The Invention of the White Race
by JEFFREY B. PERRY
SOURCE/Amazon
Theodore W. Allen’s two-volume The Invention of the White Race, republished by Verso Books in a New Expanded Edition, presents a full-scale challenge to what Allen refers to as “The Great White Assumption” – “the unquestioning, indeed unthinking acceptance of the ‘white’ identity of European-Americans of all classes as a natural attribute rather than a social construct.” Its thesis on the origin and nature of the “white race” contains the root of a new and radical approach to United States history, one that challenges master narratives taught in the media and in schools, colleges, and universities. With its equalitarian motif and emphasis on class struggle it speaks to people today who strive for change worldwide.
Allen’s original 700-pages magnum opus, already recognized as a “classic” by scholars such as Audrey Smedley, Wilson J. Moses, Nell Painter, and Gerald Horne, included extensive notes and appendices based on his twenty-plus years of primary source research. The November 2012 Verso edition adds new front and back matter, expanded indexes, and internal study guides for use by individuals, classes, and study groups. Invention is a major contribution to our historical understanding, it is meant to stand the test of time, and it can be expected to grow in importance in the 21st century.
“When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no ‘white’ people there; nor, according to the colonial records, would there be for another sixty years.”
That arresting statement, printed on the back cover of the first (1994) volume, reflected the fact that, after poring through 885 county-years of Virginia’s colonial records, Allen found “no instance of the official use of the word ‘white’ as a token of social status” prior to its appearance in a 1691 law. As he explained, “Others living in the colony at that time were English; they had been English when they left England, and naturally they and their Virginia-born children were English, they were not ‘white.’” “White identity had to be carefully taught, and it would be only after the passage of some six crucial decades” that the word “would appear as a synonym for European-American.”
Counterpunch for more
The “Moral Equivalence of the Founding Fathers”
by DR. T P WILKINSON
The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America by Gerald Horne, New York University Press, 2014 SOURCE/New York University Press
“Well before 1776, Britain was being forced to consider an end to slavery.”
Since 1976, the bicentennial of the unilateral declaration of independence (UDI) that led to the founding of the United States of America from thirteen originally British colonies, Black History Month has been an officially recognized period—in February—when the descendants of the Founding Fathers acknowledge that the descendants of their slaves also have a history. Also in February, Presidents’ Day—initially George Washington’s birthday but now a combined birthday celebration for Washington and Abraham Lincoln: the Father of the Country and the Great Liberator. The year starts with Martin Luther King Day in January, when some whites and Blacks commemorate the man who was the highlight of the Great March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963—assassinated in 1968 for saying in 1967:
“I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.”
…
However, the expansion of the slave-based economy caused a serious problem. Slaves soon outnumbered Europeans in all of the colonial possessions. Africans soon took notice of this fact and revolted—causing Europeans to invest ever more resources in suppressing the Black labor force. Despite inducements and even impressment, the colonizers failed to lure enough Europeans to the colonies to create a balance of power/ terror sufficient to keep slave populations docile. Here official American history focuses on the failure of revolts in the Caribbean and downplays the impact these revolts had on British colonial policy. In fact, well before 1776, Britain was being forced to consider an end to slavery. At the same time competition among the colonizing countries intensified. Wars in Europe arose among the colonizers and these wars became world wars in which colonial possessions changed hands between Spain, France, and Britain. These wars further reduced the profitability of colonial enterprises. By the mid-18th century, every European colonial power was trying to find an accommodation with their Black populations, especially since these wars could not be fought in the colonies without arming them. Black soldiers were not willing to fight for slavery so they had to be freed if they were to bear arms in European wars. As a result Caribbean Blacks were being allowed into the colonial regimes—a process which would transform British possessions forever, except in North America. Colonial rivalry created a class of Blacks who were not only no longer slaves but who were willing to fight in very disciplined regiments against anything resembling slavery—wherever it still prevailed.
Black Agenda Report for more