Theodore W. Allen
| Theodore W. Allen | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Theodore William Allen August 23, 1919 Indianapolis, Indiana |
| Died | January 19, 2005 (aged 85) Crown Heights, Brooklyn, New York |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Writer |
Theodore William "Ted" Allen (August 23, 1919 – January 19, 2005) was an 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.
Theodore William Allen was born into a middle-class family in Indianapolis, Indiana. He had a sister Eula May and brother Tom; their parents were Thomas E. Allen, a sales manager, and Almeda Earl Allen, a housewife. The family moved when he was a child to Paintsville, Kentucky, and then to Huntington, West Virginia, where he lived and, in his words, "was proletarianized" during the Great Depression. When Allen started working soon after high school (deciding that college did not do enough for independent thought), he quickly joined labor unions.
Allen became an early activist and organizer in the labor movement. At age 17, he joined the American Federation of Musicians Local 362 and the Communist Party, and soon was elected as a delegate to the Huntington Central Labor Union, AFL. He subsequently worked as a coal miner in West Virginia as a member of the United Mine Workers, serving as an organizer and president of one Local and later member of another. He also co-developed a trade union organizing program for the Marion County, West Virginia Industrial Union Council, CIO.
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