Groundbreaking analysis of the birth of racism in America
When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no
'white' people there. Nor, according to colonial records, would there
be for another sixty years. In this seminal two-volume work, The
Invention of the White Race, Theodore W. Allen tells the story of how
America's ruling classes created the category of the 'white race' as a
means of social control. Since that early invention, white privileges
have enforced the myth of racial superiority, and that fact has been
central to maintaining ruling-class domination over ordinary working
people of all colors throughout American history.
Since publication in the mid-nineties, The Invention of the White
Race has become indispensable in debates on the origins of racial
oppression in America. Finally Verso has brought both volumes
togather in one seminal text.
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' privileges in 1965. He
co-authored the influential White Blindspot, authored Can White
Workers Radicals Be Radicalized?, and wrote the groundbreaking
Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery before publication of
his seminal two-volume classic The Invention of the White Race.
