Jeffrey B. Perry

“Theodore W. Allen’s The Invention of the White Race is one of the twentieth-century’s major contributions to historical understanding. This extraordinarily important two-volume work, first published in 1994 and 1997, and considered a “classic” by 2003, presents a full-scale challenge to what Allen 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. It’s thesis on the origin and nature of the so-called “white race” contains the root of a new and radical approach to United States history, one that challenges dominant narratives taught in schools, colleges, universities, and the media. With its equalitarian motif and emphasis on the class struggle dimension of history it contributes mightily to our understanding of American, African American, and Labor History and it speaks to people desiring and struggling for change worldwide. Its influence can be expected to continue to grow in the twenty-first century.”

From New “Introduction” to Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, Vol. 1: Racial Oppression and Social Control (1994; Verso Books: New Expanded Edition, November 2012).

For more information CLICK HERE
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“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 arresting statement, printed on the back cover of the first volume of The Invention of the White Race by Theodore W. Allen, first published in 1994, reflected the fact that, after twenty-plus years of research in Virginia’s colonial records, he found “no instance of the official use of the word ‘white’ as a token of social status” prior to its appearance in a 1691 law. As he 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.”
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Theodore W. Allen’s The Invention of the White Race should be of special interest to students and scholars of Labor History. This two-volume "classic," recently published by Verso Books in a new, expanded edition (with internal study guides), challenges existing master narratives and seeks to provide the foundation for a radical new interpretation of U.S. History and U.S. Labor History.

Read comments on Invention from scholars and labor activists HERE and see a few samples below, at the very bottom.

Note the attention to labor in the following "Table of Contents" --


The Invention of the White Race
Vol. 2 The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo America

Table of Contents

Introduction to the Second Edition [by Jeffrey B. Perry]

PART ONE: Labor Problems of the European Colonizing Powers
1. The Labor Supply Problem: England a Special Case
2. English Background, with Anglo-American Variations Noted
3. Euro-Indian Relations and the Problem of Social Control

PART TWO: The Plantation of Bondage
4. The Fateful Addiction to “Present Profit”
5. The Massacre of the Tenantry
6. Bricks without Straw: Bondage, but No Intermediate Stratum

PART THREE: Road to Rebellion
7. Bond-Labor: Enduring . . .
8. . . . and Resisting
9. The Insubstantiality of the Intermediate Stratum
10. The Status of African-Americans

PART FOUR: Rebellion and Reaction
11. Rebellion – And Its Aftermath
12. The Abortion of the “White Race” Social Control System in the Anglo-Caribbean
13. The Invention of the White Race – and the Ordeal of America

Appendices
Appendix II-A: (see Chapter 1, note 64 [re “Maroon communities” in the Americas])
Appendix II-B: (see Chapter 2, note 6 [re Wat Tyler’s Rebellion])
Appendix II-C: (see Chapter 5, note 46 [re the “‘cheap commodity’ strategy for capitalist conquest and William Bullock])
Appendix II-D: (see Chapter 7, note 197 [re the bond-labor system])
Appendix II-E: (see Chapter 9, note 54 [re reduction in the supply of persons in England “available for bond-labor in the plantation colonies”])
Appendix F: (see Chapter 13, note 26 [re William Gooch and the discussion of white supremacy among the ruling classes in eighteenth-century Virginia])
Editor’s Appendix G: A Guide to “The Invention of the White Race” Volume II
Editor’s Appendix H: Select Bibliography on Theodore W. Allen

Notes
Index [Newly Expanded]

Sample Reviewer Comments --

“In a masterful two-volume work Theodore (Ted) Allen transforms the reader’s understanding of race and racial oppression . . . This two volume work becomes more than a look at history; it is a foundation for a path toward social justice." -- Bill Fletcher, Jr., co-author, Solidarity Divided and “They’re Bankrupting Us!” And 20 Other Myths about Unions

“The Invention of the White Race [is] . . . meticulously researched . . . and its insights . . . themes and perspectives should be made available to all scholars . . . it should become a classic without which no future American history will be written.” -- Audrey Smedley, Professor Emeritus at Virginia Commonwealth University, author of Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview

"As magisterial and comprehensive as the day it was first published, Theodore Allen's The Invention of the White Race continues to set the intellectual, analytical and rhetorical standard when it comes to understanding the real roots of white supremacy, its intrinsic connection to the class system, and the way in which persons committed to justice and equity might move society to a different reality." -- Tim Wise, author, White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son, and Dear White America: Letter to a New Minority

“Allen's Invention of the White Race is one of the most important books of U.S. history ever written. It illuminates the origins of the largest single obstacle to progressive change and working class power in the US: racism and white supremacy.” -- Joe Berry, Labor educator, organizer, and author of Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education

“The profound insights in The Invention of the White Race are essential both to understand the origins and destructiveness of white supremacy and to provide the means to conduct struggle against it. Allen’s study is mandatory reading for everyone concerned with justice, equality and the liberation of all from the binds of white supremacy.” -- Mark Solomon, W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, Harvard University

"Few books are capable of carrying the profound weight of being deemed to be a classic--this is surely one. Indeed, if one has to read one book to provide a foundation for understanding the contemporary U.S.--read this one." – Gerald Horne, activist, historian and author, most recently, of Negro Comrades of the Crown: African-Americans and the British Empire Fight the U.S. Before Emancipation

“A must read for educators, scholars and social change activist -- now more than ever! Ted Allen’s writings illuminate the centrality of how white supremacy continues to work in maintaining a powerless American working class.” -- Tami Gold, Professor & Filmmaker, PSC CUNY Chapter Chair, Hunter College

“If one wants to understand the current, often contradictory, system of racial oppression in the United States --- and its historical origins --- there is only one place to start: Theodore Allen's brilliant, illuminating, The Invention of the White Race.” -- Michael Goldfield, author of The Color of Politics: Race and the Mainsprings of American Politics

“[A] historical materialist analysis . . . reflecting the perspective of the author whose working class upbringing informed his work and whose political understanding called for constant struggle against white supremacy.” -- Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, author, Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie

"We cannot effectively counter the depth of white racism in the US if we don’t understand its origin and mechanisms. [Allen] has figured something out that can guide our work—it’s groundbreaking and it’s eye-opening." -- Gene Bruskin, Co-Convener U.S. Labor Against the War and Former Director of the Justice@Smithfield Campaign

“Through an exhaustive review of the primary sources, Theodore W. Allen pulls back the veil over the origin of racial oppression in Anglo-America. Allen's description of how the 1% divided and controlled the 99% in response to the class struggles of 17th century Virginia challenges European Americans today to ‘throw off the stifling incubus of the white identity.’” -- Sean Ahern, New York City public school teacher

“Independent scholar Theodore W. Allen has produced a two-volume tour de force that situates the development of racism, white supremacy, and racial identities in context of the sixteenth and seventeenth century British conquest of Ireland, the Atlantic slave trade, the rise of chattel bond-servitude in the Caribbean and English-speaking North America, and the destruction of Native American societies. More importantly, Allen draws from a wide array of primary sources to reveal the ways the political and economic elites, driven to maintain and expand their social control of laboring people — whether bound or free -- invented the concept of the white race. Allen’s research has profoundly shaped and influenced, often behind the scenes, historians’ debates on American colonial slavery and its connections to racism, white supremacy, and nascent capitalism.” – Charles L. Lumpkins, Pennsylvania State University, author of American Pogrom: The East St. Louis Race Riot and Black Politics

“Allen’s closely argued book produces a stunning transformation of the issue [of which came first, slavery or racism] by insisting that the question is . . . when and how European-Americans began to think of themselves as white . . . Historians of early America are likely to find especially illuminating Allen’s well-developed analogy between Ireland and British America, which persuaded me, at lest, that systems of ‘racial oppression’ have little to do with phenotype. Immigration historians should be particularly interested in Allen’s analysis of how the Irish, victims of racial oppression at home, learned that they were ‘white’ once they crossed the Atlantic and became . . . supporters of a system of racial oppression in the United States.” -- Russell R. Menard, University of Minnesota, in Journal of American Ethnic History

“Anyone who wants to understand the peculiar state of working class organizing in the USA — from the support by the majority of Southern white working class people for the war to defend slavery to the perversions of "Joe the Plumber" — needs to study and learn from the insights provided by the work of Ted Allen. Ted Allen's work resonates to this day with everyone who has confronted the organizing challenge of dealing with the issue of race in the crucible of class politics in the USA. During my nearly 50 years of writing, reporting and organizing, there has rarely been a time when Ted Allen's studies haven't helped me understand more clearly what we were confronting, either in Chicago's public schools or in other areas (such as military organizing) where I worked.” -- George N. Schmidt, reporter for www.substancenews.net and Chicago Teachers Union delegate

“Theodore Allen's The Invention of the White Race is essential reading for all students of race and power in America. This path-breaking research reframes and cuts across the disciplines of history, sociology and politics, shedding a dynamic new light on the important and often hidden phenomenon of race in America's cultural evolution.” -- Joseph Wilson, Professor of Political Science, Brooklyn College

". . . this is a rare book. It is the product of deep reflection, patient research and passionate political commitment. It speaks authoritatively to a thousand-year sweep of the history of Britain, Ireland, West Africa, the colonized Americas and the United States. Its origins outside professional history – Allen has worked as miner, mailhandler, draftsman and librarian – lend an urgency and clarity usually absent in academic writings, but without even a bit of anti-intellectualism . . . Allen . . . is making a decisive contribution to the demystifying and dismantling of what he terms the ‘quintessential Peculiar Institution’ – that is, ‘the so-called “White Race.”’ His 1975 pamphlet, Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery brilliantly posed the issue of the ‘invention of the white race’ within a materialist framework.’ . . . In Volume One, Allen uses Irish history as a ‘mirror’ to generate new angles of vision regarding race in the U.S. Since, as he argues, ‘Irish history presents a case of racial oppression without reference to alleged skin color,’ it offers a sharp challenge to easy assumptions that racism is a natural, color-based ‘phylogenic’ phenomenon. . . . Allen offers the best account yet of the process by which the Irish “became white” in the U.S. and of the roles of the Democratic Party, the unions, the labor market and the Catholic Church in ensuring that the nineteenth century immigrants best ‘prepared by tradition and experience to empathize with the African Americans’ would become a critical component of the “intermediate stratum’ of ‘whites’ perpetuating a system of racial oppression and class privilege in the U.S. In describing this tragic transformation, Allen provides a model for the consideration of ‘white skin privileges,’ which is seen as material and real but also as part of a larger system of oppression, including white worker oppression . . . what is most striking in Invention of the White Race is the quality of searching questions and clear answers.” – David Roediger, in Race Traitor

“Along with David Roediger and Noel Ignatiev, Theodore Allen has made a critically important contribution to the study of working-class 'whiteness' in the United States. Allen's exploration of how and why Irish immigrants embraced a white identity is truly original, and worthy of renewed engagement.” -- Bruce Nelson, author of Irish Nationalists and the Making of the Irish Race
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Table of Contents
for
"The Developing Conjuncture and Insights From
Hubert Harrison and Theodore W. Allen
On the Centrality of the Fight Against White Supremacy"


By Jeffrey B. Perry
( For a link to the article CLICK HERE and go to top left)


Epigraph
Introduction
    Hubert Harrison
    Theodore W. Allen
    Harrison and Allen and the Centrality of the Struggle Against White-Supremacy
Some Class and Racial Aspects of The Conjuncture
    Deepening Economic Crisis
    U.S. Workers Faring Badly
    White Supremacist Shaping
    Wisconsin
    Millions are Suffering and Conditions are Worsening
Insights from Hubert Harrison
    Arrival in America, Contrast with St. Croix
    Socialist Party Writings
    “Southernism or Socialism – which?”
    The Socialist Party Puts [the “White”] Race First and Class After
   Class Consciousness, White Supremacy, and the "Duty to Champion the Cause of the Negro"
    On “The Touchstone” and the Two-Fold Character of Democracy in America
    Concentrated Race-Conscious Work in the Black Community
    Capitalist Imperialism and the Need to Break Down Exclusion Walls of White Workers
    The International Colored Unity League
    Struggle Against White Supremacy is Central
Insights from Theodore W. Allen
   Early Research and Writings and Pioneering Use of “White Skin Privilege” Concept
   White Blindspot
   Why No Socialism? . . . and The Main Retardant to Working    Class Consciousness
   The Role of White Supremacy in Three Previous Crises
   The Great Depression . . . and the White Supremacist Response
   Response to Four Arguments Against and Five “Artful Dodges”
   Early 1970s Writings and Strategy
   “The Invention of the White Race”
   Other Important Contributions in Writings on the Colonial Period
   Inventing the “White Race” and Fixing “a perpetual Brand upon Free Negros”
   Political Economic Aspects of the Invention of the “White Race”
   Racial Oppression and National Oppression
   “Racial Slavery” and “Slavery”
   Male Supremacy, Gender Oppression, and Laws Affecting the Family
   Slavery as Capitalism, Slaveholders as Capitalists, Enslaved as Proletarians
   Class-Conscious, Anti-White Supremacist Counter Narrative –    Comments on Jordan and Morgan
   Not Simply a Social Construct, But a Ruling Class Social    Control Formation . . . and Comments on Roediger
   The “White Race” and “White Race” Privilege
   On the Bifurcation of “Labor History” and “Black History” and on the “National Question”
   Later Writings . . . “Toward a Revolution in Labor History”
Strategy
The Struggle Ahead
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Some Statistics Related to Race and Class in America

On June 25, 2010, the Congressional Budget Office reported that the after-tax income gaps between the richest one percent and the middle and poorest fifths in the United States had more than tripled between 1979 and 2007.

The concentration at the top of the income scale was the greatest at any time since 1928, immediately prior to the Great Depression. . . .

On July 1, 2010, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that 14.6 million Americans were unemployed, 45.5% of these were long-term unemployed (27 weeks or more), and the official unemployment rate was 9.5 percent.

Another 8.6 million were listed as involuntarily working part-time and 2.6 million more were marginally attached to the economy (they hadn’t looked for work in the four weeks preceding the survey).

Included in this group were 1.2 million “discouraged workers” who had given up looking for work “because they believe no jobs are available for them.”

Overall, the BLS counted 25.8 million workers unemployed/underemployed, some 17 percent of the workforce.

Other workers were turning to the Social Security Administration’s disability program for help and the SSA’s chief actuary predicted “roughly a million more disability applications from 2009 through 2011 than it would have without the recession.”

Approximately 40 million Americans, 13.2% of the population, were living in poverty, fifty percent of children would need food stamps while growing up, over 46 million Americans were without healthcare, home foreclosures hit a record high of 937,840 in the third quarter of 2009, and a newly developed Economic Security Index found that 20 percent of Americans without a financial cushion experienced a 25 percent or greater loss of household income in 2009 (and conditions were expected to worsen).

. . . In addition to recognizing the devastating consequences worldwide, it is especially important to emphasize that poor and working people in the United States are not faring well either.

The World Health Organization reported that “the U.S. health system spends a higher portion of its gross domestic product than any other country,” but it ranked 37th in performance.

The Social Security Administration found that “50 percent of wage earners had net compensation [wages, tips, and the like] less than or equal to . . . $26,261.29 [$505 per week/$12.63 per hour pre-tax] for 2009.

America, according to Michelle Alexander in "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness" (2010), has “the highest rate of incarceration in the world.”

At a June 2010 Congressional Summit it was reported that “incarceration rates have increased 800 percent in the last 30 years” and that “90 percent of all criminal defendants fall below the poverty line.”

The Economic Policy Institute compared the U.S. to 19 other industrialized countries and found that it had “weaker unions, lower minimum wages, [and] less generous social benefits” than the other countries.

Not only do U.S. workers work more hours than those in these other countries, they do so without statutorily paid public holidays and they are alone amongst this group in not receiving statutorily paid vacation time.

Most significantly, on the two major measures of household income inequality (the Gini coefficient and the ratio of 90th-to-10th percentile), the U.S. showed the greatest inequality.

White Supremacist Shaping

In the United States the suffering and hardship reflected in these and other areas are intensified by racial oppression.

In July 2010 Black unemployment was reported at 15.6%, white unemployment was 8.6%; in 2008 Black poverty was reported at 24.7%, “non-Hispanic White” poverty was 8.6%.

Ninety percent of Black children will be on food stamps at some point while growing up.

Stark racial disparities exist, and in general have increased, in jobs, housing, health care, education, incarceration and every major social and economic indicator measured in the Urban League’s State of Black America 2009.

That report describes “persistent inequalities” in American society and utilizes an “Equality Index” that considers five areas – economics, health, education, social justice, and civic engagement in order to compare Black to “white” equality (with equality being 100% and an index of less than 100% indicating that Black people are doing worse relative to “whites”).

The overall Equality Index is 71.1%. The index for economics is 57.4%, social justice 60.4%, health 74.4%, education 78.5%, and civic engagement 96.3%.

Incarceration figures are staggering. Black males are incarcerated “at a rate more than six times higher than white males” and Black females at a rate over 3.6 times that of white females.

Alexander, in "The New Jim Crow," emphasizes that “no other country in the world imprisons so many of its racial or ethnic minorities” and she describes how America has “a set of structured arrangements that locks . . . [African Americans] into a subordinate political, social, and economic position, effectively creating a second class citizenship.”

Jan M. Chaiken, Director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, found “approximately 30 percent of black men ages 20 to 29 were under correctional supervision” and “a young black man age 18 . . . had a 28.5 percent chance of spending time in prison during his life.” . . .

Marc V. Levine of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, in 2009, the most recent year for which data were available, reports that “a staggering 53.3 percent of metro Milwaukee’s working age African American males were not employed: either unemployed, or, for various reasons (including incarceration), not even in the labor force.”

Levine points out that “This is the highest jobless rate among working age black males ever recorded in Milwaukee,” which, he notes, also has “the widest racial disparity in jobless rates among forty of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas.”

Milwaukee, though extreme, is not alone, however, and the “jobless” figures for adult Black males in other cities are similar: Detroit – 59.5%, Cleveland – 52.3%, Buffalo – 52.3%, Chicago 50.3%, Pittsburgh 50.3%, and so on.

Sources for these statistics and related historical analysis can be found in Jeffrey B. Perry, “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) available online in pdf format at www.jeffreybperry.net (top left) or by Clicking Here
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Slide Presentation/Book Talk on
"The Invention of the White Race, Social Control, and The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America”
A presentation by Jeffrey B. Perry
based on the new, expanded edition of
Theodore W. Allen’s The Invention of the White Race
For information on hosting a slide presentation/book talk contact jeffreybperry@gmail.com

Theodore W. Allen’s The Invention of the White Race, with its focus on racial oppression and social control, is one of the twentieth-century’s major contributions to historical understanding. Its two volumes (Racial Oppression and Social Control and The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America) emphasize the centrality of struggle against white supremacy to efforts at social change and present a full-scale challenge to what Allen refers to as “The Great White Assumption” – “the unquestioning, indeed unthinking acceptance of the ‘white’ identity of European-Americans of all classes as a natural attribute rather than a social construct.”

Readers of the first edition of The Invention of the White Race (in 1994) 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. 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.”

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 – that 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 deliberately instituted a system of racial privileges to define and maintain the “white race” and implement a system of “racial oppression” and 2) the consequences were not only ruinous to African-Americans, they were also “disastrous” for European-American workers.

In the course of discussing these topics Allen, in Volume I, reviews the history of the debate over "Which came first – racism or slavery?" He uses the mirror of Irish history for a definition of racial oppression and for an explanation of the phenomenon in terms of social control, rather than phenotype, or classification by complexion. Compelling analogies are presented between the oppression of the Irish, in Ireland, and white supremacist oppression of Indians and African-Americans. Examples are offered to show that racial oppression is a deliberate ruling-class social control policy that differs from national oppression in terms of the recruitment of the intermediate social control buffer. Examination of similarities and differences in the social control systems developed in the Anglo-American plantation colonies, the Anglo-Caribbean, and Ireland show how racial oppression may, or may not be, replaced by national oppression under the same ruling class. In addition, Allen shows the “relativity of race” in the “sea-change” by which Irish haters of racial oppression in Ireland were transformed into opponents of Abolitionism and supporters of racial oppression in America.

With the conceptual groundwork laid, free of the “White Blindspot,” Allen focuses, in Volume Two, on the plantation colonies of Anglo-America during the period from the founding of Jamestown to the cancellation of the original ban on slavery in the colony of Georgia in 1750. He pays particular attention to the pivotal events of Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 and the 1705 revisal of Virginia laws, particularly the “Act concerning Servants and Slaves.” He also discusses the English background, the origin and peculiarities of Virginia’s original plantation labor supply, and the implications for the evolution of the bond-labor system in Anglo-America; why the Spanish example could not be followed in regard to the labor force; the consequence of the economic addiction to tobacco; the chattellization of labor; the oppression and resistance of the bond-laborers, African-Americans and European-Americans, together; the growing interest on the part of the Anglo-American continental plantation bourgeoisie in reducing African-Americans to lifetime, hereditary bond-servitude; the John Punch and Elizabeth Key cases; the divided mind of the English law on the enslavability of Christians; the sharpening class struggle - in the absence of a system of racial oppression - between the plantation elite on the one hand, and the debt-burdened small planters and the majority of the economically productive population, the bond-laborers, three-fourths English, one-fourth African-American; the dispute over “Indian policy” between “frontier” planters and the ruling elite; the eruption of the social contradictions in Bacon’s Rebellion, in which the main rebel force came to be made up of English and African-American bond-laborers, together demanding an end to bond-servitude; the defeat of the rebels, followed by a period of continued instability of social control; apprehension of a recurrence of rebellion; the social control-problem in attempting to exploit newly-gained African sources of labor by reducing African-Americans to life-time, hereditary bondage, especially considering the refuge available for escaping bond-laborers in the mountains at the back of the colonies, and in a continent beyond; the invention of the white race - as the solution to the problem of social control, its failure in the British West Indies, its establishment in the continental plantation colonies, signaled by the enactment of “Act concerning Servants and Slaves,” which formally instituted the system of privileges for European-Americans, of even the lowest social status, vis-à-vis any person of any degree of African ancestry, not only bond-laborers, but “free Negroes,” as well; the remolding of male supremacy as white-male supremacy as an essential element of the system of white-skin privileges; the creation of white male privileges with regard to African-American women; and how the “Ordeal of Colonial Virginia” gave birth to the Ordeal of America.

Invention’s thesis on the origin and nature of the “white race” and the origin of the system of racial oppression in Anglo-America contains the root of a new and radical approach to United States history, one that challenges master narratives taught in the media and in schools, colleges, and universities. With its egalitarian motif, focus on class struggle, and emphasis on the centrality of struggle against white supremacy it contributes significantly to our understanding of American History, African American History, and Labor History and speaks to people today who strive for change worldwide. Its influence will continue to grow in the twenty-first century.
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To assist individual readers, classes, and study groups this new expanded edition of Allen’s seminal two-volume "classic" includes new introductions, new appendices with background on Allen and his writings, expanded indexes, and new internal study guides. The study guides follow each volume, chapter-by-chapter, and the indexes also include entries from Allen's extensive notes based on twenty years of primary research.

Please read the extraordinary praise from such scholars and labor, left, and anti-white supremacist activists 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, Sean Ahern, 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. Click Here to read these comments

Table of Contents for Vol. 2
"The Invention of the White Race: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo America"

Introduction to the Second Edition [by Jeffrey B. Perry]

PART ONE: Labor Problems of the European Colonizing Powers
1. The Labor Supply Problem: England a Special Case
2. English Background, with Anglo-American Variations Noted
3. Euro-Indian Relations and the Problem of Social Control

PART TWO: The Plantation of Bondage
4. The Fateful Edition to “Present Profit”
5. The Massacre of the Tenantry
6. Bricks without Straw: Bondage, but No Intermediate Stratum

PART THREE: Road to Rebellion
7. Bond-Labor: Enduring . . .
8. . . . and Resisting
9. The Insubstantiality of the Intermediate Stratum
10. The Status of African-Americans

PART FOUR: Rebellion and Reaction
11. Rebellion – And Its Aftermath
12. The Abortion of the “White Race” Social Control System in the Anglo-Caribbean
13. The Invention of the White Race – and the Ordeal of America

Appendices
Appendix II-A: (see Chapter 1, note 64 [re “Maroon communities” in the Americas])
Appendix II-B: (see Chapter 2, note 6 [re Wat Tyler’s Rebellion])
Appendix II-C: (see Chapter 5, note 46 [re the “‘cheap commodity’ strategy for capitalist conquest and William Bullock])
Appendix II-D: (see Chapter 7, note 197 [re the bond-labor system])
Appendix II-E: (see Chapter 9, note 54 [re reduction in the supply of persons in England “available for bond-labor in the plantation colonies”])
Appendix F: (see Chapter 13, note 26 [re William Gooch and the discussion of white supremacy among the ruling classes in eighteenth-century Virginia])
Editor’s Appendix G: A Guide to “The Invention of the White Race” Volume II
Editor’s Appendix H: Select Bibliography on Theodore W. Allen

Notes
Index [Newly Expanded]

This new edition of "The Invention of the White Race" is essential reading for those interested in matters of race and class, for study groups, and for classes. The volumes make especially thoughtful gifts for loved ones, friends, and co-workers.

Please encourage public librarians and school librarians to order these new editions so they are available for others to read!

The volumes are available directly from Verso Books Click Here

They are also available on special discount (including both volumes shrinkwrapped) from Amazon Click Here

For the initial price for a shrinkwrapped set of both volumes at Barnes and Noble Click Here

Table of Contents for Volume I

“The Invention of the White Race: Racial Oppression and Social Control”

Acknowledgements
Introduction to the Second Edition [by Jeffrey B. Perry]
Introduction
1. The Anatomy of Racial Oppression
2. Social Control and the Intermediate Strata: Ireland
3. Protestant Ascendancy and White Supremacy
4. Social Control: From Racial to National Oppression
5. Ulster
6. Anglo-America: Ulster Writ Large
7. The Sea-change
8. How the Sea-change was Wrought
Appendices
Appendix A: (see Introduction, note 46 [re intermarriage])
Appendix B: (see Introduction, note 46 [re “cheaper labor” rationale])
Appendix C: (see Chapter 1, note 58 and Chapter 2 note 51 [re Africans’ strength as a limit to English colonization])
Appendix D: (see Chapter 2, notes 42 and 73 [re English Plantations in Ireland as “response to rebellion”])
Appendix E: (see Chapter 2, note 58 [re England on threshold of its career as a world colonial power, with Ireland as its first objective”])
Appendix F: (see Chapter 2, note 77 [re Mountjoy’s “starvation strategy” for Ireland])
Appendix G: (see Chapter 2, note 108 [re “social control policies of the Western colonizing powers”])
Appendix H: (see Chapter 3, note 8 [re “Scottish slavery”])
Appendix I: (see Chapter 3, note 46 [re relative cost differential of English and Irish common labor greater than differential between wage-labor and bond-labor in continental Anglo-America])
Appendix J: (see Chapter 4, note 107 [re “Daniel O’Connell’s views regarding revolutionary violence in Ireland”])
Appendix K: (see Chapter 7, note 62 [re “The Slave” by Leander (John Hughes)])
Appendix L: (see Chapter 7, note 80 [re “Address from the people of Ireland to their Countrymen and Countrywomen in America”])
Editor’s Appendix M: A Brief Biography of Theodore W. Allen
Editor’s Appendix N: Notes to Encourage Engagement with Volume I
Chronological Finding Aid for Users of this Volume
Notes
Index [Newly Expanded]

Theodore W. Allen’s "The Invention of the White Race," with its focus on racial oppression and social control, is one of the twentieth-century’s major contributions to historical understanding. This two-volume “classic” presents a full-scale challenge to what Allen refers to as “The Great White Assumption” – “the unquestioning, indeed unthinking acceptance of the ‘white’ identity of European-Americans of all classes as a natural attribute rather than a social construct.” Its thesis on the origin and nature of the “white race” contains the root of a new and radical approach to United States history, one that challenges master narratives taught in the media and in schools, colleges, and universities. With its egalitarian motif and emphasis on class struggle it speaks to people today who strive for change worldwide. Its influence 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. 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.”

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 implement a system of “racial oppression” and 2) the consequences were not only ruinous to the interests of African-Americans, they were also “disastrous” for European-American workers.

Please share this information with others who might be interested!
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“Solidarity Forever!” Means “Privileges Never!”
Theodore W. Allen on "White-Skin Privilege" and "'White Race' Privilege"

I would like to thank Dan La Botz for commenting on my response to his review article "Lessons of the American Revolutionary Left of the 1970s: A Review of Truth and Revolution."

In my first response I tried to do three things:

First I tried to make clear that, based on the historical record, Theodore W. Allen pioneered the “white-skin privilege” analysis in 1965 and he was the originator and principal developer of the theory.

Second, I tried to make clear that Allen did not consider “white-skin privileges” to be “benefits” for working people. Allen argues that “white-skin privileges” were created and maintained by the ruling-class to serve its interests for purposes of social control. He emphasized that “white-skin privileges,” conferred on European-American workers by the ruling class, are ruinous to the class interests of European-American workers and all workers and that “the day-to-day real interests of the white workers is not their white-skin privileges, but in the development of an ever expanding union of class conscious workers.”

Third, I tried to call attention to the importance of Allen’s writings, particularly the new Verso Books publication of his two-volume, magnum opus The Invention of the White Race, which is due out in November.

As I understand La Botz’ response to my posting, he accepts my first and second points on Allen’s pioneering role and that Allen did not consider “white-skin privileges” as a benefit.

Regarding my third point -- I do not read La Botz’ response as one that encourages the reading of Allen. I feel that is unfortunate because, as I stated, Allen was a major anti-white supremacist working-class intellectual/activist whose writings have much to offer us today.


Comments on Allen’s Work by Scholars and Labor, Left, and Anti-white Supremacist Activists

I am not alone in this sentiment. I encourage people to read the comments on Allen’s work by such scholars and labor, left, and anti-white supremacist activists as Bill Fletcher, Jr., Audrey Smedley, Tim Wise, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Gene Bruskin, Tami Gold, Muriel Tillinghast, Joe Berry, George Schmidt, Noel Inatiev, Carl Davidson, Mark Solomon, Gerald Horne, 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.


Easily Accessible Allen Articles

I also encourage people to read easily accessible Allen articles including:

Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race

"Summary of the Argument of The Invention of the White Race"

"In Defense of Affirmative Action in Employment Policy"

"'Race' and 'Ethnicity': History and the 2000 Census"

“On Roediger's Wages of Whiteness"

In addition, my article “The Developing Conjuncture and Some Insights from Hubert Harrison and Theodore W. Allen on the Centrality of the Fight Against White Supremacy” offers a section (beginning on p. 99) on Allen’s last major unpublished work, “Toward a Revolution in Labor History.”


Ruling-Class "whites" Benefit from the System of "White-Skin Privileges" -- It Is In Their Class Interest

In reading La Botz’ original review and response to my posting it seems that the position he initially inaccurately attributed to Theodore W. Allen – the idea that “white skin privileges” are a “benefit” to “white” workers – was in fact La Botz’ position, not Allen’s. If I read La Botz correctly, he says “white skin privilege” was a set of “benefits” that somehow “accrued to those deemed to be white” and, to La Botz, it is “obvious” that “‘white skin privilege’ provided immediate, short term . . . benefits to whites.”

Here is where I think that Allen’s anti-white supremacist, class-conscious historical analysis is particularly instructive.

Allen is talking about European-American workers, not about the “white” ruling class and not about the multi-class formation “whites” that La Botz says accrue “benefits.” Allen historically details how ruling-class “whites” benefit from the system of “white-skin privileges” – it is in their class interests. He is emphatic, however, that for European-American workers, “white-skin privileges” are not in their interest and they should be challenged.


Origin of the System of "white race privileges"

Allen’s details the origin of the system of “white race privileges” as he argues:

1. The “white race” was invented as a ruling class social control formation and a system of “racial slavery,” a form of racial oppression, was implemented in response to labor solidarity as manifested in the latter (civil war) stages of Bacon's Rebellion (1676-77).

2. A system of racial privileges was deliberately instituted as a conscious ruling-class policy in order to define and establish the “white race” as a social control formation

3. The consequence was not only ruinous to the interests of the African-American workers, it was also disastrous for “white” workers.

He also describes how “The normal course of capitalist events brings on a deterioration of the conditions of the laboring classes” and deep crises such as those of the 1870s, 1890s, and 1930s. In each of these “three periods of national crisis [the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Populist Revolt of 1890s, and the Great Depression of the 1930s] characterized by general confrontations between capital and urban and rural laboring classes” Allen details how “The key to the defeat of the forces of democracy, labor and socialism was in each case achieved by ruling-class appeals to white supremacism, basically by fostering white-skin privileges of laboring-class European-Americans.”

“The “Developing Conjuncture . . .” (pp. 34, 87-89) article cited above describes how Allen developed the “white race” privilege concept and how he emphasized that these privileges were a “poison bait” and they “do not permit” the masses of European-American workers nor their children “to escape” from that class. He explained, “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 used 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 an additional important insight 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.”

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.”


"Race-Privilege Policy is Deliberate Bourgeois Class Policy"

It Serves the Interest of the Ruling Class, Not the Interests of the Working Class

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.”

Allen made clear what he understood as the “interests of the working class” and referred to Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto: “1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.” He elsewhere pointed out, “The Wobblies caught the essence of it in their slogan: ‘An injury to one is an injury to all.’”

Throughout his work Allen emphasizes, “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.”

Based on his research Allen wrote, “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.” He emphasized, “‘Solidarity forever!’ means ‘Privileges never!’”


"Can White Workers/Radicals Be Radicalized?"

From the perspective of wanting to encourage reading of the writings of Theodore W. Allen, it is unfortunate that in his review La Botz, in addition to incorrectly characterizing a main aspect of Allen’s “white skin privilege” theory, also provides a link to a version of “White Blindspot” that is not the most complete version -- it is a link to a version that doesn’t include Allen’s very important article “Can White Workers Radicals Be Radicalized?” [Note -- "Workers" was crossed-out by Allen, but kept in the title. In the future this article will be cited using Workers/Radicals to indicate that the word "Workers" is crossed out and the word "Radicals" remains.]

The most complete version of “White Blindspot” had three component parts; the one that La Botz linked to only had two. As I explain in “The Developing Conjuncture . . .” -- “the most complete version was published as Noel Ignatin (Ignatiev) and Ted (Theodore W.) Allen, White Blindspot & Can White Workers/Radicals Be Radicalized? (Detroit: The Radical Education Project and New York: NYC Revolutionary Youth Movement, 1969). That stapled, mimeo publication had three components, an article by Ignatin and Allen entitled “White Blindspot,” “A Letter of Support” that was written by Allen, and Allen’s extremely important article “Can White Workers/Radicals Be Radicalized?” (The “White Blindspot” linked to buy La Botz only had the first two pieces.)

The activist Dennis O’Neill, in “Some Thoughts on the Contributions of Ted Allen,” explains that Allen and Ignatiev wrote “'White Blindspot' (including another piece entitled ‘Can White Workers/Radicals Be Radicalized?’), which became one of dozens of pamphlets published by the SDS-affiliated Radical Education Project. Within six months of its publication, this cheaply mimeographed piece by two little-known authors set the terms for nearly all discussion of racism and what to do about it within the most influential radical group on US campuses. The concept quickly spread throughout the broader Left and there too set the terms in a discussion that had been raging since 1965.”

Thus, in terms of encouraging readers to read Allen’s important writings, it is unfortunate that when La Botz offered his link to “White Blindspot” it only included the first two pieces “White Blindspot” and “A Letter of Support” and it did not include Allen’s “Can White Workers/Radicals Be Radicalized?”

The more complete version of “White Blindspot”, with the three components and including Allen’s “Can White Workers/ Radicals Be Radicalized?” is available online and is also available as a link on my webpage in the section “Theodore W. Allen (with audio and video links)”. I very much encourage people to read it.

“Can White Workers/Radicals Be Radicalized?” takes up a number of issues that I think should be of special interest to readers today.


On the "generally low level of class consciousness of the United States working class" --
The Six-Point Rationale

It first addresses the issue of “general historians and labor and socialist specialists” who “have sought to explain the ‘traditional’ generally low level of class consciousness of the United States working class as compared with that of the workers of many other industrial countries.” Writing in the late 1960s, Allen described the prevailing consensus among left and labor historians as a consensus that attributed the low level of class consciousness among American workers to such factors as the early development of civil liberties, the heterogeneity of the work force, the safety valve of homesteading opportunities in the west, the ease of social mobility, the relative shortage of labor, and the early development of “pure and simple trade unionism.”

Allen argued that the “classical consensus on the subject” was the product of the efforts of such writers as Frederick Engels, “co-founder with Karl Marx of the very theory of proletarian revolution”; Frederick A. Sorge, “main correspondent of Marx and Engels in the United States” and a socialist and labor activist for almost sixty years; Frederick Jackson Turner, giant of U.S. history; Richard T. Ely, Christian Socialist and author of “the first attempt at a labor history in the United States”; Morris Hillquit, founder and leading figure of the Socialist Party for almost two decades; John R. Commons, who, with his associates authored the first comprehensive history of the U.S. labor movement; Selig Perlman, a Commons associate who later authored A Theory of the Labor Movement; Mary Beard and Charles A. Beard, labor and general historians; and William Z. Foster, major figure in the history of U.S. communism with “his analyses of ‘American exceptionalism.’”

Allen challenged this “old consensus” as being “seriously flawed . . . by erroneous assumptions, one-sidedness, exaggeration, and above all, by white-blindness.” He also countered with his own theory that white supremacism, reinforced among European-Americans by “white-skin privilege,” was the main retardant of working-class consciousness in the U.S. and that efforts at radical social change should direct principal efforts at challenging the system of white supremacy and “white-skin privilege.”

Probing further, Allen also discussed reasons that the six-point rationale had lost much of its force and in so doing he provided important historical analysis. He noted that the free land safety valve theory had been “thoroughly discredited” for many reasons including that the bulk of the best lands were taken by railroads, mining companies, land companies, and speculators and that the costs of homesteading were prohibitive for eastern wage earners. He similarly pointed out that heterogeneity “may well . . . have brought . . . more strength than weakness to the United States labor and radical movement”; that the “rise of mass, ‘non aristocratic,’ industrial unions has not broken the basic pattern of opposition to a workers party, on the part of the leaders”; and that the “‘language problem’ in labor agitating and organizing never really posed any insurmountable obstacle.”

He then focused on what he described as “two basic and irrefutable themes.” First, whatever the state of class-consciousness may have been most of the time, “there have been occasional periods of widespread and violent eruption of radical thought and action on the part of the workers and poor farmers, white and black.” He cited Black labor's valiant Reconstruction struggle; the Exodus of 1879; the “year of violence” in 1877 marked by “fiery revolts at every major terminal point across the country”; the period from “bloody Haymarket” in 1886 to the Pullman strike of 1894 during which “the U.S. army was called upon no less than 328 times to suppress labor's struggles”; the Populists of the same period when Black and white poor farmers “joined hands for an instant in the South” and when Middle Western farmers decided to “raise less corn and more hell!”; and the labor struggles of the 1930's marked by sit down strikes and the establishment of industrial unionism.

Allen emphasized that in such times “any proposal to discuss the relative backwardness of the United States workers and poor farmers would have had a ring of unreality.” He reasoned, “if, in such crises, the cause of labor was consistently defeated by force and cooptation; if no permanent advance of class consciousness in the form of a third, anti-capitalist, party was achieved . . . there must have been reasons more relevant than ‘free land’ that you couldn't get; ‘free votes’ that you couldn't cast, or couldn't get counted; or ‘high wages’ for jobs you couldn't find or
. . . the rest of the standard rationale.”

His second, “irrefutable” theme was that each of the facts of life in the classical consensus had to be “decisively altered when examined in the light of the centrality of the question of white supremacy and of the white-skin privileges of the white workers.” He again reasoned, “‘Free land,’ ‘constitutional liberties,’ ‘immigration,’ ‘high wages,’ ‘social mobility,’ ‘aristocracy of labor’” are “all, white-skin privileges” and “whatever their effect upon the thinking of white workers may be said to be, the same cannot be claimed in the case of the Negro.”


In Three Previous Crises "the defeat of the forces of democracy, labor and socialism was in each case achieved by ruling-class appeals to white supremacism, basically by fostering white-skin privileges"

In another very compelling section of “Can White Workers/Radicals Be Radicalized?” (with great relevance today), Allen offered important historical analyses of three previous crises [the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Populist Revolt of 1890s, and the Great Depression of the 1930s] characterized by general confrontations between capital and urban and rural laboring classes. He explained how, in each case, the ruling class moved to maintain power by turns to white supremacy and by reinforcing “white race” privileges and, as he later summed up, “The key to the defeat of the forces of democracy, labor and socialism was in each case achieved by ruling-class appeals to white supremacism, basically by fostering white-skin privileges of laboring-class European-Americans.”


Four Arguments Against and Five "Artful Dodges"

In yet another section of “Can White Workers/Radicals Be Radicalized?” (and in another section of “A Letter of Support”) Allen offers additional insights that should be of great interest to contemporary readers. Allen was a very serious and principled proletarian scholar and he tried to honestly identify and address objections people might have to what he was saying. As he would later do in his major work, The Invention of the White Race, Allen put forth arguments that might be raised by those who challenged what he said, and then sought to address those positions in an informed and principled way.

In “A Letter of Support” he specifically countered the arguments that: (1) he “exaggerate[d] the importance of the Negro question”; (2) that “the fight against white supremacy . . . cannot be regarded as THE key; there are others, equally important, such as the struggle against the Viet Nam war and imperialist war in general, or solidarity with the nationally oppressed peoples of the world struggling against the yoke of imperialism”; (3) “that the struggle against white supremacy and the corrupting effects of the white-skin privilege cannot be the key for the simple reason that it is not possible to ‘sell’ the idea to the white workers, who have those privileges and who are saturated with the white supremacist ideology of the Bourgeoisie” (or, as some argue, “That it is not really in the white workers’ interests” to oppose white supremacy); and (4) that what he proposed amounted “merely [to] whites reacting subjectively out of feelings of guilt.”

In “Can White Workers/Radicals Be Radicalized?” Allen similarly sought to “cut the ground out from all the artful-dodging” (the artful dodge concept is derived from the Charles Dickens character Jack Dawkins, who was known as the Artful Dodger, in Oliver Twist) of “white” “radicals” on the issue of the centrality of the fight against white supremacy. (Hence, the crossing out of the word “Workers” and insertion of the word “Radicals” in the title “Can White Workers/Radicals Be Radicalized?”)

The five artful dodges that Allen addressed and countered were:

1) “‘level up; don’t level down! . . . don’t ‘take anything away from the whites’”;

2) “the new working class – the technical specialists and educators – will be able to deal with the white-skin privilege . . . because they are almost completely insulated from the effects of Negro competition, they are not affected by the white supremacy that the lower orders of whites have taken on”;

3) “the immediate interests of the white workers are in conflict with those of the Negro, . . . But their long-range interests in ‘the revolution’ are in common. Therefore, we need a strategy of ‘parallel struggles’ with each group fighting for ‘its own interest’ against the Establishment. Eventually our efforts will join when the long-range tasks are at hand. In the meantime, however, racism cannot be the main issue among the white workers; at the same time it must be the main issue among the black workers.”;

4) “Eventually, when the depression and/or austerity times roll around, the corporations will move to cut their losses by reducing the privileges that they have extended to the white workers. When that time comes, the white workers will sing ‘Solidarity, forever!’ again and join the black workers in the struggle against capital”;

5) “Don’t waste time on the United States white workers . . . The privileges of these workers are paid for by the super-profits wrung out of the super-exploited black, yellow and brown labor . . . The victorious national liberation struggles of these peoples will, sooner, or later, chop off these sources of white-skin privilege funds. Then, not before, the white workers will ‘get the message.’ Meantime, the role of white radicals is simply to ‘support’ the colonial liberation struggles.”

Allen’s responses to the four arguments against and to the five artful dodges still have great relevance today. His responses can be found online in "White Blindspot" and "Can White Workers/Radicals Be Radicalized?. In another effort to stimulate the reading of works by Allen, I encourage readers to go directly to that site to read them in their entirety.

In Sum

In sum, I would again strongly encourage people to read writings of the anti-white supremacist proletarian intellectual/activist Theodore W. Allen, to read (in particular) the newly expanded Verso Books edition of The Invention of the White Race, and to ponder Allen’s use of the word “Solidarity” taken from “Can White Workers/Radicals Be Radicalized?” -- “‘Solidarity Forever!’ means ‘Privileges Never!’” Read More 

The anti-white supremacist, working class intellectual/activist Theodore W. (Ted) Allen (1919-2005) was one of the most important writers on race and class in twentieth-century America. His seminal, two-volume magnum opus, The Invention of the White Race, which is being published in a new expanded edition by Verso Books in November 2012, is increasingly recognized as a classic and his writings have much to offer us today.

For a host of reasons, however, Allen’s writings have often been inaccurately described, improperly cited, and ignored rather than having been read, engaged with, and given the serious attention they merit.

It is with the aim of encouraging engagement with Allen’s work in mind, and in a fraternal spirit, that I offer the following comments in response Dan La Botz’ statements about Allen in his “Lessons of the American Revolutionary Left of the 1970s: A Review of Truth and Revolution” published in Solidarity.
.

1. Regarding La Botz’ statement that “white skin privilege” was “a theory first suggested by Noel Ignatin and Ted Allen” --

As documented and discussed in my 2010 Cultural Logic article “The Developing Conjuncture and Some Insights From Hubert Harrison and Theodore W. Allen on the Centrality of the Fight Against White Supremacy (esp. pp. 8-9, 31-34) the record is quite clear that Theodore W. Allen pioneered the “white skin privilege” analysis in 1965 and that he was the originator and principal developer of the theory.

Noel Ignatin (Ignatiev), explains: “My first act in 1966 on finding myself outside the group [POC] was to get back in touch with Molly [Theodore W. ‘Ted’ Allen]. It was then he introduced me to his thinking on white-skin privilege, which he had developed after he left the POC [in 1962] . . . not to be too grandiose about it, if Ted was Darwin, I was his Huxley.” (Noel Ignatiev to author, June 17, 2005, possession of author.)

Ignatiev adds that in the fall of 1966 he became convinced of “the correctness” of the “position that the white-skin privilege has been the Achilles’ heel of the labor movement in the US, and that the fight against white supremacy (beginning among white workers, with the repudiation of the white-skin privilege) is the key to strategy for revolution in this country.” (Noel Ignatin (Ignatiev) “Author’s Note,” October 5, 1969, in Noel Ignatin and Ted (Theodore W.) Allen, “White Blindspot” & “Can White Workers [crossed out] Radicals Be Radicalized?” (Detroit: The Radical Education Project and New York: NYC Revolutionary Youth Movement, 1969.)

2. Regarding La Botz’ statement that Allen argued that “white skin privilege” was a set of “benefits” that “accrued to those determined to be white” -- this is simply not what Allen argued.

Allen repeatedly argued that for European-American workers the “white skin privileges” were not “benefits” – they were “poison,” “ruinous,” a baited hook – they were against the class interests of working people. (See “The Developing Conjuncture . . .” pp. 34, 78-80.)

He emphasized that the ruling class deliberately instituted and maintains a system of “white skin privileges” (in their class interests) for purposes of social control.

In the above cited “Can White Workers [crossed out] Radicals Be Radicalized?” article (pp. 15, 18) Allen writes: “history has shown that the white-skin privilege does not serve the interests of the white workers, it also shows that the concomitant racist ideology has blinded them to that fact.” He further explains, “The day-to-day real interests of the white workers is not the white skin privileges, but in the development of an ever expanding union of class conscious workers, white and black.”

In his 1975 pamphlet Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race Allen explains that the “three essentials [that] have informed my own approach in a book I have for several years been engaged in writing . . . on the origin of racial slavery, white supremacy and the system of racial privileges of white labor in this country” are:

First, racial slavery and white supremacy in this country was a ruling-class response to a problem of labor solidarity. Second, a system of racial privileges for white workers was deliberately instituted in order to define and establish the ‘white race’ as a social control formation. Third, the consequence was not only ruinous to the interests of the Afro-American workers but was also ‘disastrous’ . . .for the white worker.

Clearly, Allen consistently argued that “white skin privileges” are not “benefits” – rather, they are ruinous to the class interests of European-American workers and all workers.

Finally, I think it important to call attention to the fact that Allen pointed out that slogans such as “‘Solidarity forever!’ means ‘Privileges never!’” have meaning for contemporary struggles as do such slogans as “Workers of the world unite,” “Abolish the wage system,” and “An injury to one is an injury to all!”

Thus, in addition to encouraging people to read Allen’s writings, I would also like to encourage readers of “Solidarity,” while looking at the masthead, to think about the slogan “‘Solidarity forever!’ means ‘Privileges never!’” Read More 

In Volume One of The Invention of the White Race: Racial Oppression and Social Control, Theodore W. Allen painstakingly sets out the historical precedents, the comparative case studies, the means to dissect threadbare explanations of contemporary racism, and then provides us with nimble heuristic devices to disentangle the snarled derivatives of the white supremacy ideology we face today.
But it is Volume Two (The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America) which so many of us working on civil rights in the South still carry in our mental knapsack into combat with the remaining diehard Confederistas who continue their sniping at people of color and insinuating their propaganda into the conservative legislative agenda. Volume Two in particular, with its penetrating narrative about the origins of white supremacy and slavery, much of it unfolding in Virginia, is of special inspiration to me and to my civil rights comrades in the Old Dominion. It spells out hope and erases all doubt, even among former skeptics, that white supremacy is not an inherent condition, but a cruel contrivance created and nurtured by the powerful few to master the rest of us. And in Ted Allen’s analysis dwells the heartening prospect that this invention, like all such fabrications, can be dismembered and its fragments thrown upon the waste heap of history.

Edward H. Peeples, Ph.D., Associate Professor Emeritus, Virginia Commonwealth University; Civil rights activist; author, Twentieth Century Scalawag: A White Southerner’s Journey through Segregation to Human Rights Activism (forthcoming, UVA Press)

For more on Theodore W. Allen's The Invention of the White Race and for a link to order from Verso Books -- Click Here!
 Read More 

"THERE WERE NO WHITE PEOPLE THERE" -- 1619
“When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619"
On the back cover of the 1994 first edition of The Invention of the White Race Vol. I: Racial Oppression and Social Control, author Theodore W. Allen writes, “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.” He based this statement on the fact that, after twenty-plus years of meticulous research and examination of 885 county-years of pattern-setting Virginia’s colonial records, he found “no instance of the official use of the word ‘white’ as a token of social status” prior to 1691.

As he subsequently 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 another sixty years before the word “would appear as a synonym for European-American.”

"THERE WERE NO WHITE PEOPLE THERE" -- 1640
The men who ran away with John Punch (Barack Obama's) ancestor in 1640
were "Victor, a [D]utchman" and "a Scotchman called James Gregory"
The Journal of the Executive Council of Colonial Virginia dated 9 July 1640 discusses the case of John Punch, President Barack Obama's ancestor. It is the only known account of the case and it reads as follows:

"Whereas Hugh Gwyn hath by order from this Board brought back from Maryland three servants formerly run away from the said Gwyn, the court doth therefore order that the said three servants shall receive the punishment of whipping and to have thirty stripes apiece one called Victor, a [D]utchman, the other a Scotchman called James Gregory, shall first serve out their times with their master according to their Indentures and one whole year apiece after the time of their service is Expired ... the third being a Negro named John Punch shall serve his said master and his assigns for the time of his natural Life here or elsewhere."

In this 1640 document the two servants captured with John Punch are described as "a [D]utchman” and “a Scotchman." They were not described as "white." The “white race” was not functioning in early Virginia.

"THERE WERE NO WHITE PEOPLE THERE" -- 1676-77
From Captain Thomas Grantham's Account

During Bacon's Rebellion (1676-77) Captain Thomas Grantham played a decisive role in bringing about the final defeat of the rebels. He procured the treachery of a new rebel general to help him in securing the surrender of the West Point (Virginia) garrison of three hundred men in arms. Then Grantham tackled the main stronghold of the rebels, which was three miles up country. In Grantham's own words:

"I there met about four hundred English and Negroes in Arms who were much dissatisfied at the Surrender of the Point, saying I had betrayed them, and thereupon some were for shooting me and others were for cutting me in peeces: I told them I would willingly surrender myselfe to them, till they were satisfied from His Majestie, and did engage to the Negroes and Servants, that they were all pardoned and freed from their Slavery: And with faire promises and Rundletts of Brandy, I pacified them, giving them severall Noates under my hand that what I did was by the order of his Majestie and the Governor....Most of them I persuaded to goe to their Homes, which accordingnly they did, except about eighty Negroes and twenty English which would not deliver their Armes."

Grantham tricked these one hundred men on board a sloop with the promise of taking them to a rebel fort a few miles down York River. Instead, however, he towed them behind his own sloop, brought them under the guns of another ship, and forced their surrender. In his account of the incident he wrote that the rebels "yeilded with a great deal of discontent, saying had they known my purpose they would have destroyed me."


The Invention of the “White" Race
and Fixing “a perpetual Brand upon Free Negros & Mulattos”

In discussing the post-Bacon’s Rebellion period, The Invention of the White Race describes how Virginia’s plantation elite contrived a new social status, a “‘white’ identity,” designed to set European-Americans at a distance from African Americans and “to enlist European-Americans of every class as . . . supporters of capitalist agriculture based on chattel bond-labor” of African-Americans.

They did this not by fostering social mobility, but by re-issung “long-established common law rights, ‘incident to every free man,’ . . . in the form of ‘white’ privileges.” These included “the presumption of liberty, the right to get married, the right to carry a gun, the right to read and write, the right to testify in legal proceedings, the right of self-directed physical mobility, and the enjoyment of male prerogatives over women.”
“[T]he record indicates . . that laboring-class European-Americans in the continental plantation colonies showed little interest in ‘white identity’ before the institution of the system of ‘race’ privileges at the end of the seventeenth century.”

Invention makes the extremely important points that the successful function of this new “white” status required that all African Americans “be excluded from it” and that this decision was a conscious ruling-class policy.

“[W]hen African-Americans were deprived of their long-held right to vote in Virginia . . .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.” This was clearly not an ‘unthinking decision’! Rather, it was a deliberate act by the plantation bourgeoisie” that repealed “an electoral principle that had existed in Virginia for more than a century.”

Not only was the invention of the "white" race ruinous to the interests of African-Americans, it was also ruinous to the interests of European-American poor and working people. As the author of The Invention of the White Race, Theodore W. Allen, points out -- “ . . . their (the poor “whites”) own position, vis–a-vis the rich and powerful . . . was not improved, but weakened, by the white-skin privilege system.” Read More 

September 24, 2012, Monday from 1-2 p.m. Jeffrey B. Perry will discuss Theodore W. Allen’s seminal work “The Invention of the White Race” with host Utrice Leid on her show “Leid Stories” on the Progressive Radio Network. “Leid Stories” seeks to provide important context for issues confronting us today, particularly issues of race and class, and it airs Monday – Friday from 1 to 2 p.m. [CLICK HERE TO LISTEN AND READ ABOUT "LEID STORIES"] Read More 

[Theodore W.] Allen describes how "the invention of the white race at the beginning of the eighteenth century was the solution to the problem of the participation of the bond-laborers and the poor free in Bacon's Rebellion" and of "how to maintain social control while continuing to base the economy on chattel bond-labor." The "great majority of the free men could not become employers or even secure long-term leaseholders," so they were "enlisted in the system of social control, not by a class interest, but by being ‘promoted’ to the ‘white race." This was accomplished "by conferring on the poor European-Americans a set of white-skin privileges; privileges that did not require their promotion to the class of property owners.”

For more see Jeffrey B. Perry, "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) Click Here (and go to top left for PDF) Read More 

Review of "Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918" by the Italian Scholar Alberto Benvenuti in the online German journal "Sehepunkte," Vol. 12, No. 9 (2012)
Click Here!

The Cases of Dr. Jahi Issa

Dr. Jahi Issa was fired on August 17, 2012 from his position as Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at Delaware State University (DSU). He also faces serious criminal charges and several years in jail. These actions against Dr. Issa are related to his attendance at a March 1, 2012 student rally/protest against attacks on Black education that was conducted under such slogans as “Its Time for A Change.”

Delaware State University in Dover, Delaware is one of the nation’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). It was established in 1891 as “The State College for Colored Students,” by the Delaware General Assembly under provisions of the Morrill Act of 1890 by which land-grant colleges for African-Americans came into existence in states that maintained separate educational facilities for Black students and for “white” students. The school’s current enrollment is about 4,000 students and it is the second biggest university in Delaware. Currently, an estimated 72% of its students are African-American.

Dr. Issa’s permanent discharge stems directly from his attendance at, and support for, the March 1, 2012 student rally at the DSU Board of Trustees meeting. The specific charges in his notice of dismissal were “failure to perform professional responsibilities” and “serious misconduct.” Dr. Issa maintains he is innocent of all charges. At the time of the protest Dr. Issa was one of only two full-time African-American professors in the Department of History, Political Science and Philosophy, he had received positive reviews, and the Department had no tenured African-American faculty.

Dr. Issa also faces serious criminal charges related to his attendance at the March 1 student protest. Board of Trustees meetings are supposed to be open to the public, students were rallying outside the meeting site, and Issa was supporting and watching them when the police came up on him. He now faces several years in jail for allegedly “rioting” [i.e. protesting without a “permit”], allegedly refusing a direct order [to disperse], allegedly verbally abusing a police officer, and allegedly putting a hand on a police officer. Issa pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Dr. Issa insists: there was no “riot”; he was attending a lawful rally outside a Board of Trustees meeting by Black students over issues related to attacks on Black educators and Black education; he acted lawfully; his first amendment and free speech rights were violated; and he was seized and roughed-up (causing him to be sent to the hospital) by police in an apparently pre-meditated targeting because of his outspokenness on issues related to attacks on Black educators and Black education.

Issa emphasizes he was at the rally to support students in their civic engagement and "remind them of their First Amendment rights" when police approached him. "I never insulted anyone. I never hit anyone. I was attacked," he says. He then adds: "They were pulling my arms up. I was losing my breath. I said, 'You're hurting me.' I told them I was getting hurt, and I was losing my breath." After being seized, Dr. Issa was taken to Kent General Hospital. His blood pressure was over 200 and he had a separated shoulder and other medical injuries. After Issa was manhandled by the police the DSU students spontaneously broke into a chant of “Rodney King! Rodney King!” (See Issa being seized by police in the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1YuJzYnetM at 0:34 Click Here. )

Dr. Issa also calls attention to the disparity in treatment that he received and the treatment that was extended to an overwhelmingly “white” group of student demonstrators who raised issues regarding the Equestrian team in March 2010. At that demonstration, protesters rode horses in front of the Administration Building yet no one was subjected to an attack similar to what Dr. Issa faced.

Jahi Issa is convinced that he was attacked because of his writings about ongoing attacks on Black faculty, Black students, and Historically Black Colleges and Universities and that the attacks on him are part of the systematic attacks currently directed at Black education and public education. (See, for example, his article Jahi Issa, “The Ethnic Cleansing of Historically Black Colleges in the Age of Obama” article http://www.blackagendareport.com/blog/7896 Click Here.)

Issa also thinks the attacks are directly related to his support for the March 1 students’ rally and concern about his ideas reaching students and a wider audience both within and beyond the university.

He writes that his firing comes “after more than three years of harassment and physical attacks by the DSU Administration . . . I was fired based on false allegations. There was no due process! And no hearing! I have not even had my day in court! The DSU Administration has systematically eliminated most of its African American faculty from the school. In fact, this is why I was fired. Because I had the audacity to stand up and tell the truth about the future of African American EDUCATION in the country.”

The attacks do appear to come from people in very high places and they appear to be aimed at isolating Issa politically and intimidating him and others who would speak on these issues. Dr. Issa maintains that powerful, moneyed interests and their political allies see billions of dollars in public education monies as objects of their greed. He believes they are the ones who are ultimately leading these attacks.

Dr. Issa seeks to call attention to these issues and to broaden political and legal support for his defense. He is a married father of five children (oldest 14). His college and university background includes a B.A. from Texas Southern, an M.A. from Southern, and a Ph.D. from Howard. His phone number is 302-465-3787 and his email is jahiissa65@gmail.com . He urges those interested in helping to contact him directly.


Background to Jahi Issa’s Work and His Cases

Video of Dr. Issa being seized and knocked to the ground by police (at 0:34 seconds) while he peacefully watches student protest at Delaware State is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1YuJzYnetM Click Here

Coverage from the Dover (Del.) Post on the arrest of Dr. Issa is at http://www.doverpost.com/news/x1160487010/Delaware-State-University-professor-arrested-during-student-protest Click Here

Additional coverage of the Issa arrest from Black Star News available at http://www.blackstarnews.com/news/128/ARTICLE/8291/2012-06-16.html Click Here

Jahi Issa’s article in Black Agenda Report on the "The Ethnic Cleansing of Historically Black Colleges in the Age of Obama" is at http://www.blackagendareport.com/blog/7896 Click Here

See also Jahi Issa's discussion of Historically Black Colleges as "a strategic resource for the higher education of African-Americans" in “No Need to Overhaul Black Colleges,” in The Chronicle of Higher Education at http://chronicle.com/article/No-Need-to-Overhaul-Americas/129565/ Click Here

Rudolph Lewis's Chicken Bones includes some letters of support for Dr. Issa and a copy of his letter published in the "Chronicle of Higher Education" at http://www.nathanielturner.com/supportletterjahiissa.htm Click Here

An article on the ACLU's early support of his case is at http://www.doverpost.com/news/x1704640114/Follow-Up-ACLU-backs-Delaware-State-University-professor-arrested-during-protest Click Here

An Article from Black Commentator on his work in North Carolina for Obama campaign in 2008 is at http://academic.udayton.edu/race/2008electionandracism/Obama/Obama20.htm Click Here

The struggle at DSU is not unique and recently Professor Jane Davis, Chair of the Faculty Senate at Tennessee State University was recently handcuffed and arrested for protesting university policy at an August 20, 2012 Faculty Senate meeting. See http://www.tennessean.com/article/20120821/NEWS04/308210030/TSU-Faculty-Senate-leader-arrested?gcheck=1&nclick_check=1 Click Here

For those interested in financially aiding Jahi Issa (he has lost his job, has five children, and already has thousands of dollars in legal costs) see www.hbcuinstitute.org Click Here

Please share this information widely. Read More 

[This document written in 1989 (in the language of the day) discusses important work from the 1980s by union activists who viewed the struggle against white supremacy as central to workers’ interests. It is hoped that readers will find that it offers some insights for use in struggles today.]

THE MAIL HANDLERS UNION AND THE FIGHT AGAINST RACISM
at the National and at the Grass Roots Level

by Jeffrey B. Perry

Notes From a Talk By the Treasurer of Local 300
At the Labor Notes Conference
Sunday May 21, 1989
Detroit, Michigan

Introduction

Over the past five years at the 4000-workers New Jersey International Bulk Mail Center (in Jersey City, NJ) and over the past year-and-a-half at the national level, Postal Mail Handlers, desirous of a better life, have waged somewhat successful struggles in three broad areas: against contract givebacks and business unionism; against the organized crime dominated Laborers’ International Union; and for an autonomous, class conscious, and democratic rank-and-file oriented union.

From the beginning, the struggle against racism has been central to these efforts. It has been central in two crucial ways. First, we have been able to take significant strides forward because, as we have consciously fought against racism, we have developed a solid human core on which to build. Second, by addressing each major issue and stage of our struggle in light of the question “How does racism affect this?” and by then seeking to combat such racism, we have had a political direction that has enabled us to move forward. We have not merely reacted to racism; rather we have sought to dictate the direction of anti-racist struggle.

Lessons We Have Learned

In the course of our struggle we have learned, at times very imperfectly and at times with great difficulty, some important lessons. These lessons are no catechism of accepted beliefs, rather, they are based on specific and concrete struggles and each one is backed up by concrete examples in the real world.

These lessons, as we understand them, are:

1. By identifying and exposing racist practices, patterns, and ideas, and then calling on people to fight against them, we have not weakened our efforts, but we have made our efforts stronger.

2. To the degree that we have regularized, routinized, and institutionalized our anti-racist work, particularly in our publications, job responsibilities, and leadership positions, to that degree have we been better able to counter racial efforts aimed at undermining our struggle. Regularized and consistent work, not spontaneous reflex actions are needed against racism.

3. In developing our publications we could effectively employ political, economic, and moral arguments against racism, and that once we got the moral upperhand it was possible to employ disproportionately effective publicity against our opposition.

4. The core of our racist opposition was objectively sexist and that by exposing and struggling against this opposition on both grounds we were more effectively able to build our movement.

5. Our enemies, both in USPS management and in the LIUNA hierarchy, particularly at crucial stages in struggles, have consciously tried to make racist appeals and attacks to weaken us and to undermine our efforts.

6. Given the clearly racist positions taken by LIUNA, our struggles for “Autonomy” have been struggles which were objectively antiracist and which gave major impetus to our movement for democracy.

7. In our Black-led union, as opposed lo our union under LIUNA's “white” appointed leadership, progressive ideas and causes were far more warmly received and promulgated and thus Black leadership at all levels has greatly aided the progressive development of our union.

8. In the course of our struggles, white workers who have united with us on anti-racist issues have played a particularly important role in either winning or neutralizing other "whites," thereby enabling our efforts to move forward.

9. And finally, we have found that by challenging "white race" appeals and so-called "white worker rights” and "white worker interests" we better prepared ourselves to counter the racist appeals of management and LIUNA.

Who We Are

The National Postal Mail Handlers Union represents 52,000 Mail Handlers nationwide. Approximately half of our 42,000 members are African American, Hispanic, or other peoples of color. About 15% of our members are women. Six out of seven members of our National Executive Board are Black and about two-thirds of our 37 Local Presidents are Black or Hispanic.

We are the third largest of the Postal Unions. The American Postal Workers Union and the National Association of Letter Carriers each have six to seven times our membership.

Mail Handlers perform the heaviest, dirtiest, lowest paying work of the principal postal crafts. We load and unload trucks and otherwise "move" mail within postal facilities.

Since 1968 Mail Handlers have been merged with and a Division of LIUNA—the Laborer's International Union of North America, AFL-CIO. LIUNA is an organized crime dominated construction union of some half million members. The majority of its members are Black and Hispanic and its leadership is, almost exclusively, “white." LIUNA is one of the pillars of conservative reaction in the AFL-CIO. Further, through the AFL-CIO's Building Trades Council, LIUNA President Angelo Fosco and LIUNA Attorney Robert Connerton wield inordinate power.

LIUNA believes that it ultimately holds all decision making power over Mail Handlers -- particularly regarding our contract, constitution, and finances. LIUNA also apparently believes that it never has to answer to us. Over the past year-and-a half the NPMHU challenged LIUNA on all these counts.

We have had significant victories over LIUNA in two conventions, three national elections, in blocking a trusteeship, in gaining an injunction against their seizure of our money, and in passing a reform constitution highlighted by one-person-one-vote for national officers, democratic rights, and Mail Handler control, and shaped by the principled position articulated in our preamble, that "all members of society should challenge such pernicious evils as racism, sexism, and capital's domination of labor."

At the base level, workers at the 4,000-worker New Jersey International Bulk Mail Center in Jersey City, New Jersey have a history of struggle. Bulk workers participated in major wildcat strikes in 1974 and 1978, co-organized a several thousand person strong New Jersey Anti-Apartheid Mobilization Committee March in 1986, were vociferous Mail Handler opponents of the sellout 1987 postal contract, and currently are in the 10th day of a 100% successful cafeteria boycott. (In the first wildcat strike amnesty was obtained, in the second over 100 workers were fired. These firings were for striking against the federal government and were forerunners to the PATCO firings.)

Some Examples of Struggle

At the Base

At the NJIBMC over the past 5 years Mail Handler union members put out a regular, hard-hitting, 2-to-4 page weekly newsletter. The union has developed a well-trained stewards apparatus and a history of organized struggle.

Since 1984, campaigns have been waged for contract enforcement, particularly around: discipline attacks; safety violations; harassment of the ill, injured, and pregnant; bid posting violations; layoffs; restrictions on shop stewards functioning; opposition to split rest days; opposition to use of casual employees; opposition to improper holiday scheduling; for work clothing allowances; and against discrimination and favoritism in disciplines, details, overtime, promotions, and light duty assignments.

Struggles have also been waged on broader issues including the sell out 1987 postal contract; the right to distribute literature; asbestos removal; improper locker room searches; drug testing; cafeteria management; toxic waste removal; contra aid; a free Ireland; against mob control of our union; for a reform union constitution; and for a democratic one-person-one-vote union. When the union took up and co-organized the 1986 New Jersey State anti-apartheid march the work inside the plant was so productive that thousands of "Free South Africa" buttons were sold and worn by workers (of all races and nationalities) within the plant.

The First Struggle Set the Stage

At the NJIBMC, the first major struggle in this period set the stage for all future efforts and it was a decidedly anti-racist struggle.

After our new administration assumed office in 1984, on an anti-racist platform, it was quickly put to the test. Within a matter of weeks we discerned a clearly racist pattern to management's treatment of our workers. It started out with light duty denials -- denials of work to people with off-the-job injuries whose doctors said they could perform work with certain limitations. The first eight cases of light duty denials, which we encountered, were cases involving Black workers--one man with 5 children had been denied work for twenty-five months.

Other areas we examined had a similar racist shaping -- disciplines came down more frequently and more harshly against Black workers, promotions for Black workers were disproportionately few, as were assignment detail requests that were granted.

On further investigation we found that virtually every top level manager running our postal facility, as well as key high level officials in the other major facilities in North Jersey and New York, were white male members of the Columbia Association--an openly segregatory organization for Italian Americans only.

We found that this management dominated organization had utilized USPS-paid “free” mailings to solicit members and had incorporated in the State of New Jersey with its principal place of business at our postal facility.

We also found that its membership included high-level union people from our union, and reportedly from the other two major postal unions. The former head of the Mail Handlers Union at our facility was also the former President of the Columbia Association.

We openly challenged the existence of this racist/sexist organization, the power it wielded, and we opposed the patterns of discrimination it had established.

In the course of that struggle we were warned about how powerful the Columbians were, we were advised that we would alienate the “white” and the Italian workers, and we were advised to stick to more nuts and bolts union issues.

We, on the other hand, developed an effective media counter-offensive which helped us build our newsletter; we stressed how these issues directly affected all our workers; we emphasized that if we truly were a union which aimed to protect its workers that we had to make special efforts to counter special discrimination; and we emphasized that neither “white" workers' nor Italian workers' interests as workers were being served by this Columbia organization.

Once we gained the upper hand morally we used it to constantly hammer management on this issue and virtually every other issue that we touched. As long as the management dominated Columbia Association functioned we were relentless in our denunciations.

The Columbians did attempt a racist counter-offensive from within our union ranks, led by that former union leader who was also a former President of the Columbia Association, but this effort was quickly isolated, tied to management, and discredited.

The campaign against the Columbia Association was successful. The workers denied light duty assignments got the assignments and the man out 25 months got back pay.

The campaign effectively ousted the Columbia Association from our building and weakened management's power in relation to our union. The new union administration got off to a good start -- our efforts were viewed to be foursquare against racism and sexism, for the workers, and principled.

Over the next few years we tried to continue emphasizing this pro-worker, anti-racist perspective in developing our steward apparatus and grievance handling. We also sought to emphasize this pro-worker, anti-racist perspective in our newsletters. We found that we were best able to do this with a publication which was regular and frequent (we published weekly) and in which racism was seen as a central factor to be considered in all issues.


Fighting Racism at the National Level

At the National level we have been waging a major struggle for autonomy and democracy and we have increasingly tied this to a struggle for a better contract. In each stage of this struggle the fight against racism has been central. LIUNA has been accurately portrayed as racist, undemocratic, and ready to sell us out. The National Postal Mail Handlers' Union, in contrast, has consciously tried to oppose racism, build democracy, and oppose sellouts.

In late 1987, as 26 months of LIUNA trusteeship over our union was coming to an end, our union representatives at convention, and led by Black leaders, stood up in open rebellion and voted down every single one of LIUNA's proposed amendments to the Mail Handler constitution. Mail Handler delegates also elected a new progressive administration in which six out of seven Executive Board members were Black.

While there was a long history which went into the December 1987 Conference, it is important to realize that LIUNA supported a more conservative “white” candidate for top office and that the LIUNA trustee, in a widely reported statement, had sought to make a racist appeal to one of the white Local Presidents. That the racist appeal was exposed and criticized by “whites” helped to cement the necessary anti-racist, pro Mail Handler unity which was necessary to stand up to LIUNA and reject all their proposals in late 1987.

As the newly elected administration developed it openly challenged LIUNA rule on the grounds that it was autocratic, greedy, mob-tied, and racist, and therefore not working in the interest of Mail Handlers. This appeal, supported by facts and some exceptional legal work, enabled Mail Handlers to first march on LIUNA headquarters in protest, then block a LIUNA trusteeship, and then hold a remarkable constitutional convention.

The Constitutional Convention reshaped the union on the principles of one-person-one-vote direct election of national officers and Mail Handler control of contract and constitution matters. It also included important wording from the "Union Member's Bill of Rights."

The December 1988 Constitutional Convention also passed some remarkable Resolutions supporting freedom movements and workers efforts in the West Bank and Gaza, South Africa, and Nicaragua while opposing such domestic evils as two-tier wages, drug testing, organized crime involvement in our union, and the Hatch Act. Other resolutions also called for union democracy, organizing the unorganized, childcare, AIDS work, and taking the Postal Service off budget.

The Mail Handlers' Reform Constitution is an educational document that broadly proclaims the principles on which Mail Handlers have sought to build their new union. The Preamble declares:

We believe that all members of society should challenge such pernicious evils as racism, sexism, and capital's domination of labor. We further believe that it is important for the working class to ever realize "in unity there is strength" and that "an injury to one is an injury to all."

The Constitution also, consciously aimed to protect free speech rights and to allow struggles against racism and sexism by removing wording from the old constitution which prohibited "criticism, reflection, argument, or debate touching on any member's race, religion, color, creed, sex, place of national origin . . . etc." The thought behind this was that if you can't name, identify, and describe the problem, you couldn’t begin to solve it.

After we passed our constitution, which LIUNA is currently challenging, we entered a full-scale political struggle with LIUNA in the form of two, first-ever, one-person, one-vote, elections of national officers.

The LIUNA candidate for the top spot had money, resources, and a base of support centered around eight locals, six of which were “white”-led and conservative.

Literature supporting the LIUNA candidate was of two types. First, was material, which was misleading and sought to focus on narrow contract issues. Second, there was a series of "anonymous" "Willie Horton" type pieces that were simply vicious, racist literature -- and which were small time versions of the literature that appeared during the Bush campaign.

In contrast, the progressive African-American led “Team for Democracy" ran a campaign of broad appeal which had its core support in the South, the inner cities, and certain progressive locals. We centered our appeal on the newly franchised rank-and-file voters (who were all voting for the first time) and combined rank-and-file oriented literature and literature distribution with visits to facilities and in some places phone trees.

The “Team for Democracy" campaign took the higher ground, focused in-depth on contract issues, openly opposed racism, and tied the LIUNA candidate to our last sell-out contract and to selling us out to LIUNA.

The 1987 Postal Contract, signed by LIUNA while they had Mail Handlers under trusteeship, was broadly viewed as a back door deal between organized crime dominated LIUNA and Postmaster Preston Tisch. In that contract LIUNA undercut the other two postal unions by signing three weeks early and settling for a meager 1.6% wage increase (at a time when most of the media was predicting we would get anywhere from a 2.6 to a 3.2% increase).

In various literature which circulated it was also charged that the contract which LIUNA signed was tied to business deals between Tisch's CNA Insurance Company which underwrites and administers the Billion Dollar Mail Handler Benefit Plan (and several smaller union-related insurance plans) and LIUNA. LIUNA reportedly sought to gain control of signatory power over the lucrative Mail Handler Benefit Plan and wanted increased formal contract recognition from the United States Postal Service—recognition that it received when Tisch and Fosco agreed to replace Mail Handlers with LIUNA in certain key passages in the contract.

In that sell-out contract LIUNA also willingly gave up major EEO protections for our workers in the form of simultaneous dual filing rights. This was a racist concession which neither other postal union made and focus on this issue by the “Team for Democracy" greatly aided in the principled exposure of LIUNA.

The “Team for Democracy" election strategy worked. In the first round of the two-stage election procedures the “Team" swept five of seven National Executive Board spots. In the final runoff, the “Team" won the last two spots, including the crucial position of National President. In that final, head-to-head election, “Team for Democracy" candidates, running on an anti-racist anti-sellout, pro-democracy campaign won by almost a two-to-one margin.

In Sum

In sum, based on recent experiences in the Mail Handlers Union, the struggle against racism has been central to our struggles for a more democratic, class conscious, rank-and-file oriented union and to the degree that we have maintained that perspective and acted accordingly we have moved our struggle forward. Read More 

Jahi Issa recently asked me what I thought Theodore W. Allen meant when he argued that "white race' privileges and white supremacism were disastrous for European-American workers.

I try to address this question at some length in my article “The Developing Conjuncture . . . ,” (see below *). For now, however, I offer a few brief comments based on Allen’s work and some recent statistics.

Allen’s research argues:

1. The “white race” was invented as a ruling class social control formation and a system of “racial slavery,” a form of racial oppression, was implemented in response to labor solidarity as manifested in the latter (civil war) stages of Bacon's Rebellion (1676-77).

2. A system of racial privileges was deliberately instituted as a conscious ruling-class policy in order to define and establish the “white race.”

3. The consequence was not only ruinous to the interests of the African-American workers, it was also disastrous for “white” workers.

Allen explains that in Virginia the colonial period, among the masses of European workers, “the bourgeoisie established the dominance of race consciousness as against proletarian class consciousness.”

He emphasizes “there were too many [European-American workers] . . . to be promoted to the bourgeoisie” so they were made members of “the ‘white race’” and this “white race,” this “all-class association of European-Americans held together by ‘racial’ privileges conferred on laboring class European-Americans relative to African-Americans – [has functioned] as the principal historic guarantor of ruling-class domination of national life” in the U.S.

For Allen, “the ‘white race’ must be understood, not simply as a social construct, but as a ruling class social control formation.” The ruling class created and maintains the “white race” in their own interests and it continues to serve their interests.

Under capitalism those ruing class interests are opposed to the class interests of the workers. Allen emphasizes that “ . . . their (the poor “whites”) own position, vis–a-vis the rich and powerful . . . was not improved, but weakened, by the white-skin privilege system” that the ruling class established.

Based on this understanding Allen describes “white race” privileges as a “poison bait” and explained that the privileges “do not permit” the masses of European American workers nor their children “to escape” from the working class.

“It is not that the ordinary white worker gets more than [s]he must have to support [her/]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.”

Allen would frequently provide 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.”

Allen goes further, however, and continually stresses that “white race” privileges are not “benefits,” but that they are “poison,” “ruinous,” a baited hook, to the class interests of working people.

He cites other important examples with great relevance for today. He describes how “The normal course of capitalist events brings on a deterioration of the conditions of the laboring classes” as happened in the 1870s, 1890s, and 1930s.

Then, in the accompanying “three periods of national crisis [the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Populist Revolt of 1890s, and the Great Depression of the 1930s] characterized by general confrontations between capital and urban and rural laboring classes . . . The key to the defeat of the forces of democracy, labor and socialism was in each case achieved by ruling-class appeals to white supremacism, basically by fostering white-skin privileges of laboring-class European-Americans.”

In the face of attacks by bosses and the ruling class workers need to unite and organize to fight. When workers break ranks and collaborate with bosses the interests of workers are weakened. This is what happens when “white workers” put “white” interests before worker interests.

For Allen, “The ‘white race’ is the historically most general form of ‘class collaboration.’”

The international implications of this are that “the greatest political, social, and ideological bulwark of the imperialist warmakers and colonial oppressors is precisely white supremacy in America.”

Based on his research Allen wrote, “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.”

He emphasized, “‘Solidarity forever!’ means ‘Privileges never!’” and he elsewhere pointed out, “The Wobblies caught the essence of it in their slogan: ‘An injury to one is an injury to all.’”

About two years ago I pulled together (see my article* The Developing Conjuncture . . . linked to below) statistics showing some of the ways that the existing white supremacist capitalist order was disastrous for working people. While conditions have generally worsened since then, here is some of what I found--

After-tax income gaps between the richest one percent and the middle and poorest fifths in the United States had more than tripled between 1979 and 2007. The concentration at the top of the income scale was the greatest at any time since 1928, immediately prior to the Great Depression.

On July 1, 2010, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that 14.6 million Americans were unemployed, 45.5% of these were long-term unemployed (27 weeks or more), and the official unemployment rate was 9.5 percent.

Another 8.6 million were listed as involuntarily working part-time and 2.6 million more were marginally attached to the economy (they hadn’t looked for work in the four weeks preceding the survey). Included in this group were 1.2 million “discouraged workers” who had given up looking for work “because they believe no jobs are available for them.”

Overall, the BLS counted 25.8 million workers unemployed/underemployed, some 17 percent of the workforce.

Other workers were turning to the Social Security Administration’s disability program for help and the SSA’s chief actuary predicted “roughly a million more disability applications from 2009 through 2011 than it would have without the recession.”

Approximately 40 million Americans, 13.2% of the population, were living in poverty, fifty percent of children would need food stamps while growing up, over 46 million Americans were without healthcare, home foreclosures hit a record high of 937,840 in the third quarter of 2009, and a newly developed Economic Security Index found that 20 percent of Americans without a financial cushion experienced a 25 percent or greater loss of household income in 2009 (and conditions were expected to worsen).

The World Health Organization reported that “the U.S. health system spends a higher portion of its gross domestic product than any other country,” but it ranked 37th in performance.

The Social Security Administration found that “50 percent of wage earners had net compensation [wages, tips, and the like] less than or equal to . . . $26,261.29 [$505 per week/$12.63 per hour pre-tax] for 2009.

The U.S. “the highest rate of incarceration in the world,” “incarceration rates have increased 800 percent in the last 30 years,” and “90 percent of all criminal defendants fall below the poverty line.”

The Economic Policy Institute compared the U.S. to 19 other industrialized countries and found that workers in the U.S. it had “weaker unions, lower minimum wages, [and] less generous social benefits” than the other countries. Not only do U.S. workers work more hours than those in these other countries, they do so without statutorily paid public holidays and they are alone amongst this group in not receiving statutorily paid vacation time.

Most significantly, on the two major measures of household income inequality (the Gini coefficient and the ratio of 90th-to-10th percentile), the U.S. showed the greatest inequality.

Such statistics could go on and on, and each and everyone is shaped in a horribly white supremacist fashion (which is documented in my longer article).

"White race" privileges and white supremacism are found in every aspect of U.S. society and they should be opposed by all. Victims of racial oppression have led in opposition to "white race" privileges and white supremacism. It is in the class interest of European-American workers to vigorously join in this struggle.

I think the point is clear – working people in the U.S. are not faring well, weapons for fighting back (including unions, workers organizations, labor parties, left parties, etc. are weak), white supremacy is central to understanding this situation, these conditions are worsening, and working people in the U.S. need to wage a concerted struggle against white supremacy as they challenge their bosses and the ruling class.


* An in-depth treatment of Theodore W. Allen’s thinking on this subject can be found in my article "The Developing Conjuncture . . ." (esp. pp. 8-11 and 30-109. A link to the PDF of that article can be found at www.jeffreybperry.net (top left) Click Here and the article refers to many other Allen articles including some that can be found at http://www.jeffreybperry.net/_center__font_size__3__b_4__theodore_w__allen_br___with_audio_and_video_links____86151.htm Click Here

Jeffrey B. Perry
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For anyone reading (or using in a class or study group) Edmund S. Morgan’s "American Slavery/American Freedom" and/or Winthrop D. Jordan's "White Over Black," I would encourage also reading something by Theodore W. Allen.

In particular, I would recommend either Allen's “The Invention of the White Race” (which is being published in a new edition by Verso in November 2012), his 1978 review of Morgan’s book in “Monthly Review,” his article “Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race” (available online at http://clogic.eserver.org/2006/allen.html Click Here ), or his "Summary of the Argument of 'The Invention of the White Race'" (available online at http://clogic.eserver.org/1-2/allen.html Click Here ).

Allen's work details the development of racial slavery and racial oppression in Anglo-America with special emphasis on social control and "the invention of the 'white race'" in late-17th century Virginia.

In the process, it seeks to challenge what Allen considers to be the two main arguments that undermine the struggle against white supremacy by European-American workers: (1) the argument that white supremacism is innate, and (2) the argument that European-American workers “benefit” from “white race” privileges and white supremacism -- that the privileges are in their class interest.

These arguments are respectively related to two historical master 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 Winthrop D. Jordan in "White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812."

The second argument is related to Morgan’s contention that as racial slavery developed in Virginia, “there were too few free poor [European-Americans] on hand to matter.”

Allen's rigorously researched two-volume "classic" challenges both these positions and it (along with his other writings) offers an important counter-narrative to the narratives of Jordan and Morgan.

It is a seminal contribution to U.S. history!

Jeffrey B. Perry
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Some interesting background regarding proposed Census changes in how it measures "race" and "ethnicity" is provided in Theodore W. Allen's "'Race' and 'Ethnicity': History and the 2000 Census" online at "Cultural Logic.

Jeffrey B. Perry

In Vol. 2 of “The Invention of the White Race,” sub-titled “The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America,” Theodore W. Allen addresses the question of the differential treatment of John Punch at some length and with many footnotes from original sources. I strongly recommend that volume. Many of the key points he makes can be found online in Theodore W. Allen, “Summary of the Argument of the Invention of the White Race” available Here.

Drawing from Allen, I offer the following brief comments:

Status of African-Americans

Allen maintains that the relative social status of African-descended and European-descended people in a very “Volatile” Virginia society up through Bacon’s Rebellion (1676-77) “can be determined to have been indeterminate.” It was indeterminate because “it was being fought out . . .in the context of the great social stresses of high mortality, the monocultural [tobacco] economy, impoverishment, an extremely high sex ratio - all based on or deriving from the abnormal system of chattel bond-servitude.” He argues that Bacon’s Rebellion was the critical moment of that social struggle and “posed the question of who should rule.” The answer, “contrived over the next several decades, would not only determine the status of African-Americans, but would install the monorail of Anglo-American historical development, white supremacy.”

Allen further argues that the General Court’s order relating to John Punch [see below] “is equally proof that he was not a lifetime bond-laborer when he ran away” and, by that act, “he was demonstrating his unwillingness to submit to even limited-term bond-servitude.” Thus, “The John Punch case . . . epitomized the status of African-Americans in seventeenth-century Virginia. On the one hand, it showed a readiness of at least some of the plantation elite to equate ‘being a negro’ with being a lifetime bond-laborer. On the other hand, development of social policy along this line was obstructed by several factors.” [italics mine]

Among those factors cited by Allen were the “institutional inertia presented by English common law, . . .and by . . . principles of Christian fellowship”; the many examples of “normal social standing and mobility for African-Americans”; and the “opposition of African-Americans, both bond-laborers and non-bond-laborers, with the general support - certainly without the concerted opposition - of European-American bond-laborers, and other free but poor laboring people, determined by a sense of common class interest.” Allen discusses all of these factors, along with the insubstantiality of an intermediate buffer social control stratum, at great length.

Some Background

By 1640 the Virginia General Court was receiving daily complaints about “servants that run away from their masters” and, writes Allen, the problem “had reached such proportions that the Colony Council made the recapture of runaway bond-laborers a public concern, and ordered that the expense of recovering fugitives be borne, not by the owner, but by the public treasury of the respective counties.” This was the situation in June 1640 when three Virginia bond-laborers, “Victor, a Dutchman . . . a Scotchman called James Gregory. . . . [and] a negro named John Punch,” escaped together to Maryland. After they were caught they were brought back to face the Virginia General Court.” Also in June 1640, the Virginia Colony Council and General Court commissioned a Charles City County posse to pursue “certain runaway negroes.” The cost was to be shared by all the counties from which they had run away and Allen says that this suggests “that the phenomenon was extensive.”

Limited and Lifetime Servitude

Allen explains “the reduction of the almost totally English labor force from tenants and wage-laborers to chattel bond-servitude in the 1620s was a negation of previously existing laws.” Regarding imposing two distinct categories of servitude -- limited term and lifetime servitude – Allen emphasizes that “the death-rate was so high for several decades, that there would have been no practical advantage for employers in seeking to institute such a distinction.”

Just such a distinction was anticipated, however, “when the Virginia General Court . . .imposed lifetime bond-servitude on John Punch.” The question is fairly asked, writes Allen, “why did the appetite for profit not lead the Court to sentence John Punch’s European-American comrades to lifetime servitude also?”

Why the disparate treatment?

If the court “was motivated by ‘white’ supremacist thinking,” comments Allen, it “is not a fact of the record.” He mentions other possibilities. “Under English common law Christians could not be enslaved by Christians; presumably, Scots and Dutchmen were Christians; but Africans were not.” Since “England’s relations with Scotland and Holland were critical to English interests,” there “might well have been a reluctance to offend those countries” while “no such complication was likely to arise from imposing lifetime bondage on an African, or African-American.” The “Court members in all probability were aware of the project then under way to establish an English plantation colony on Providence Island, using African lifetime bond-laborers” and “they surely knew that some Africans were already being exploited elsewhere in the Americas on the same terms.” [italics mine] They “might have been influenced by such examples to pursue the same purpose in Virginia.” They were also aware that “the African-American bond-laborers arriving in Virginia from the West Indies (or Brazil via Dutch colonies to the north of Maryland) did not come with English-style, term-limiting indentures” and “the members of General Court may thus have felt encouraged to impose the ultimate term, lifetime, in such cases.” Whatever the reasoning, “citing John Punch’s ‘being a negro’ in justification of his life sentence, was resorting to mere bench law, devoid of reference to English or Virginia precedent.” Allen then emphasizes, what the record does show in this case is “a disposition on the part of some, at least, of the plantation bourgeoisie to reduce African-Americans to lifetime servitude.” [italics mine]

Lengthened Service

As the proportion of bond-laborers who were surviving their terms increased, “some employers began to see an appeal in extending the bond-laborers’ terms generally. The ‘custom of the country’ for English bond-laborers in Virginia, which had been set at four years in 1658, was increased to five in 1662.” Also, with “the flourishing of the Irish slave trade” after Cromwell’s conquest, “laws were enacted to make Irish bond-laborers, and, after 1658, ‘all aliens’ in that status, serve six years.”

A 1660 law “equalized at five years the length of ‘the custom of the country,’ without distinction of ‘aliens,’ but that same law for the first time restricted term-limiting to those ‘of what christian nation soever.’” [Ireland now qualified as a “christian country.”] Since “the only ‘christian nations’ were in Europe, this clause was most particularly, though not exclusively, aimed at persons of African origin or descent.” Allen concludes that this exclusion of African-Americans from the limitation on the length of servitude imposed on bond-laborers, “reflected and was intended to further the efforts made by some elements of the plantation bourgeoisie to reduce African-American bond-laborers to lifetime servitude.” This, he adds, was “a form of class oppression of bond-laborers by owners, somewhat like the slavery of Scots miners and salt-pan workers from the end of sixteenth century to the eve of the nineteenth century.”

Not yet a system of racial oppression

This was, Allen emphasizes, “a long way from the establishment of a system of racial oppression.” Although “its implicit denial to African-Americans of even the lowest range of social mobility, from bond-labor to freedom, contained a seed of a system racial oppression,” that “seed could not be fully developed without a strong intermediate social control stratum.” And that did not exist in the period up to Bacon’s Rebellion.


The Plantation Bourgeoisie

Allen explains that the “English bourgeoisie finally secured direct access to African labor at the end of the Second Dutch War, concluded at the Treaty of Breda in 1667” and five years later, with the establishment of the Royal African Company, England embarked on a career that within less than forty years made English merchants the preeminent suppliers of African bond-labor to the Western Hemisphere.” Now, “finally the plantation bourgeoisie was brought within reach of the realization of the vision foreshadowed in a number of laws already enacted” that aimed at “enrichment through the imposition of lifetime, hereditary bond-servitude of Africans and African-Americans.” The “anticipated reduction in labor costs would have been desirable for the employing class at any time, but as the end of the seventeenth century neared, it appeared to offer the bourgeoisie both a way of evading the unresolvable contradictions between [tobacco] monoculture and diversity, and a significant easing of the contention between English and continental branches of the business with respect to profits from low-priced tobacco.”

Allen comments that it was “a conscious decision, not an unthinking one” by Virginia’s plantation bourgeoisie to opt for monoculture and chattel bond-servitude.” However, “a lack of capacity to command’ had made it impossible for the plantation bourgeoisie to impose the necessary social discipline on free and middle-rank tobacco farmers.”

The Invention of the "White" Race

Allen concludes: “Given the English superstructural obstacles and the already marked resistance of African-Americans to lifetime hereditary bondage, a rapid and large addition of African bond-laborers to the population in the 1670s, would certainly tend to reduce the effectiveness of the already weak social control stratum.” In that situation, writes Allen, the “white race” was “invented” as a ruling class social control formation “whose distinguishing characteristic was not the participation of the slaveholding class, nor even of other elements of the propertied classes; . . . [but] the participation of the European-American laboring classes: non-slaveholders, self-employed smallholders, tenants, and laborers.” He calls attention to the fact that “Whatever might have been the case with . . . members of the ruling class, the record indicates that laboring-class European-Americans in the continental plantation colonies showed little interest in ‘white identity’ before the institution of the system of ‘race’ privileges at the end of the seventeenth century.” He then emphasizes that “this white race social control system begun in Virginia and Maryland, would serve as the model of social order to each succeeding plantation region of settlement.”


Addendum

Ancestry.com cites the following paragraph from the Journal of the Executive Council [of Colonial Virginia] dated 9 July 1640 as “the only one surviving account that certainly pertains to John Punch’s life”:

Whereas Hugh Gwyn hath by order from this Board brought back from Maryland three servants formerly run away from the said Gwyn, the court doth therefore order that the said three servants shall receive the punishment of whipping and to have thirty stripes apiece one called Victor, a [D]utchman, the other a Scotchman called James Gregory, shall first serve out their times with their master according to their Indentures and one whole year apiece after the time of their service is Expired ... the third being a Negro named John Punch shall serve his said master and his assigns for the time of his natural Life here or elsewhere.

See also my August 3, 2012 piece "No Basis for Claims John Punch Was 'Indentured' and Two Servants Were 'White'" available at http://www.jeffreybperry.net/blog.htm?post=868025 Click Here

Jeffrey B. Perry
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