I’ll just come out and say it: Theodore Allen’s The Invention of the White Race is the best work of history and critical race theory I’ve ever read. It cleared up a great deal of fuzziness I had around the construction and invention of race and why it’s an integral part of American history, and today American capitalism.
In simple terms, Allen’s project is to prove that “race” is a system of social control and not a biological phenomenon. Skin color emerges as the de facto ideology behind which this system of social control was established in the antebellum colonial South, but in fact not until over a century of American slavery had passed does any notion of whiteness emerge on the scene. The white race is invented as a social control mechanism, a response to very specific historical circumstances.
Allen generally imagines that social control is accomplished through a three tier hierarchy. Separating the top and bottom tiers is a middle tier. This middle tier acts as the lever of social control and a buffer against the oppressed tier at the bottom.
Very often, little separates the middle and bottom tier materially, but the middle tier can always access a package of privileges, however small, that the bottom tier cannot. These privileges are the hinge on which the entire structure of oppression rests, for the middle tier becomes a willing and indeed enthusiastic oppressor of the bottom, even if this ultimately benefits the top tier much more.
The type of control system, racial or “national” (Allen uses this term, though it does not seem to fit perfectly), depends entirely on the characteristics of the middle tier and the privileges that the least well-off person exhibiting such a characteristic is ipso facto entitled to that the most well-off person of the bottom tier is not.
First, we should examine what Allen means by a racial system of social control. Volume one of Allen’s work is in fact a history of Ireland, which surprised me and I’m sure many readers. It isn’t until late in the book that it becomes clear what Allen has accomplished by bringing the reader through Irish history. He has established, under the Protestant Ascendancy – that is, prior to the turn of the 19th century and Catholic Emancipation, and indeed until the 20th century in Ulster (today Northern Ireland) – Ireland exhibited a system of social control based on race that differed from Virginia of the 19th century only superficially.
Racial system of social control
| Virginia, from 18th Century | Ireland under Protestant Ascendancy | |
|---|---|---|
| Ruling Tier | White Landlords | Protestant Landlords |
| Social Control Tier | White Laborers | Protestant Laborers (Presbyterians) |
| Oppressed Tier | All Blacks | All Native Catholics |
Notice how such a system of social control is characterized by the top and middle tier sharing a single characteristic, “whiteness” in the case of Virginia from the 18th century and Protestantism for all of Ireland before 1800 and in the Ulster Plantation until the 20th century.
In the case of Ireland, the Penal Law restrictions on Catholics meant that Protestants had expanded rights to inherit property, were not required to pay tithes to the Church of Ireland, and the length of tenancy for a Catholic was substantially longer; Catholics were also rounded up and sold as soldiers to serve in continental wars. Note, of course, that both the Catholics and Protestants in Ireland had pasty white skin; that did not prevent the use of a race-based system of oppression. Race, then, must be something else.
In the case of 18th and 19th century Virginia, before the Civil War, poor whites were separated from blacks by freedom (if little else). Following the Civil War and abolition of slavery, Jim Crow was the enforcer of the privileges of poor whites over any black such as the right to exercise the franchise and right not to live in terror. Today, it manifests itself in the right not to be incarcerated for minor offenses or outright killed by police.
The other exhibition of social control in a system of hierarchical social relations is that of national control. Allen brings us three examples here: Ireland following the Catholic Relief Act of 1829, colonial Virginia in the 19th century, and the British West Indies. To demonstrate that this is not just a Western European phenomenon, I have also added an example that I’m well-acquainted with from my own historical studies, the Balkans under Ottoman rule.
National system of social control
| Ireland after Emancipation | Virginia, 17th Century | West Indies and Brazil | Balkans under Ottoman Rule | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ruling Tier | Protestant Landlords | Landlords | White Landlords | Ottoman Turks |
| Social Control Tier | Catholic Bourgeoisie | Yeoman Smallholders | Free Blacks (“Colored”) | Muslim Slavs |
| Oppressed Tier | Catholic Tenant Farmers | Slaves and Tenants | Enslaved Blacks (“Negroes”) | Christian Slavs |
The defining feature of national social control is that the middle tier exhibits characteristics of both the upper and bottom tiers, but those shared characteristics with the upper tier entitle these people to a package of privileges that they would not otherwise have had under a racial system of social control. Generally, this system of social control is preferable when the characteristics of those in the ruling tier (e.g. Protestants, landlords, white skin) are a clear minority.
In Ireland, Catholic Emancipation, a movement led by the Catholic bourgeoisie, was successful because a certain group of well-off Catholics had accumulated capital, because Catholics vastly outnumbered Protestants, and because Britain feared French designs on Ireland as a stepping stone to invasion. However, in Ulster, where Catholics were not a majority and lacked a bourgeoisie, the system of racial control was maintained.
In Virginia, the middle and bottom tier contained both Euro- and Afro-Americans, though the middle tier was itself quite small. Allen notes that the distinction between slave, tenant, and indentured servant was effectively meaningless because tenants and servants could be sold as property, had their terms extended by masters through manipulation of the law, and had a short life expectancy that meant their terms were effectively for life even if they were not artificially extended.
The switch to racial control in Virginia – that is, the titular invention of the white race – happens as a result of historical coincidence. Lifespans of slaves and servants increase, the British see models of lifetime enslavement of African-Americans demonstrated elsewhere, and, most importantly, the near-miss of Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 demonstrates the inadequacy of the tiny number of yeoman smallholders as a control mechanism against a united front of black and white tenants. But throughout the 17th century, Allen finds no evidence of any difference under law or in reality that whites and blacks were considered any differently.
Contrast the experience with the British West Indies, where there was never a large enough Euro-American population to institute racial control and slave rebellion was a regular phenomenon. Instead, there was a distinct difference between the significant free Afro-American population (known as “Colored”) and enslaved Afro-Americans (“Negroes”). Allen discusses the shock of Afro-Americans migrating from the national control-based West Indies to the racial-control based United States, where the terms Colored and Negro were synonyms for people in the bottom tier of the hierarchy rather than denoting different steps on the ladder.
In the Ottoman Balkans, devshirme (the “blood tax,” though how violently coercive the practice was is hotly contested by Ottoman historians) was perhaps the purest manifestation of this type of control. Muslim Slavs taken through devshirme were able to advance through the meritocratic administrative bureaucracy and Janissary Corps, while Christian Slavs were forced to pay special taxes and were unable to inherit land. Many Christian Slavs, especially landowning Albanians and ethnic Serbs in the former kingdom of Bosnia, converted to Islam freely in order to enable inheritance and avoid special taxation.
The differing experiences of Ireland and Virginia demonstrate that the particular manifestation of hierarchical order are not stages of development but rather a result of historical circumstance and empirical necessity at a given time. In what would become the Republic of Ireland, a rising Catholic bourgeoisie and threat of outside invasion along with the United Irishmen rebellion led to the replacement of racial oppression with national oppression. Catholicism no longer stood as the driving instrument of oppression; instead, it became property ownership. Indeed, the differences between Catholicism and Protestantism seemed to melt into air, except for the Fenians. In Virginia, growing population and Bacon’s Rebellion led to the replacement of national oppression with racial oppression. Whiteness was invented as a way to provide poor Euro-Americans a motivation to turn their anger away from the property owners and against their fellows in destitution and de facto enslavement.
The vast majority of examples here are pre-capitalist, or at least from the very beginnings of the age of capital. Hierarchical social relations were not introduced by capitalism. Those from previous modes of production, feudalism and mercantile capitalism, provided a ready mold into which industrial capitalism could flow, and then exploit for the extraction of surplus value from labor. Capitalism nefariously reproduces this social hierarchy for its own ends.
This repudiates the thesis that racism will be conquered by demographics. It also helps explain why poor white Americans are often among the most vociferous defenders of the status quo, even if they barely benefit and are objectively hurt by such a system as well.
Anti-racism is anti-capitalism. The ideology of racism was historically constructed, and thus can be erased through social struggle. But in order for victory to be complete, with it must topple the system of economic oppression that, at least in the United States, depends upon it.
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