The Incubus: Bourgeois Social Control and the White Racial Identity Theodore W. Allen’s Ontological Critique and Epistemological Breakthrough 1965-1975

Author

Sean I. Ahern, CUNY Graduate CenterFollow

Date of Degree

6-2025

Document Type

Master's Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Program

Liberal Studies

Advisor

Justin Rogers-Cooper

Subject Categories

American Studies | History | Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies

Keywords

White Blindspot, class struggle, American Exceptionalism, Repudiate the white skin privilege, The Most Vulnerable Point, The invention of the white race

Abstract

Theodore W. Allen (1919-2004) was a proletarian autodidact, former coal miner, and member of the Communist Party from 1939-1958. Deeply influenced by the Civil Rights and Black Liberation Movements and his reading of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in the early 1960s, Allen developed a critique of what he termed the “White Blindspot” in the eyes of most U. S. labor historians who had omitted the Black chattel laborers from the proletariat. This omission on the part of both Marxist and non-Marxists constituted, in Allen’s view, the original sin of U. S. labor historiography, which had inadvertently inhibited the development of class consciousness in the U. S. He coined the term “white-skin privilege” in 1965, which he identified as the material basis for white racial opportunism and class collaboration in the labor movement, and which had sacrificed the interests of the working class. The system of white-skin privileges was the form of bourgeois social control most vulnerable to attack by those seeking systemic reform and revolution. His efforts were unsuccessful to influence the New Communist Movement to place the struggle against white supremacism and white skin privileges at the center of their agitation and propaganda and efforts to reconstitute a revolutionary Marxist party in the U. S. Ted Allen and his literary executor, Jeff Perry, were close friends and comrades of mine from the early 1970s until their passing. My thesis draws from a direct experience and close study of their work, which has been greatly facilitated by Jeff’s loving preservation and deposit of Ted’s papers to the safety of the archivists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. I have selected to focus on a tumultuous decade 1965-1975, during which Allen developed his critique, and when he was active in the radical movements of the time and wrote the breakthrough article that proved to be the precis for The Invention of the White Race, Vol II.

Recommended Citation

Ahern, Sean I., "The Incubus: Bourgeois Social Control and the White Racial Identity Theodore W. Allen’s Ontological Critique and Epistemological Breakthrough 1965-1975" (2025). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6234