The Invention of the White Race: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (Invention of the White Race)

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Synopsis: On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, Martin Luther King declared his dream of a racially integrated, non-discriminatory American society. Some three centuries before, that dream had in many ways been reality, since white skin privilege was recognized neither in law nor in the social practices of the laboring classes. But by the early decades of the eighteenth century, racial oppression would be the norm in the plantation colonies, and African Americans would continue to suffer under its yoke for more than two centuries. In this second volume of his acclaimed study of the origins of racial oppression, Theodore Allen explores the ways in which African bond-laborers were turned into chattel slaves and were differentiated from their fellow proletarians of European origin.

Rocked by the solidarity across racial lines exhibited by the rebellious laboring classes in the wake of the famous Bacon’s Rebellion, the plantation bourgeoisie sought a solution to its labor problems in the creation of a buffer social control stratum of poor whites, who enjoyed little enough privilege in colonial society beyond that of their skin color, which protected them from the enslavement visited upon Africans and African Americans. Such was, as Allen puts it, “the invention of the white race,” that “peculiar institution” which continues to haunt social relations in the US down to the present. Allen’s two volumes are essential reading for students of US history and politics.

From the Author: Here is an instance where less is more. "Origin" has the desired specificity, as in Darwin's title The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, and Engels' The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. In choosing this sub-title, I meant it to be consistent with the argument of the book, which shows class struggle to have been the origin of racial oppression, rather than ascribing racial oppression to "natural" and/or pre-American "prejudices" as proposed by Carl Degler and Winthrop Jordan, for example. Ted Allen, twallen1@ix.netcom.com, June 9, 1997.

Bibliographic Details

Title: The Invention of the White Race: The Origin ...
Publisher: Verso
Publication Date: 1997
Binding: Paperback
Condition: Acceptable