Dr. Jeffrey B. Perry on Theodore W. Allen’s “The Invention of the White Race”

Dr. Perry will make a presentation on Theodore W. Allen’s two-volume classic The Invention of the White Race, with special emphasis on Volume 2, The Origin of Racial Opression in Anglo-America.

Theodore Allen (1919-2005) was an American independent, self-taught, working-class intellectual, writer, and activist, best known for his contributions to the struggle against white supremacy, specifically his pioneering writings beginning in 1965 on the concept of white skin privilege and for his seminal, two volume work The Invention of the White Race (1994 and 1997). His work details how the “white race” was invented as a ruling-class social control formation and a system of racial oppression was imposed in response to labor solidarity in the wake of Bacon’s Rebellion (1676-77), how the “white race” was created and maintained through privileges conferred on laboring class European-Americans relative to African-Americans, how these privileges were ruinous to the interests of African-Americans and disastrous for laboring class European-Americans, and how the “white race” has been the principal historic guarantor of ruling-class domination in America.

Jeffrey B. Perry contributed new introductions, back matter, internal study guides, and expanded indexes to Verso Books’ new expanded edition of The Invention of the White Race. For more information on Dr. Perry and his work on Hubert Harrison “the father of Harlem radicalism” (1883-1927) and Theodore W. Allen visit www.jeffreybperry.net