The Invention of the White Race, Volume 1

Racial Oppression and Social Control

Theodore W. Allen

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781844677696
• eBook ISBN:
  9781781689691
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
• Index: Social Sciences

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 years. In this seminal two-volume work, The Invention of the White Race, Theodore W. Allen tells the story of how America's ruling classes created the category of the "white race" as a means of social control. Since that early invention, white privileges have enforced the myth of racial superiority, and that fact has been central to maintaining ruling-class domination over ordinary working people of all colors throughout American history.
Volume I draws lessons from Irish history, comparing British rule in Ireland with the "white" oppression of Native Americans and African Americans. Allen details how Irish immigrants fleeing persecution learned to spread racial oppression in their adoptive country as part of white America.
Since publication in the mid-nineties, The Invention of the White Race has become indispensable in debates on the origins of racial oppression in America. In this updated edition, scholar Jeffrey B. Perry provides a new introduction, a short biography of the author and a study guide.

1

The Anatomy of Racial Oppression

However one may choose to define the term “racial”, it concerns the historian only as it relates to a pattern of oppression (subordination, subjugation, exploitation) of one set of human beings by another. Orlando Patterson, in his Slavery and Social Death, takes “the racial factor to mean the assumption of innate differences based on real or imagined physical or other differences.”¹ But, as I have pointed out in the Introduction, such an assumption does not an oppressor make; presumably the objects of racial oppression (however the term is defined) are capable of the same sorts of assumptions. David Brion Davis, explaining slavery in the United States, says, “racial dissimilarity [was] offered as an excuse” for it.² That is true enough and consistent with Patterson’s definition of “the racial factor.” But again, excuses are not an automatic promotion to oppressor; before racial oppression is excused, it must first be imposed and sustained. That is what needs to be explained.

Unfortunately, “racial dissimilarity” in the conventional phenotypical sense proves to be more banana peel than stepping stone. Historically, “racial dissimilarities” have not only been artificially used, they are themselves artificial. In colonial Hispanic America, it was possible for a person, regardless of phenotype (physical appearance), to become “white” by purchasing a royal certificate of “whiteness.”³ With less formality, but equal success, one may move from one “racial category” to another in today’s Brazil where, it is said, “money whitens.”⁴ On the other hand, in the United States the organizing principle of society is that no such “whitening” be recognized – whether “whitening” by genetic variation or by simple wealth. In 1890, a Portuguese emigrant settling in Guyana (British Guiana) would learn that he/she was not “white.” But a sibling of that same person arriving in the United States in that same year would learn that by a sea-change he/she had become “white.”⁵ In the last Spanish census of Cuba, Mexican Indians and Chinese were classified as “white”, but in 1907 the first United States census there classed these groups as “colored.”⁶ According to Virginia law in 1860, a person with but three “white” grandparents was a Negro; in 1907, having no more than fifteen out of sixteen “white” great-great-grandparents entitled one to the same classification; in 1910, the limit was asymptotic: “every person in whom there is ascertainable any Negro blood … [was to] be deemed a colored person.”⁷ As of 1983, the National Center for Health Statistics was effectively following the 1910 Virginia principle by classifying any person as black if either of the parents was black. At the same time, in Texas the “race” classification was determined by the “race” of the father.⁸ Prior to 1970, a set of Louisiana court decisions dating back to the late 1700s had upheld the legal concept that “any traceable amount” of African ancestry defined a “Negro.” In 1970, “racial” classification became the subject of hard bargaining in the Louisiana state legislature. The Conservatives held out for 1/64, but the “more enlightened” opposition forced a compromise at 1/32 as the requisite proportion of Negro forebears, a principle that was upheld by the state’s Supreme Court in 1974.⁹

By considering the notion of “racial oppression” in terms of the substantive, the operative element, namely “oppression,” it is possible to avoid the contradictions and howling absurdities that result from attempts to splice genetics and sociology.¹⁰ By examining racial oppression as a particular system of oppression – like gender oppression or class oppression or national oppression – we find firmer footing for analyzing racial slavery and the invention and peculiar function of the “white race,” and for confronting the theory that racial oppression can be explained in terms of “phenotype” – the old ace-in-the-hole of racist apologetics. This approach also preserves the basis for a consistent theory of the organic interconnection of racial, class, national, and gender oppression.¹¹

The Irish Analogy

To our conditioned minds, the attitude and behavior of Anglo-Americans toward African-Americans and American Indians have the readily recognizable character of racial oppression. But when racial oppression is defined in terms of its operational principles, the exclusion of the Irish case is seen to be wholly arbitrary. The exclusion is especially deplorable when practiced by European-American scholars, because it ignores a case where “white” consciousness on the part of the observer is least likely to affect the drawing of conclusions. A “need to know they were white”¹² cannot possibly serve to explain the attitude of the English toward the Irish. The history of English rule in Ireland, and of the Irish in America, presents instructive parallels and divergences for the understanding of “race” as a sociogenic rather than a phylogenic category; and of racial slavery as a system of social control.

Historians and the Analogy

Even as the nineteenth-century imperialist “scramble for Africa” was unfolding, resonances of English abolitionism and Chartism, and of the great Civil War and Emancipation in America, still thrilled somewhere in the collective consciousness of historians toiling to interpret the past to the present. One such, the distinguished English historian and abolitionist Henry Hallam (1777–1859), pointed out the racist affinity of the Spanish genocide of the Christian Moors and the English oppression of the Irish.¹³

The pre-eminent Anglo-Irish historian William Edward Hartpole Lecky (1838–1903) noted how the people of the English Pale in Ireland came to “look upon the Irish as later colonists looked upon the Red Indians.”¹⁴ Or consider the remarkable insight of W. K. Sullivan, Irish historian and President of Queen’s College, Cork, who analogized the social role of the non-gentry Protestants in Ireland and the “poor whites” in America.¹⁵ Karl Marx applied the analogy in pursuit of the unity of working people of all countries:

The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker … [and] in relation to the Irish worker he feels himself a member of the ruling nation.… His attitude is much the same as that of the “poor whites” to the “niggers”.¹⁶

The most depraved derivation of the analogy was voiced by the English historian Edward A. Freeman (1823–92) during a visit to America in 1881. The United States, he said, “would be a grand land if only every Irishman would kill a negro, and be hanged for it.”¹⁷

World War Two had an obvious effect on consciousness of the analogy among historians concerned with the problem of slavery and racism. They have devoted considerable attention to the attitudes of the English in the Tudor and Stuart periods toward the Irish, as homologues of the general European attitude toward the Indians of the Americas.¹⁸ In his richly documented exposition of the close relation of the images of the Irish and the American Indians and Africans, David Beers Quinn claims that this closeness revealed “what some Englishmen thought about some Irishmen and about Irish society.”¹⁹ Historians such as Quinn, Jones, Canny and Muldoon argue effectively that racism among Europeans is not limited to their relations with non-Europeans, but that it can exist in the most extreme form between one European nation, such as England, and another, such as Ireland. To that extent they make a worthy contribution to the analysis of the societies based on lifetime bond-labor in the Americas, and of the Anglo-American continental plantation colonies in particular.

Since their studies center mainly on Elizabethan times, they give no particular attention to the white-supremacism directed particularly against African-Americans that is of central importance for the study of American history. The same circumstance forecloses any close examination and analysis of the parallels between white supremacy in Anglo-America and the religio-racial oppression of the Irish resulting from the Cromwellian English conquest in 1652 and the Penal Laws of the eighteenth-century Protestant Ascendancy. Finally, this limitation of perspective leaves unconsidered the case of the Irish immigrant who, however poor, Catholic and racially oppressed he/she might have been in Ireland, could emerge in Anglo-America as an ordained member of the “white race” along with Anglo- and other European-Americans, with all the privileges, rights and immunities appertaining thereto. This peculiar social transition is instructive in the principle of the relativity of “race.” It certainly was a thing not dreamt of in the philosophy of the English planters of Munster.

Some historians accept the parallels so far as the American Indians are concerned, but do so in such a way as to deny their relevance to the white-supremacist oppression of African-Americans. They cite the opinion of certain seventeenth-century Englishmen to the effect that Indians are born “white” and only become “tawny” by prolonged exposure to the elements.²⁰ Muldoon, for example, taking note of the English way of lumping the Irish and the Indians together as “savages”, asserts, “Crucial to this comparison was the belief that Indians were white men …”²¹

George M. Frederickson defines “racism” in such a way as to exclude extension of the parallel between Irish and Indians to the African-American. While noting that the English justified their genocidal treatment of the Irish and the American Indians by classing them as “savages,” he maintains that this did not involve “a ‘racial’ concept in the modern sense” because it was “not yet associated with pigmentation.”²²

Nicholas P. Canny, developing the lead provided by David Beers Quinn, documented and analyzed significant parallels in the attitudes taken by the Elizabethan English ruling classes toward the Irish and the American Indians. It was his specific aim “to show how the justification for colonization influenced or reflected English attitudes toward the Gaelic Irish and, by extension, toward the imported slave and the indigenous populations in North America.”²³ While Canny does not undertake a treatment of the parallel between the Irish and African-Americans, it is not because he considers it irrelevant. Quite the contrary; he writes: “We find the same indictments being brought against the Indians, and later the blacks, in the New World that had been brought against the Irish.”²⁴

Michael Hechter makes a special contribution by explicitly challenging, in the context of the same parallel, the dominance of the “phenotype” fixation.

Anglo-Saxons and Celts cannot be differentiated by color. Despite this, however, racism came to flower [in Ireland] as well. I think that Americans have come to realize how this is possible by following the recent events in Northern Ireland.²⁵

The Analogy as Practice

The chron...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction to the Second Edition
• Introduction
• 1. The Anatomy of Racial Oppression
• 2. Social Control and the Intermediate Strata: Ireland
• 3. Protestant Ascendancy and White Supremacy
• 4. Social Control: From Racial to National Oppression
• 5. Ulster
• 6. Anglo-America: Ulster Writ Large
• 7. The Sea-change
• 8. How the Sea-change was Wrought
• Appendices
• Chronological Finding Aid for Users of this Volume
• Notes
• Index