The Invention of the White Race
The Origin of Racial Oppression
A comprehensive, tour-de-force analysis of the birth of slavery, racism, and white supremacy in the American South—and how it shaped our modern world.
“A must-read for all social justice activists, teachers, and scholars.”
—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
Long heralded as a classic study of the origin of white privilege from the activist who first coined the term, Theodore W. Allen’s work remains an indispensable resource for making sense of our conflicted present, a reference point for everyone from Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Nell Irvin Painter to Reni-Eddo Lodge and Aníbal Quijano.
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…
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).
The Invention of the White Race
Theodore W. Allen