[Marxism] Ted Allen

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Roadsigns is a periodic internet publication of Freedom Road Socialist
Organization. www.freedomroad.org

Apologies for sending two Roadsigns posts in a single day, but there is a
issue of timeliness in the case of this message. 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, and if
Roadsigns readers express enough interest, it will be forwarded as well.

In the meantime, here are a couple of brief thoughts on Ted's historical
contribution, which is central to the political tradition that a great
majority of the people on this list share to one degree or another. It is
unfortunate that he 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 CP 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 swell.

Crudely put, white privilege theory states that the presence and
persistence of white supremacy as an ideology and the consequent extremely
low level of class consciousness in the multi-national working class
throughout US history is the product of a centuries-old, deeply entrenched
system which awards privileges to white folks. Allen characterized these
privileges as "poisoned," because they wind up providing the capitalist
class with a divided working class in which the white section is blinded
from seeing and fighting for its own true interests.

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
radical 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 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.in 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 which 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 which 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 RYM 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 kernal.

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 combatting white, and male, privilege became
common currency among a new generation of young activists like the
environmentalist kids who made up 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 "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 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, which developed some
influence in what was then the rapidly eroding NCM. 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 which have added to its ranks since. FRSO has
made plans to bring out a new book on white privilege by the end of 2005.

In the meantime, the idea has become a meme (the social equivalent to a
biological gene) which 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
combatting 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.

--

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