The Invention of the White Race, Volume 2 The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America

by Allen, Theodore W.; Perry, Jeffrey B.

• ISBN13: 9781844677702
• ISBN10: 1844677702
• Edition: 2nd
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-11-20
• Publisher: Verso Books

Summary

When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no '¬Swhite'¬ people, nor, according to colonial records, would there be for another sixty years. In his seminal two-volume work, The Invention of the White Race, Allen details the creation of the '¬Swhite race'¬ by the ruling class as a method of social control, in response to labor unrest precipitated by Bacon'¬"s Rebellion. Distinguishing European Americans from African Americans within the laboring class, white privileges enforced the myth of the white race through the years and has been central to maintaining ruling-class domination over the entire working class. Since publication in the mid-nineties, Invention has become indispensable in debates on the origins of racial oppression in America. Volume One utilizes Irish history to show the relativity of race and racial oppression as a form of social control. Volume Two details the development of racial oppression and racial slavery in colonial Virginia and, more broadly, Anglo-America. A new introduction by Jeffrey B. Perry discusses Allen'¬"s contributions, critical reception and continuing importance.

Author Biography

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

Table of Contents

Lists of Figures and Tables and a Note on Dates	p. ix
Introduction to the Second Edition	p. x
Labor Problems of the European Colonizing Powers	p. 1
The Labor Supply Problem: England a Special Case	p. 3
English Background, with Anglo-American Variations Noted	p. 14
Euro-Indian Relations and the Problem of Social Control	p. 30
The Plantation of Bondage	p. 47
The Fateful Addiction to "Present Profit"	p. 49
The Massacre of the Tenantry	p. 75
Bricks without Straw: Bondage, but No Intermediate Stratum	p. 97
Road to Rebellion	p. 117
Bond-labor: Enduring…	p. 119
… and Resisting	p. 148
The Insubstantiality of the Intermediate Stratum	p. 163
The Status of African-Americans	p. 177
Rebellion and Reaction	p. 201
Rebellion - and Its Aftermath	p. 203
The Abortion of the "White Race" Social Control System in the Anglo-Caribbean	p. 223
The Invention of the White Race - and the Ordeal of America	p. 239
Appendices	p. 261
Notes	p. 298
Index	p. 388
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