Theodore W. Allen

Volume One: Racial Oppression and Social Control (1994)

Volume Two: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (1997)

London & New York, Verso Books

by Dennis O'Neil  

Ted Allen, author of The Invention of the White Race and a founding father of modern white privilege theory, died today.

Friends of Ted's who know him best will doubtless put out an obituary rich in biographical detail in the coming weeks. In the meantime, here are a couple of brief thoughts on Ted's historical contribution, which is central to the political tradition that gave rise to the Freedom Road Socialist Organization among other forces on the US Left.

It is unfortunate that Ted Allen died before someone had a chance to interview him at great length for what would surely have been a doctoral dissertation and a fascinating study in intellectual history.

In brief, it would start as the story of a few younger communists in Brooklyn, who left, jumping or pushed, the increasingly revisionist Communist Party USA in the 1950s. Like many who sought to keep their eyes on the goal of revolution in the US, they understood the importance of the racial divide in the US working class and worked to develop a deeper analysis of it. Two in particular, Ted Allen and Esther Kusic, building on work by earlier thinkers going back to DuBois and Lenin, articulated a theory which explained the puzzling depth and persistence of this divide and, as a result, a great deal of the history of US society and the working class here as well.

So far, so good, but then comes the really remarkable development. In the late '60s, Ted worked closely with Noel Ignatiev (then Ignatin) a younger comrade of his active in Students for a Democratic Society, the largest group in the predominantly white campus sector of the revolutionary upsurge that was sweeping the US and much of the world, with the baby boom generation as its shock troops. Together the two wrote a pamphlet entitled "White Blindspot" (including another piece entitled "Can White Workers/Radicals Be Radicalized?"), which became one of dozens of pamphlets published by the SDS-affiliated Radical Education Project.

Within six months of its publication, this cheaply mimeographed piece by two little-known authors set the terms for nearly all discussion of racism and what to do about it within the most influential radical group on US campuses. The concept quickly spread throughout the broader Left and there too set the terms in a discussion that had been raging since 1965. That was the year that African American activists in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the youngest and most militant of the organizations in the Civil Rights Movement, politely asked white SNCCers to leave, and encouraged them to go back and organize among white folk.

(The rapid spread of the concept is also shown by the adaptation of the theory's insights from the beginning by the newly born Women's Liberation Movement, which derived the concept of "male privilege" and made it a cornerstone of new feminist theory.)

Its reach was so great not because it was novel or "cool" but because it explained social reality in a way that made the workings of US capitalism much clearer than anything before it. As the theory spread, it occasioned fierce debate and splits not only between advocates and opponents, but also within the ranks of those who took Allen and Ignatiev's ground-breaking work and ran with it. As SDS self-destructed in 1970, both the folks who would become the Weather Underground and many of the rival Revolutionary Youth Movement 2 forces based their analysis and programs on the implications of "white skin privilege." Folks in the Black Liberation Movement and the rising movements among Puerto Ricans, Chicanos, Asian-Americans and Native Americans had their own discussions and debates, differing on interpretation and implications, but acknowledging the validity of the central theoretical kernel.

By the mid-'70s, the Weatherfolk had, let's say, slipped from view and many other post-campus radicals had adopted a more old-school and very much by-the-books formalist Marxism-Leninism, with little room for non-canonical twists like white privilege theory. But the theory had slipped the bounds of the radical movement and become, among other things, the foundation for a significant trend in the academy. Some scholars radicalized in the '60s, like David Roediger, took the insights of Ted and his co-thinkers and started doing academic work which by the '90s had expanded to become the whole new field of "whiteness studies."

Among radicals who did not take the turn to various Marxist orthodoxies, the concept of white privilege continued to have currency and to take on new forms. By the late '80s, for instance, an understanding of and at least conversation about means of combating white, and male, privilege became common currency among a new generation of young activists like the environmentalist youth who made up groups like the Student Environmental Action Coalition, and later became a central force in the pre- and post-Seattle globalization battles. Among these forces, study tended to focus on the individual workings of privilege among white folks and the need for individuals to tackle it in their own day-to-day practice. Works like Peggy McIntosh's perceptive pamphlet "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" were used in NGOs and church groups as well as more activist formations to help people, especially white people, learn about and acknowledge the white blindspot.

And the concept of white privilege (a more common formulation than white skin privilege since the mid-'70s, though both have strengths and weaknesses) proved too useful to be driven entirely out of the communist movement for insufficient orthodoxy. In the late '70s, a group called the Proletarian Unity League (PUL) took up a double task. On one front, the PUL sought to rescue white privilege theory from some advocates whose position tended imply that any mass struggle that didn't have the fight against privilege at its center was worthless or even reinforced the system of white privilege. On the other side, they took on the orthos in the New Communist Movement who tried to suggest (confusing cause and effect in a spectacular manner) that the whole idea was a petty bourgeois scheme to split the unity of the working class.

In 1981, the PUL published a book, A House Divided: Labor and White Supremacy, which developed some influence in what was then the rapidly eroding New Communist Movement. The book provided one of the theoretical linchpins (and a guide to practical work) for the formation of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization later in the decade, and for the various mergers that have added to its ranks since. FRSO has made plans to bring out a new book on white privilege, The Cost of Privilege, by the end of 2005.

In the meantime, the idea has become a meme (the social equivalent to a biological gene) that replicates itself and crops up in the oddest places. One of the most striking is in the writings and speeches of Bill Bradley, a US Senator from NJ in the '90s and a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2000. The theory of "white skin privilege" (the formulation he uses) most definitely resonates with Bradley: he lived it in a hard-to-ignore form as a privileged white star for the championship NY Knicks basketball team in the '70s , the period in which the NBA became overwhelmingly Black.

Finally, to come full circle, the continued relevance and actual usefulness of white privilege theory itself owes a great debt to Ted Allen. Working largely alone, he spent years researching and reflecting on the history of the US (and of other countries where he could make useful comparisons to other systems of social control employed by the rulers there). The product was the splendid two-volume work, The Invention of the White Race, finally published by Verso in the mid-'90s. Further advances in understanding and combating white privilege from here on out will have as a jumping-off point the new framework Ted Allen constructed in this work.

Ted Allen lived his whole life as a revolutionary, and his contribution to the struggle in this country is a massive one. Thanks to his insight and intellectual rigor, he was fortunate to have lived out at least the early stages of the old Marxist insight that ideas, when they grip the masses, become a material force.
 
January 19, 2005

(slightly revised June 6, 2005)