The Invention of the White Race

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 colours throughout American history.

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. Finally, Verso has brought both volumes together in one seminal text.

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’ privileges in 1965. He co-authored the influential White Blindspot, authored Can White Workers Radicals Be Radicalized?, and wrote the groundbreaking Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery before publication of his seminal two-volume classic The Invention of the White Race.