Jeffrey B. Perry

"Hubert Harrison and Theodore W. Allen pointed to white supremacy as the historic principal retardant to social change efforts in the U.S. They emphasized that struggle against white supremacy was central to efforts at social change. Given the unfolding conjuncture and the directness and clarity with which they addressed issues of race and class, their insights deserve considerable attention, particularly from those interested in efforts to end white supremacist bourgeois domination in the United States." - See “The Developing Conjuncture and Some Insights From Hubert Harrison and Theodore W. Allen on the Centrality of the Fight Against White Supremacy” at http://www.jeffreybperry.net/files/PerryConjuncture.pdf  Read More 

“(In) three periods of national crisis [Civil War and Reconstruction, Populist Revolt of 1890s, and the Great Depression of the 1930s] characterized by general confrontations between capital and urban and rural laboring classes . . . The key to the defeat of the forces of democracy, labor and socialism was in each case achieved by ruling-class appeals to white supremacism, basically by fostering white-skin privileges of laboring class European-Americans.”
– Theodore W. Allen --
See “The Developing Conjuncture and Some Insights From Hubert Harrison and Theodore W. Allen on the Centrality of the Fight Against White Supremacy” by Jeffrey B. Perry at http://www.jeffreybperry.net/works.htm (top left)
 Read More 

“The Developing Conjuncture and Some Insights From Hubert Harrison and Theodore W. Allen on the Centrality of the Fight Against White Supremacy” by Jeffrey B. Perry is now available at http://www.jeffreybperry.net/works.htm (top left)

A pre-publication version of an article that will appear online in "Cultural Logic"

On Tuesday, October 25, 2011, at 12 noon, Jeffrey B. Perry will discuss Hubert Harrison in an event sponsored by the Center for Inquiry-New York City, at the Roscoe Brown Student Center, Bronx Community College, 2155 University Avenue, Bronx, N,Y, 10453.

The “New York News” claimed that during 1912 Harrison was “the most trusted and valued speaker of the Socialist Party in the city” and “demands were sent to the Party for his services as speaker and debater all over the United States.” After one of his talks at Wall Street in New York on September 13, the “New York Times” described him as “an eloquent and forceful negro speaker” who “shattered all records for distance in an address on Socialism in front of the Stock Exchange building.” He reportedly “mounted the stand in front of the Socialists’ banner at noon and started in with a description of life in the medieval ages.” At first his voice reached the outermost limits of the crowd, but as the hours passed and his voice grew huskier, the circle of auditors drew closer. He went strong into the third hour and then talked himself into a hoarse whisper before ending.

-- From Jeffrey B. Perry, “Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918” (Columbia University Press), p. 191 -- Read More 

On Fri., Sept. 30, 2011, at 7:30 PM the Hubert Harrison-Theodore W. Allen Society will host a Presentation by long-time community and education activist Jitu Weusi at the Brecht Forum, 451 West St. (Between Bank and Bethune), NY, NY.
Jitu will discuss struggles he has been involved in for the past 50 years and offer thoughts on the struggles ahead.
We encourage you to attend and to spread the word on this event to friends. Read More 

For information on the Hubert H. Harrison Papers see -- http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/archival/collections/ldpd_6134799/

“(In) three periods of national crisis [Civil War and Reconstruction, Populist Revolt of 1890s, and the Great Depression of the 1930s] characterized by general confrontations between capital and urban and rural laboring classes . . . The key to the defeat of the forces of democracy, labor and socialism was in each case achieved by ruling-class appeals to white supremacism, basically by fostering white-skin privileges of laboring-class European-Americans.”

--Theodore W. Allen--
--“Introduction” to “The Kernel and the Meaning:
A Contribution to a Proletarian Critique of United States History," 2003-- Read More 

“As long as the Color Line exists, . . . The cant of ‘Democracy’ is intended as dust in the eyes of white voters . . . It furnishes bait for the clever statesmen.”
--Hubert Harrison--
--New Negro, 1919--

“It is only the Blindspot in the eyes of America, and its historians, that can overlook and misread so clean and encouraging a chapter of human struggle and human uplift [as Black Reconstruction].”
--W.E.B. Du Bois--
--Black Reconstruction, 1935--

“All the while their white blindspot prevents them from seeing what we are talking about is . . . the ‘white question,’ the white question of questions - the centrality of the problem of white supremacy and the white-skin privilege which have historically frustrated the struggle for democracy, progress and socialism in the US.”
--Theodore W. Allen--
--“White Blindspot,” 1967-- Read More 

“...your official documents [show] that the white men of your [Socialist] party officially put [the white] ‘race first’ rather than ‘class first.’”
-Hubert Harrison-
-An Open Letter to the Socialist Party of New York City, Negro World, 1920-

“...the ‘white race’ must be understood, not simply as a social construct, but as a ruling class social control formation.”
-Theodore W. Allen-
-“Summary of the Argument of The Invention of the White Race,” 1998- Read More 

“ . . . the mission of the Socialist Party is to free the working class from exploitation, and . . . the duty of the party to champion . . .[the "Negro’s"] cause is as clear as day. This is the crucial test of Socialism’s sincerity.”
-- Hubert Harrison --
-- “Socialism and the Negro,” "International Socialist Review," 1912 --

"The Negro problem, then, is the great test of the American socialists.”
-- W.E.B. Du Bois --
-- “Socialism and the Negro Problem,” "The New Review," 1913 -- Read More 

When Theodore W. Allen published his 1975 pamphlet on “Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race” he wrote in the very important note 63 the following –


“Of all the historians of the "social" school whose work I have read, only the black historian Lerone Bennett, Jr., in his article, "The Road Not Taken," Ebony, vol. 25 (1970), no. 10 (August), pp. 70-77, and in Chap. III of his new book The Shaping of Black America (Chicago, 1975), succeeds in placing the argument on the three essential bearing-points from which it cannot be toppled. First, racial slavery and white supremacy in this country was a ruling-class response to a problem of labor solidarity. Second, a system of racial privileges for white workers was deliberately instituted in order to define and establish the "white race" as a social control formation. Third, the consequence was not only ruinous to the interests of the Afro-American workers but was also "disastrous" (Bennett's word) for the white worker. Others (such as the Handlins, Morgan and Breen) state the first two points to some degree, but only Bennett combines all three.
Although I learned of Bennett's essay only in April 1975, the same three essentials have informed my own approach in a book I have for several years been engaged in writing (and of which this present article is a spin-off), on the origin of racial slavery, white supremacy and the system of racial privileges of white labor in this country.”

For anyone interested in that Allen pamphlet it is available for free online at -- http://clogic.eserver.org/2006/allen.html  Read More 

“Politically, the Negro is the touchstone of the modern democratic idea. The presence of the Negro puts our democracy to the test and reveals the falsity of it . . . [True democracy and equality implies] a revolution . . . startling to even think of.”

-- Hubert Harrison --
-- “The Negro and Socialism,” 1911 --

“The most vulnerable point at which a decisive blow can be struck against bourgeois rule in the United States is white supremacy. White supremacy is both the keystone and the Achilles heel of U.S. bourgeois democracy, the historic font of bourgeois rule in the United States.”
Theodore W. Allen
“The Most Vulnerable Point,” 1972

“The ten million Negroes of America form a group that is more essentially proletarian than any other American group . . . and the Negro was . . . [under slavery] the most thoroughly exploited of the American proletariat, . . . the most thoroughly despised.”
-- Hubert Harrison --
-- “Socialism and the Negro,” "International Socialist Review," 1912 --

“The South, after the Civil] war, presented the greatest opportunity for a real national labor movement which the nation ever saw or is likely to see for many decades. Yet the [white] labor movement, with but few exceptions, never realized the situation. It never had the intelligence or knowledge, as a whole, to see in black slavery and Reconstruction, the kernel and the meaning of the labor movement in the United States.”
-- W.E.B. Du Bois --
-- "Black Reconstruction," 1935 --

"Given this understanding of slavery in Anglo-America as capitalism, and of the slaveholders as capitalists, it follows that the chattel bond-laborers were proletarians. Accordingly, the study of class consciousness as a sense the American workers have of their own class interests, must start with recognition of that fact."
-- Theodore W. Allen --
-- "On Roediger’s 'The Wages of Whiteness,'” 2001 --  Read More 

"Given this understanding of slavery in Anglo-America as capitalism, and of the slaveholders as capitalists, it follows that the chattel bond-laborers were proletarians. Accordingly, the study of class consciousness as a sense the American workers have of their own class interests, must start with recognition of that fact."

-- Theodore W. Allen --
-- From his critical review --
--"On Roediger’s 'The Wages of Whiteness,'” 2001
at http://clogic.eserver.org/4-2/allen.html  Read More 

“The ten million Negroes of America form a group that is more essentially proletarian than any other American group . . . and the Negro was . . . [under slavery] the most thoroughly exploited of the American proletariat, . . . the most thoroughly despised.”
--Hubert Harrison--
--“Socialism and the Negro,” "International Socialist Review," 1912--

“The South, after the [Civil] war, presented the greatest opportunity for a real national labor movement which the nation ever saw or is likely to see for many decades. Yet the [white] labor movement, with but few exceptions, never realized the situation. It never had the intelligence or knowledge, as a whole, to see in black slavery and Reconstruction, the kernel and the meaning of the labor movement in the United States.”

-- W.E.B. Du Bois --
-- "Black Reconstruction," 1935 -- Read More 

“ . . . their (the poor “whites”) own position, vis–a-vis the rich and powerful . . . was not improved, but weakened, by the white-skin privilege system.”

--Theodore W. Allen--
"Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race," 1975

“When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no ‘white’ people there, nor according to the colonial records, would there be for another sixty years.”
--Theodore W. Allen--
--"The Invention of the White Race," Vol. 1, 1994--
--(Written after searching through 885 county-years of Virginia’s colonial records)--

“In the latter half of the seventeenth century, [in] Virginia and Maryland, the tobacco colonies . . . Afro-American and European-American proletarians made common cause in this struggle to an extent never duplicated in the three hundred years since.”
--Theodore W. Allen--
--"Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race," 1975--

“ . . . the record indicates that laboring-class European-Americans in the continental plantation colonies showed little interest in ‘white identity’ before the institution of the system of ‘race’ privileges at the end of the seventeenth century.”
--Theodore W. Allen--
--"The Invention of the White Race," Vol. 1, 1994--

“…The plantation bourgeoisie established a system of social control by the institutionalization of the ‘white’ race whereby the mass of poor whites was alienated from the black proletariat and enlisted as enforcers of bourgeois power.”
--Theodore W. Allen--
"Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race," 1975--

“ . . . the ‘white race’ must be understood, not simply as a social construct, but as a ruling class social control formation.”
--Theodore W. Allen--
--“Summary of the Argument of The Invention of the White Race,” 1998--

“ . . . their (the poor “whites”) own position, vis–a-vis the rich and powerful . . . was not improved, but weakened, by the white-skin privilege system.”
--Theodore W. Allen--
--"Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race," 1975--

These quotes are from From Jeffrey B. Perry, “The Developing Conjuncture and Some Insights From Hubert Harrison and Theodore W. Allen On the Centrality of the Fight Against White Supremacy” (120 pp., forthcoming online by August 23, 2011, at "Cultural Logic") Read More