The Invention of the White Race, Volume 2

Theodore W. Allen

Verso, 1994 - History - 372 pages

"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."

Contents

• England a Special Case: 3
• English Background with AngloAmerican Variations Noted: 14
• EuroIndian Relations and the Problem of Social Control 390: 30
• PART TWO The Plantation of Bondage: 47
• The Fateful Addiction to Present Profit: 49
• The Massacre of the Tenantry: 75
• Bondage but No Intermediate Stratum: 97
• PART THREE Road to Rebellion: 117
• Enduring: 119
• and Resisting: 148
• The Insubstantiality of the Intermediate Stratum: 163
• The Status of AfricanAmericans: 177
• Rebellion and Its Aftermath: 203
• The Abortion of the White Race Social Control System: 223
• The Invention of the White Race and the Ordeal of America: 239
• Appendices: 261
• Notes: 275
• Index: 365

About the author

Theodore W. 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).

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Invention of the White Race, Volume 2; Volume 2 of Haymarket series; The Invention of the White Race, Theodore W. Allen
• Author: Theodore W. Allen
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Verso, 1994
• ISBN: 1859840760, 9781859840764
• Length: 372 pages
• Subjects: History / United States / General; Social Science / Anthropology / Cultural & Social; Social Science / Discrimination; Social Science / Minority Studies; Social Science / Race & Ethnic Relations