The Invention of the White Race

A reading and discussion of Theodore W. Allen’s two volume work
with The Revolutions Study Group

In 1972, after a lifetime of activism in the labor and communist movements, Theodore W. Allen shared the following strategic insight with a new generation of revolutionaries: “The most vulnerable point at which a decisive blow can be struck against bourgeois rule in the U.S. is white supremacy. White supremacy is both the keystone (in the arch) and the Achilles heel of U.S. bourgeois democracy, the historic form of bourgeois rule in the US.]

It is a vulnerable point because it is a historically developed and unresolvable internal contradiction of US bourgeois democracy. It is the decisive vulnerable point because—as history has repeatedly proved—the basic class contradictions in bourgeois democracy can never fully mature until and unless the anti-proletarian nature of white supremacy has been completely established in the minds of the proletarian masses.”

Theodore W. Allen spent the next 30 years researching the primary sources and writing The Invention of the White Race (2 volumes) which provides a historical materialist analysis of racial oppression and the white identity which emerged as a principal form of social control over rebellious laboring class of European and Africans in the pattern setting colonies of Virginia and Maryland in the late 17th early 18th century.

The Revolutions Study Group (started at the Brecht Forum) has met since 2009. The group has recently completed an in-depth study of W.E.B. Dubois’ Black Reconstruction and this past winter and spring studied White Supremacy and Bourgeois Social Control.