Allen, Theodore W.

ALLEN, THEODORE W. (1919-2005). Raised in a white-collar family in Indianpolis, Theodore (“Ted”) Allen was “proletarianized,” he recalled, during the Great Depression. He found work in West Virginia coal mines and joined the Communist Party at seventeen. Moving to Brooklyn in the 1940s, he worked at the Labor Research Association and at the Jefferson School. He left the Communist Party in the late 1950s, disappointed by the Party’s approach to race. For the next forty-plus years, he found employment at a number of mostly blue-collar jobs and lived often in near-poverty in neighborhoods of New York. At the same time, he became a prolific writer known for advancing an analysis of “white-skin privilege.”

An autodidact, Allen launched his thesis with the co-authored pamphlet White Blindspot (1967) and its sequel, Can White Workers [crossed out] Radicals Be Radicalized? (1969). He followed these publications with Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race (1974-1975), and the two-volume The Invention of the White Race (1994, 1997). He continued to write essays on related subjects until near the end of his life.

Allen initially conceived of the idea of writing a historical study of three crises in US history involving general confrontations "between capital and urban and rural laboring classes." The Civil War and Reconstruction, the Populist Revolt, and the Great Depression supplied the moments when "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." What he called "white-skin privilege,” then, constituted the main retardant of working-class consciousness. This, he argued, was the answer to the recurring question, “Why is there no socialism in America?”

He sought to explore how the "white race" was invented as a ruling-class social control formation in response to labor solidarity and heightened class struggle manifested in the later, civil-war stages of Bacon's Rebellion (1676-1677). In his view, the powerful classes deliberately instituted a ruling-class social control policy in order to define, establish, and maintain the "white race.” The consequences would be not only ruinous to the interests of African Americans, but also "disastrous" for the European American workers.

Allen, Theodore W. The Invention of the White Race, Vol. I: Racial Oppression and Social Control (1994) and Vol. II: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo America (1997), Edited with New Introductions and Notes by Jeffrey B. Perry. London: Verso Books, 2012.

“Articles by and About Theodore W. Allen,” Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts – Amherst. https://credo.library.umass.edu/search?q=theodore+w.+allen+papers.

Perry, Jeffrey B. “The Developing Conjuncture and Insights from Hubert Harrison and Theodore W. Allen on the Centrality of the Fight Against White Supremacy,” Cultural Logic, (2010) https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums1021-s02-i010.

Theodore W. Allen Papers, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts -- Amherst, http://scua.library.umass.edu/umarmot/allen-theodore-w-1919-2005/.