CompleteMartialArts.com - The Invention of the White Race: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (Invention of the White Race)

	List Price: $22.00 Our Price: $19.80 Your Save: $ 2.20 ( 10% ) Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours Manufacturer: Verso
Average Customer Rating:
Binding: Paperback Dewey Decimal Number: 305 EAN: 9781859840764 ISBN: 1859840760 Label: Verso Manufacturer: Verso Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 400 Publication Date: 1997-08 Publisher: Verso Studio: Verso
Related Items The Invention of the White Race (Volume One: Racial Oppression and Social Control) (Haymarket Series) The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, Revised and Expanded Edition (Haymarket) How the Irish Became White Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America
Editorial Reviews: The second volume in a monumental study of the origins of racism in the US. In this second volume of his acclaimed study Theodore Allen explores how the degradation of African bond-laborers into slaves produced, for the first time in Anglo America, racism based on color differences. Theodore Allen traces the historical roots of the white supremacism that led European-American workers to oppose Abolitionism. This was in contrast to an earlier common feeling of oppression shared between European and African-American laborers. Allen examines the means by which European workers in the tobacco colonies were reduced from tenants and wage workers to chattel bond-labourers. The imposition by plantation owners of such onerous conditions of servitude created a potentially explosive situation that ultimately detonated in the famous Bacon's Rebellion -- the greatest demonstration in history, argues Allen, of solidarity between European-Americans and African-Americans against slavery. Rocked by the laboring class's solidarity, the plantation bourgeoisie sought a solution in the creation of a buffer stratum of poor whites, who now gained a privilege in their skin color protecting them from the enslavement visited upon Africans and African Americans. Such was, as Allen puts it, the invention of the white race, `that peculiar institution' that continues to haunt social relations in the US down to the present. An authoritative, masterly work, The Invention of the Whife Race is essential reading for students of US history and politics.
Spotlight customer reviews: Customer Rating: Summary: The Farce of White Identity Comment: Theodore Allen's second volume of The Invention of the White Race, which focuses on Anglo America (his first volume focused on English/British religio-racial oppression in Ireland), is simply spectacular. He brings back the lost art of empirical research from below (in distinction to merely "writing history from below"). His work in the archives of the continental colonies is arduous; and the rewards are reaped by his readers as they are aquainted with heroic men and women of the American working classes, both African American and European American. They are heroes because they resisted oppression without reference to skin color. In fact, the power of Allen's second volume is his substantiation of the thesis that white identity was invented by the Anglo-American ruling class to keep social control of the masses of poor and propertyless workers. If this sounds simplistic, read the book, because the way the rich planters achieved this invention is far from simple. Allen's work should be mandatory reading in all fields of the humanities: English, Philosophy, History, Sociology, and Psychology. Even though the discipline of history in the US academy is afraid of Allen's work, one day his two volumes will be read by millions of people. I think this is true because of the explanatory power of his research and argumentation. I've always wanted to know: Why do workers in the US oppress other workers (white workers oppressing black workers)? Does this happen anywhere else in the world, because I can't think of a single situation. What makes the US so psychotic and weird? Is it white identity? Where did white identity come from? Why is there so little class consciousness among American workers? Answers to these questions can be found in Allen's two volumes, especially in volume two where the US is the focus. Customer Rating: Summary: Well worth reading Comment: A meticulously researched, extremely important (although painful to read) book. I highly recommend it. Customer Rating: Summary: Naive Comment: The problem with his argument is that he makes generalized motives the norm after researching a few examples. It's naive to go with the premise of White workers and Black slaves going against the power structure, united we stand, etc. by itself. Historically, there are financial motives that were far stronger than "brothers in bondage" motives. The companies in the north were being bested by their southern brethren. The north could not use slaves and suffered financially, therefore created a general sympathy for the slave movement. The humanitarian issue did not come until much later, generally. For those that were always humanitarians, the John Browns, etc. They were the minority of Whites in the north, not the majority. The correlation might as well not even exist. More Reviews