bestowed the benefits of whiteness upon the newly minted Irish-Americans. There are many heartbreaking pieces of historical examples of oppression. I can't recommend this book enough, especially at a time when states are making it illegal to teach Critical Race Theory in classrooms. Though I would argue that we don't teach anything of substance in the US primary education's history class, and rather spend time preaching the mythology of America.

I will note I didn't read all of the footnotes. Many were just bibliographical references, but others were direct elaboration. I'm sure I missed out on some important details.

[Megan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This volume is largely a rundown of English oppression of the Irish as it contrasts and interacts with racial oppression in the United States. The conclusions are more hastily drawn than the informational set-up, and the book is very academic/intellectual in tone. I don’t mind that, but I imagine it could be a turn-off to many casual readers who could benefit from a less familiar but well-documented viewpoint on racial oppression. It would be good for a college class. It’s an interesting take on race in America, and I’ll have to read volume 2 to pass my final opinion on this work.

[Josie Rushin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Non-fiction about race.
Maybe it was my own error for not reading the blurb, but the introduction set the book to be about slavery, particularly in the US.
However, the majority of the text focused on Irish history. I know very little about Irish history and found this very detailed but not very accessible for someone with little Irish knowledge.
I did however find the connection between the treatment of the Irish by the British and the treatment of Black people by White people in the US interesting.
It is safe to say I will not be reading the second volume of this collection.

[B Conatus · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a long read, and it covers a ton of ground, but I learned a whole lot about how race (and nearby phenomena) are constructed in order to sustain social control. The first volume gives the backstory for the emergence of Whiteness in Virginia, and if you’re not interested in all of the details about the colonization of Ireland, it’s probably skippable so long as you read the introduction to the second volume.

[Barbara Harrison · Rating 2 out of 5]

More about Irish history than I really wanted to know, but proves that "race" has nothing to do with genetics and everything to do with the people with power holding on to power. Will stop by the library Monday to see if they have volume 2.

[Alysha]

About half of this book is citation and appendices, which should give you a warning that it is very dense and scholarly writing. It was very interesting and definitely well thought out, though I might have only understood about 50% of what I read.

[Brittany Duffy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very dense and academic throughout but a very interesting comparison of the British treatment of the Irish and the U.S. treatment of indigenous and enslaved peoples and ultimately how Irish immigrants in the U.S. sided with white supremacy over class solidarity.

[Michael T Bradley · Rating 2 out of 5]

I guess I really want volume 2. This first volume seems to be an overwhelming amount of evidence to prove something that seems self-evident to me. Volume 2 is apparently more about the impact of using the junk science in question, which is what I signed up for.

[Evan · Rating 3 out of 5]

couldn't finish it, but the thesis is important.

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

a difficult (writing style wise) but necessary read