‘As long as you think you are white, there is no hope for you.’ These words, first spoken by the literary giant James Baldwin, have since become the rallying call behind a new form of Critical Race Theory that has come to be known as ‘whiteness studies.’ In the years since Baldwin’s death in 1987, his critique has been taken up by a new generation of scholars — mostly white — who have tasked themselves with the critical deconstruction of white supremacy, privilege, and, in most cases, the ‘race’ itself. Although the field now comprises of a wide range of scholars with varying goals and interests, the idea of studying ‘whiteness’ can be traced back to the work of such socio-historians as Theodore Allen, whose 1994 two-volume study The Invention of the White Race was reissued late last year by Verso Books.

Whiteness has long been theorised as the ‘absent referent’ of race theory. Omnipresent and yet rarely defined, whiteness has been the standard against which non-Europeans have been contrasted — ‘racialised‘ — in order to justify their ongoing material and symbolic denigration at the hands of white supremacist society. Primarily, this has been a project of knowledge production. Take, as a telling example, the European fascination with ethnography in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: the roles of white as ‘observer’ and non-white as ‘observed’ have profoundly shaped how race has been conceived in ways that are still perceptible today. We need look no further than the extensive scholarship of Edward Said to see how language, culture, and intellectualism are implicated in the construction of whiteness as that which the non-white subject is set against. This ability of whiteness as a social categorisation to avoid scrutiny has been central to the success of the white supremacist project over the last five centuries.

There is no doubt that the premise of an ‘invisible’ whiteness has served a purpose in some areas of Critical Race Theory. Especially in the context of the 21st century discourse of a ‘post-racial America’, in which explicitly racist language and action have been replaced with more nuanced structures of inequality, the onus is often on race scholars to ‘prove’ the racism of acts that are presented as benign. This thin veneer of ‘race neutrality’ can often be scratched away with a simple question: How is white privilege at work here?

This is not to say that the approach doesn’t have its flaws. First and foremost, to suggest that whiteness is somehow elusive or invisible in the context of a white supremacist society is practically absurd. As Sarah Ahmed points out, whiteness is only ‘invisible’ to white people: people of colour, subject to a system of racial stratification that continues to privilege whiteness in almost all aspects of society, see it everywhere. Furthermore, the idea of ‘studying’ whiteness risks sheltering white people from their own complicacy: the ability to critique white supremacy while simultaneously benefiting from reformed structures of racial privilege is a particularly white positionality, which Howard Winant has referred to as ‘white dualism’.

One of the most encouraging developments of the turn towards what has come to be known as ‘critical whiteness studies’, though, is a renewed emphasis on the history of race as a social construct. The fact that race in general—and whiteness in particular—has been severed from its historical origins has long served to naturalise and legitimise racial oppression. In its most insidious incarnations, this dehistoricisation has fuelled the argument that slavery in the American colonies was an inevitable historical phenomenon because, to the extent that ‘it is human nature to have prejudice against those who are different,’ racism could be seen as ‘natural.’ This contention, which Allen refers to as the ‘psycho-cultural’ explanation for slavery, is precisely what the author sets out to contest in this landmark study.

The crux of Allen’s argument lies in his contention that, contrary to the idea that slavery was born of some innate racism, racial categorisations—in their particularly American context—were instead the product of slavery itself. In order to lay the groundwork for his argument, Allen devotes much attention in the work’s first volume, Racial Oppression and Social Control, to the English colonisation of Ireland in the 16th century. Rather than focusing on the phenotypes that structure our modern understanding of racism, Allen argues that an analysis of racial oppression as a form of social control provides a powerful analogy between the histories of Ireland and colonial America. Throughout the first volume, Allen’s meticulous research outlines how the dehumanisation of the Irish as the racial Other facilitated the sacking of their culture, the theft of their land, and the exploitation of their labour.

Turning then to the British colony at Virginia, the second volume uses the analogy of Ireland to interrogate The Origins of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America. Noting a conspicuous lack of the racial category of ‘white’ in colonial documents before 1680, Allen makes a compelling argument that the idea of whiteness itself was invented so as to maintain the system of slave labour that the colonial system relied upon. Unable to continue indenturing European settlers to the backbreaking labour of the plantation, the ruling class instead provided them with the incentive—in the form of racial privilege—to function as the muscle (or the whip) in a system of racial oppression that would secure plantation labour in perpetuity. In order to escape indentured labour and enter (at least symbolically) into the propertied class, poor working whites were willing to step on the backs of the newly-arrived blacks in order to move just one rung up the social ladder. The racial privilege afforded to white labouring people acted as a ‘Great Safety Valve’ that ‘[dampened] down anti-capitalist pressures by making “race, and not class, the distinction in social life.”’ By incorporating the working poor into a (relatively) privileged social category marked most notably by the freedom to own property (and placed in contrast to the lack of freedom that is to be property), the ruling class was able to shore up the foundations of early American capitalism by making ‘freedom’ dependent on one’s participation in the systems of racial oppression. Allen’s argument concludes with a searing indictment of labour’s continued inability to organise itself across the colour line, despite the urgent imperative to do so.

It is telling, though, that Allen theorises the creation of whiteness as a racial categorisation from the perspective of labour history. Indeed, as much as his project is an analysis of the origin of white-over-black racial oppression, the role of class continues to be the overarching frame that structures his argument. Thus the ‘white’ (Northern European settler) working class is to be rebuked, on the one hand, for their role in the establishment and maintenance of chattel slavery in the colony, and yet at the same time lamented — almost pitied — for having fallen prey to what, according to Allen, was a well-designed sleight-of-hand that installed racial privilege as the justification for a strictly hierarchical system of social class. While there is no doubt that class and race are interlocking systems of oppression that inform, interact, and, in many ways, determine one another, we must be careful not to suggest that one form of oppression justifies another. If anything, the common origins of racial and class oppression as identified by Allen’s work are yet another reminder that our freedoms are co-dependent—re-emphasising the need for us to come together across the various divisions of identity, now and in the future.

In terms of labour history, The Invention of the White Race should be considered a landmark text. Nowhere before has such meticulous scholarly attention been paid to the role of racial oppression in the creation of the early American working class. When it comes to race theory, however, the legacy of the text remains dubious. Certainly, Allen is successful in laying to rest what he refers to as the ‘psycho-cultural argument’ about the origins of racial oppression in the Americas. But whatever weight that argument held in the early 1990s, very few historians today would place much stock in any such contention that biology was a determining factor in the establishment of American white supremacy. More concerning, however, is the way whiteness is portrayed in Allen’s narrative. Not only does he place the white subject at the centre of his history of race in America, he also casts him in the role of victim.

At times, the frame of class conflict borders on apologising for the insidious participation of poor whites in the subjugation of black bodies. Meanwhile, the ‘ruling class‘—that ambiguous, omnipresent, and omnipotent evil—remains conspicuously absent. Were they—and are they—not also ‘white’? Why has the recent turn in scholarly attention on ‘whiteness’ been so focused on sub-categorisations of ‘white trash’, European ‘ethnicities’, and the working poor? Should ‘critical whiteness studies’, in attempting to ‘reverse the gaze’, not concern itself first and foremost with the role of whiteness as oppressor? In this regard, the publication of this second edition of The Invention of the White Race proves timely. Almost 20 years later, this is a conversation that is just getting started.

Terence Hamilton is a graduate student at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto.

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