Groundbreaking analysis of the birth of racism in America

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 colors 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 togather in one seminal text.