Theodore W Allen

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Vocation

American intellectual, writer, and activist, best known for his pioneering writings since the 1960s on "white skin privilege" and the "invention" of the white race, particularly his seminal Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race, published as a pamphlet in 1975, and published the next year in expanded form. He stressed that the white race was invented as "a ruling class social control formation." An independent, working-class scholar, Allen did research for the next quarter century to expand and document his ideas, particularly on the relation of white supremacy to the working class. He published a two-volume work, The Invention of the White Race (1994 and 1997): “The Invention of the White Race,” Vol. 1: “Racial Oppression and Social Control” (1994, 2012) and “The Invention of the White Race,” Vol. 2: “The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America” (1997, 2012); which explored racial oppression as a system of social control (in Volume 1) and the origin of racial oppression in Anglo-America (in Volume 2). It was republished by Verso Books in a new expanded edition in November 2012. He died on 19 January 2005, aged 85, in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, New York. Link to Wikipedia biography