A Wake-Up Call on White Privilege

Walking back a recent comment here at FotM by a guy named Jack Stephens (of whom more in a later post), I found some nifty material on the subject of white privilege. It struck me that it's been a long time since I gave the topic the attention it deserves--or plugged Chip Smith's superb book, The Cost of Privilege. So that's the plug.

What I want to do now is praise JJ Kissinger and Susie Becker, a young couple who were based, at least through this spring, at Seattle Pacific University. (SPU is a liberal arts school, although one which takes pains to let visitors to its website know that it "provides more than 3,800 students with a high-quality, comprehensive education grounded on the gospel of Jesus Christ." What does this mean? I don't exactly know, although Comrade Google informs me that the Discovery Institute has held an "intelligent design" conference there. Hmmm.)

JJ, by his account (which I recommend everybody read) pretty much climbed out of bed one day and decided

to create an exhibit that would visually and interactively educate people at SPU about the idea of White Privilege.

So he and Susie drafted friends, brainstormed, polled, built and assembled what looks to have been a challenging visualization and expansion of Peggy McIntosh's work on the "Invisible Knapsack" of white privilege. Throughout, they were driven by a simple conviction:

In order for true racial reconciliation to take place on this campus, our majority-white population MUST consider the implications of our whiteness.

The duo and a conscript work crew spent the better part of a Sunday night putting the whole thing up for a one day show which rang the changes on the theme of "Liberty & Justice for All." (It had such an impact on those who saw it that they held it over for Tuesday.) I highly recommend going to the well-captioned slide show JJ has posted at Flickr to document their exhibit, and giving it a look-see.

Note that JJ and Susie incorporated responses and reactions from non-white friends and acquaintances at SPU to drive the point home.

Thanks and respect to the both of them.

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Now That's What I Call Good News!!

Just checked my email from here in Oslo, and found a press release from Loretta Williams, Director of the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America. Annually the Center gives its Outstanding Book Award to a number of works which promote justice and combat bigotry.

Among this year's winners will be Chip Smith's superb The Cost of Privilege. Words cannot describe how happy this makes me. This kind of recognition is extremely important for a book (unlike most on the list) that does not have the imprint of a mainstream publishing house like Simon & Schuster, a university press like Harvard's, or even a well-established left outfit like Pluto or South End. So if you have chosen to ignore the series of plugs we have given TCoP here since New Year's Day of this year, here's a wake-up call from the people who give one of the most prestigeous awards in the field.

To learn more, and to order The Cost of Privilege, click here. And bear in mind that it makes a nifty holiday gift, so click even if you already have your own copy!

And to check out the other worthy recipients of this year's Gustavus Myers Award, take a look at their website!

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The Rose And The Thorns

Boy, there's an awful lot of good thoughtful people out there in the blogosphere critiquing the system of white supremacy and white privilege. A recent click-by run at the esteemed Yolanda Carrington's The Primary Contradiction steered me to a site called Double Consciousness. These folks who run it are, some time in the next couple of days, hosting something I (clueless newby that I am) learn is called a blog carnival.

The idea is that every month a new blog owner volunteers to take on the task of assembling (and curating) a set of recent posts around a particular theme or topic volunteered by the original bloggers. In the case of the Erase Racism Carnival, the posts deal exactly with white supremacy and white privilege. So once a month, around the 20th in this case, the great all-enveloping swamp of the blogosphere opens out onto a clearing, a patch of higher ground where bloggers of various nationalities, political views, class backgrounds, ages and so on have laid out their recent thinking on these crucial matters.

I like the idea, a "socialist new thing" in terms of the self-organization of the blogosphere and the archived month or two of the Erase Racism Carnival I've had a chance to peruse include some fascinating material. I kicked in a couple of recent pieces from FotM and am waiting to see if I make the cut. Will this supplant forms like the Day of Blogging Against White Supremacy kicked off earlier this year by Nelson Hawkins at Pottawatomie Creek? I don't see that it necessarily should, but time will tell in this rapidly evolving intellectual/social space...

When I went back to Double Consciousness today, they had a new post which tended, as the time-honored folk saying hath it, to harsh my mellow. It is a video, not a music video, just a little slice of everyday life in which a young Mexican sister gives us, close up and live, an unsolicited testimonial to the power of white supremacist and heteronormative hegemony in this society. I could write pages about this clip, but instead, I will just kick it to you, dear reader (with a hat tip to Carlo Montemayor at Double Consciousness).

Whew, hunh?

In a forthcoming post I hope to look at another good news/bad news scenario around white privilege, this one related to the invaluable new book, The Cost of Privilege.

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Sallie Holley--Inspiration From Our History

This bit of US history is the latest in a series of posts written in part to call attention to the essential new book, The Cost of Privilege. This one highlights an abolitionist little remembered today, a white woman named Salley Holley. Because she is relatively unknown, I will front-end load this essay with three reasons why she is important to us now.

1. At a time when US society held that women should avoid mixed company and public spaces, Sallie Holley became one of the small, much-loved, much-reviled band of women speakers who took to the platform and the pulpit to denounce slavery.

2. She lived her whole adult life with a supportive companion, Caroline Putnam, whom she met at college. While I have no knowledge of what they did in bed, and no desire to impose ahistorical categories on them, anybody wishing to claim them as foremothers of modern lesbian people's fighters like Audre Lorde will get no argument from me.

3. Most important, Sallie Holley and Caroline Putnam stayed with the struggle for justice for African Americans until their deaths, long after many of their white abolitionist comrades had moved on to currency reform, women's suffrage, spiritualism, temperance or commercial pursuits. It is no easy thing to be a revolutionary for an entire lifetime, and while she never described herself that way, that's what she was.

I have taken the liberty of laying out Sallie Holley's life in four stages, or battles. Most of this piece is drawn from a book entitled A Life For Liberty, published in 1899. It is a compilation of Sallie Holley's letters and excerpts, selected and introduced by a minister named John White Chadwick, who knew Sallie and many in her circle. I doubt that even the late Sonny Bono can restore copyright to it from beyond the grave and hope that someone will scan, OCR, and post a copy on the Internet.

Sallie Holley's First Battle--To Be A Full Human Being

Sallie, born in 1817, was fortunate in her father. Myron Holley was a politician and businessman who had extremely progressive ideas for his era. He loved his children and paid as much attention to the education of his daughters as his sons, at a time when the debate was "Should women learn the alphabet?" Sallie always attributed her anti-slavery values to his teachings. He did not become actively involved until the late 1830s when he helped bring into being the Liberty Party, an early precursor of Lincoln's Republicans and the first US party with an organized abolitionist group at its core. He died, barely solvent, in 1841.

From him she also got her religion, a strong New England Unitarianism. Salley remained extremely interested in religious matters her whole life, for their own hold on her, as well as because in the 19th century they were so deeply intertwined with the political issues of the day (so unlike our own time). Her values were strongly held. While young, she met General Childs and challenged him on the morality of the Seminole war, in which he had taken part:

He confessed its injustice but pleaded that as a soldier he must obey the commands of his superiors. Miss Holley did not see why.

Staying with family, she considered a career teaching or nursing, but friends persuaded her to attend Oberlin College in Ohio, and she went in 1847. Oberlin was a radical place--formed in 1835, it admitted women and Black people, unheard of at the time. When a scholarship ran out, she supported herself doing washing, baby-sitting, baking, tutoring, and sewing.

Even at radical Oberlin, Sallie Holley was something of a rebel, the only Unitarian and an increasingly "ultra" abolitionist. She met and soon was inseparable from Caroline Putnam, a fellow student. Caroline's description, from half a century later, of Sallie speaking at graduation resonates with love and appreciation:

She was radiantly lovely as she stepped forward on that great stage of the Oberlin Tabernacle, animated by the preceding music, her deep blue eyes looking off from her manuscript now and then to more earnestly impress her heretical 'Ideal of Womanhood.' Her ideas put bees in the bonnets of the sages, humming as they did with women's right to vote, to preach and with the brightest humour, poetry, and satire...

Salley Holley's Second Battle--To End Slavery

What Caroline Putnam refers to as "the momentous, the decisive convention of our lives" came in Litchfield, Ohio in 1852:

Among the speakers at this meeting was Abby Kelley Foster, who made an eloquent appeal to her listeners in behalf of the slave-woman and asked:

"Who in this great assembly is willing to plead her cause?"

At the close of her address and in the recess of the meeting Miss Holley advanced to say, 'I will plead the cause of the slave-woman.'

She wrote Caroline, "Putty, I've decided to be an anti-slavery lecturer!"

True to her pledge, she hit the speaking trail agitating against slavery and collecting funds for William Henry Garrison's magazine, The Liberator, and the American Anti-Slavery Society. Traveling from village to village by buggy and wagon, staying with strangers, facing crowds ranging from rapt to hostile, she lived "the rough and tumble kind of a life the anti-slavery lecturer experiences."

Her unrelenting attitude was captured in one letter from Farmersville, NY:

A week or two ago at a common school celebration in this village, the county superintendent invited me to address the children. Accordingly I told them of the slave-children in this country, who are not allowed to read or write or spell or commit to memory the multiplication table which they had just repeated so well. Whereupon two Buchanan men rose up and left in high indignation that 'an abolition lecture was poked at them.' I am very sorry to even seem rude and 'fanatical' but know not how to avoid it and be faithful to the cause of the slave. In fact, nothing else is so important and proper for all occasions, to be talked of, as the slave and his cause.

Sallie Hollie's Third Battle--To Resist The Dissolution Of The Anti-Slavery Movement After The Civil War

Although she was a coworker and follower of the pacifist William Lloyd Garrison, like him, she welcomed the war that followed Lincoln's election in 1860. Even before that,

on the day following John Brown's raid, she thanked God in the prayer before her lecture in Ellsworth, Maine, for John Brown's heroic deed.

After the passage of the 13th Amendment and the end of the Civil War, new tasks presented themselves. In August, 1865, she attended an Oberlin reunion:

They insisted on my relating what I had been about. I said I was afraid they wouldn't care to hear how I had been holding anti-slavery meetings all these years and still 'spoke in public.' Mr. Cooper asked what I lectured upon now. 'Oh,' I said, 'Black folks must vote all through the country.' Helen Finney, who was present with her husband, General Cox, said she thought I wanted women to vote. 'Oh, yes!" I said, 'that's inevitable,' whereupon there was 'immense sensation,'as the newspapers say.

Garrison and others argued that the goal of the American Anti-Slavery Society had been accomplished with Emancipation and it should vote itself out of business. The internal struggle which followed raged for five years, with Sallie Holley among the most passionate of those arguing that it was still needed.

Sallie wrote a scathing letter to one woman who favored closing it down, and it was published in the National Anti-Slavery Standard in 1868. This excerpt will give the flavor:

It is heartless, cold-blooded, worldly apathy, that can object to the name or the work of an Anti- Slavery Society. Since this New Year began, three negroes were seized in Tennessee, bound over logs, and beaten nearly dead, because they voted the Republican ticket. Three thousand black men in Mississippi petition Congress to send them to Liberia. In their touching language, "The white people have all the land, all the money, all the education. Many of the planters refuse to pay us all to gether, and they work generally to prevent the education of our children." And you tell me there is no need of an Anti-Slavery Society.

See black men all over the South persecuted, driven from homes, such as they have had, denied work and bread, for daring to vote loyally. See them still shot down--killed by all the cowardly, ruffianly means known to the old barbaric days of slavery--and then, if you have a human heart, ask the American Anti-Slavery Society to stop its work, if you can! Are you afraid the black people will have too many friends, too much justice, too much liberty?

Sally Hollie's Fourth Battle--To Educate and Empower The Freed Slaves

When the struggle to preserve the American Anti-Slavery Society was finally lost, in 1870, she undertook the battle that would last until her death. Two years earlier, in 1868, her beloved Caroline had moved to Lottsburg, Virginia and started a school for the freed slaves in the area. As it became clear that the defeated Southern slavocracy craved revenge and restoration and that the North was unwilling to force them to accept defeat, Sallie joined Caroline Putnam there in 1870, at the age of 52. Through the coming decades they lived at the Holly School, as Caroline named it, leaving one at a time for an annual trip North to beg funds and supplies from friends and old movement comrades.

They worked unrelentingly, growing much of their food in a massive garden and steadily improving the facilities for their students, and did so under a near-total boycott of any communication by their white neighbors:

Though our new schoolhouse is not entirely completed at this date, yet I rejoice to write, the second coat of plaster is this day going on and by November our school will enter triumphantly. These Virgina rebels are fairly confounded to see our schoolhouse spring up so magically, and our fortunes revive from their hostile tread. Like the chamomile bed, the more it is trod upon, the more fragrant and lively it becomes. Our coloured friends are cheered to the vary marrow of their bones. Their faces shine as day after day they call on us to exult and crow. Still we know the enemy ever sits with lance in rest to take advantage as often as he can make a deadly thrust.

One can sense the deep isolation of these two properly-brought-up New England ladies in Sallie's response to Southern religion, so different from the austere Unitarianism and subdued Quakerism with which she was so familiar:

The white folks' campmeeting has just ended. Over thirty conversions! The coloured 'protracted meeting' is this week in full blast, making night hideous with terrible noises.' All this kind of religion seems to me worthless. It doesn't save from lies and stealing. Nobody's character is elevated or ennobled. Vanity and self-conceit are fostered. People pray and shout and say the Holy Ghost is moving their souls! It is awful.

This last is only one example of the class bias and white paternalism that appear in Sallie Hollie's letters, and it should not be swept under the rug. But weighed against it must be the consistency with which she fought and taught and organized. In late 1892, with only scraps of the Reconstruction program in the South left, she laments that after 25 years of organizing to hold Republican majorities in local elections and relentless vote rigging by the white Democrats,

our Lottsburgh ex-slave-holders boast that they will get the post office in March. One of the most bitter told a white woman that 'That old Yankee,' meaning me, 'has ruined these Lottsburgh niggers, making them think they are as good as anybody.'

Shortly thereafter, on her annual retreat to New York, Sallie Holley caught a chill, developed pneumonia and died on January 12, 1893. She was 74, and still fighting.

In closing, let me suggest that the greatest contribution Salley Hollie and Caroline Putnam made to this country probably took the form of the thousands of African Americans who passed through the Holley school. Some went North to settle in Baltimore and New York. Others stayed in the area and used what they had learned to make better lives for their families. But many fanned out across the South, like men and women educated at similar schools, taking teaching jobs and ensuring that the white power structure would never again be able to enforce the near-universal illiteracy which had helped keep Black America in slavery's chains.

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Racial Cleansing, Sundown Towns and White Supremacy

As part of an ongoing effort to call attention to the publication of The Cost of Privilege, a splendid contribution to the struggle in the US, I will be blogging a bunch, I hope, about white supremacy and white privilege in the next few weeks.

This post was triggered by an announcement of another new book, entitled Buried In The Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America by Eliot Jaspin. A dramatic excerpt from a plug for the book will give you the idea. Jaspin, who won a Pulitzer for use of computers in reporting for the Cox newspaper group, was visiting a small Arkansas town and found some horrific relics of slavery in the burg's little history museum:

I had been in the area for several days. Until that moment it had never occurred to me that, in all the time I had been there, I had not seen a single African-American. Yet here in front of me was proof that at one time blacks had lived here. Were they still here? If not, when had they left and why? I walked out of the museum with the questions nagging me.

Over the next few days as I drove to my different appointments, I kept searching for even one black face. Tourism was one of the pillars of the local economy and along the main roads were hotels, restaurants and concert halls for country music fans. The people shopping in the stores were white. The people behind the counters were white. The people working in the motels were white. I began checking the people in cars as they passed. All white.

On my last day, I finally asked the person I was interviewing if there were any blacks in the area. “Oh no,” she said, “The Klan keeps them out.”

Now this interested me, not least because of the present tense in this last quote--"keeps them out." I haven't read Jaspin's book, but comments I've seen indicate that it is very thorough and detailed, documenting the systematic driving of Black people out of large sections of this country by lynch terror. I hope to get a review copy, to see how it handles the situation now.

Many of these areas remain lily white to this day. In fact, when Jaspin completed five years of research by writing a 16 part series for the Cox group, their flagship paper, the Atlanta Journal Constitution wouldn't publish it. It laid bare the truth about places like suburban Forsyth County, the whitest in Georgia, whose racism the AJC had been prettying up for decades. The debate over the series was covered by Creative Loafing, Atlanta's alternative weekly.

Overall, though, my impression is that Eliot Jaspin concentrates on the period from the end of Reconstruction through the 20s when a massive wave of ethnic cleansing took place:

I made a list of four or five counties that seemed to be the most suspicious and went to the Library of Congress. By cross checking my list with the New York Times Index for the decade when each collapse occurred, I found the dates when there had been stories written about some of the counties. I mounted a microfilm reel and turned the crank. As I fiddled with the focus in the dark of the library’s microfilm room, a headline appeared: “ALL NEGROES DRIVEN FROM INDIANA TOWN.”

The seven-paragraph story was to the point. “Negroes began leaving this mining town early this afternoon, following the warning issued by white residents to be out of town by 7 o’clock to night...”

Jaspin, as many readers will recognize, is working on terrain others have also researched. The best known work on the topic is by a dude named James Loewen, whose Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Textbook Got Wrong and Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong have gotten a lot of well-deserved play among progressives. A couple of years ago he wrote Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, about hundreds of towns, mainly Northern and Western, like Pekin, Illinois with actual signs at the town line reading "Nigger, Don't Let the Sun Set On You Here."

Loewen's superb website has a Sundown Towns section with some excerpts, interviews, practical research tips and, best of all, some modern day use of his research. Check out his denunciation of Honda's decision to build a new plant in Greensburg, Indiana, a town lovingly described by All Things Considered on National Public Radio as a place that "could be a movie set for an ideal American small town." Always providing that your ideal is white.

In 1906, Greensburg's white residents drove out most of its black population. By 1960, the entire county, which had boasted 164 African American residents in 1890, was down to just three, all female. In the 2000 census, Greensburg still had only two black or interracial households among 10,260 residents.

He concludes:

Surely Honda owes the nation -- and not just African Americans -- a statement telling why it chose Greensburg, despite (or because of?) Greensburg's racial past. Honda should also disclose how it plans to make its workforce look like America while locating in a town that for many decades kept out Afro-America.

Another work I have only just discovered is a self-published work by Monica Davis entitled Land, Legacy and Lynching: Building the Future in Black America--she also refers to it as Lynching for Profit. The teaser she posted on the order form for her book at LuLu.com suggests she been actively involved in the ongoing struggle to defend the remaining Black-owned farmland in this country. Her thumbnail description reflects a materialist approach emphasizing what Marx called "primitive accumulation," i.e. piracy, as a key motive for this ethnic cleansing:

A century ago, the segregated South had a deep secret--black farmers owned the majority of farmland in the region. Then came the 1910 Census results along with an organized effort to drive black farmers off the land. Through lynching and intimidation, and predatory use of federal farm loan programs, hundreds of thousands of black farmers, 90% of African-American farmers, were driven from the land through a 60 year orgy of lynching, murder, intimidation and theft. Many found refuge in factory towns and became middle class through factory work, especially in the auto industry. Others gathered in segregated ghettos in the nation's urban hell holes and continue to fuel the nation's prisons.

This is more than a little reminiscent of the work done by pioneering feminist historians on the role of appropriation in the great European witch scares.

I hope to continue to blog about this theme in an upcoming post, talking about what all this means today--for the fight against white privilege and white supremacy, for the struggle for reparations for the Black Nation, and for the all the battles of people of color in the belly of the beast. Don't let that keep you from commenting now though.

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White Privilege Through Lenses Red & Black

This blog entry is my response to Nelson Hawkins' General Call, issued last week over at Pottawatomie Creek, for bloggers to take the occasion of the Martin Luther King holiday to "Blog Against White Supremacy." I was thrilled.

For one thing, I've been doing some of that myself, in part to promote a splendid new book: The Cost of Privilege: Taking on the System of White Supremacy and Racism is due out by the end of this month. There's a rudimentary website here which will, I understand, be bulking up with an order form and much cool content in days to come. I'd advise bookmarking it.

For another, some of those who've pledged to blog are new to me, tweaking my curiosity, and some, like the one-woman wrecking squad of white supremacy, Yolanda Carrington over at The Primary Contradiction, are guaranteed to have some intriguing insights to offer. Collect 'em all! (Centrally linked at Nelson's site, I assume).

Now to cases. This is going to be an explicitly Red entry. I am going to excerpt, with only minor commentary, what I consider the most important section of veteran US communist Nelson Peery's autobiographical Black Fire. It's short but very rich.

Let me set the stage. Peery is a GI in a segregated unit, occupying the Philippines after the defeat of Japan in 1945. He is contacted by a couple of white CP members who urge him to help get the Black troops into building the "Home by Christmas" movement, a campaign which will thwart the drive by US capital to start a war with the socialist USSR.

I could feel the surge of adrenaline and the hackles began to rise. White folk look out of their blue eyes at the world and they see only a reflection of themselves. They don't see that there is a white army and there is a black army and they are equal only on payday.

The whites, in the military as in civilian life, would ask us to unite with them on issues that concerned them a lot and us a little. They would never unite on issues that concerned us a lot and them a little.

Peery has just spent chapters detailing racist violence and other outrages perpetrated against the Black troops by both the white brass and Klan types in the ranks, as well as the omnipresence of G-2 Army intelligence snooping around for unrest in Black units.

Yes, we wanted desperately to go home. But the men could not be convinced that the way home lay through mutiny.

And here the importance of the long memory of the African American community, that most valuable of survival mechanisms, is subtly shown. Peery refers to lessons learned from a mutiny thirty years before as the US finished a decade and a half of combat to consolidate its occupation of the Philippines.

The last Black regiment to try that in the Philippines spent the next twenty years cleaning white soldiers' toilets at Fort Benning. The white soldiers were glad they didn't have to work the "sugar run" and most of them figured it proper that blacks clean their toilets anyway.

Now, having laid out the contradiction in the starkest terms, Peery brings it back to the human level.

The white communists I had known were dedicated to the struggle against discrimination. The problem was, they seemed to think we would become equal if they individually treated us as equals. They had to get the sheriffs and the generals to do that too. Instead, they constantly preached to the believers. We were too sophisticated to go for that.

Now it was my turn to size up my comrades and get my thoughts together. How can you tell a person he is being strangled by an evil he is too decent to see? It was sad and frustrating and insurmountable.

And here, to thump the editorial lectern briefly, is the enormous value of the development of white privilege theory. It gives the "decent" white folks a set of lenses ("They Live"!) with which they can see--and try to figure out how to deal with--the contents of Peggy McKintosh's "invisible knapsack."

But the true kicker in this short section of Black Fire (pages 296-298) is yet to come. Peery (who has hooked up with the red-led guerillas of the Hukbalahap and is giving them aid) finishes his risky meeting with the two.

Watching them walk back through the company area, I felt more than understood something new. For the first time I got a muddled and disturbing sense that the merger of antifascism with communism had produced two kinds of Communists. Communists had led the fight against fascism in Europe. The anti-Fascist war was the practical side of the European and American Communist movement. In the euphoria of victory they were emerging as the social vanguard of their nations.

In Mindanao, in Alabama, in Rhodesia and Brazil and Shanghai and Calcutta, the war had just begun. Freedom, national freedom, the self-determination of nations, the unity of the colored colonial peoples--this was the new war. The tactic of one brand of communism was the struggle for peace. for the other, the task was preparing for war.

Too schematic? 20/20 hindsight? A big leap from white privilege in an Army camp to a global perspective? No doubt, no doubt. But these insights have flavored my thinking since I first read them when comrade Nelson Peery's book came out over a decade ago. I hope you find them as intriguing as I do.

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Something To Look Forward To In 2007

In my twenties, I was prone to say dumb stuff around this time of year, stuff like "Boy, 1976 really and truly bit the big one. No way could 1977 possibly be worse." Suffice it say, such thoughts never form in my brain these days, much less cross my lips.

But from where I stand, already there is one bright spot glowing on the generally bleak horizon of this new year. Some time within the next four to six weeks, an exceptional new book will be rolling off the presses, and I suspect it's gonna become a feature of the political landscape of the Left and the people's movements over the next couple of years.

The title: The Cost of Privilege: Taking on the System of White Supremacy and Racism

The author: Chip Smith (a 'rade of mine for many years), working with a crack research and writing team.

The thesis: That the system of national oppression reinforced by white privileges has been interwoven into the very fabric of capitalist rule in the US from its earliest days, and that only by tackling that system can a foundation be laid for deep unity across "racial" and other lines both within the working class and between working people and other oppressed strata and groups in this society.

The mission: To get activists reflecting on, talking about, planning approaches to and basing strategy on the need to deal with white (and other forms of) privilege as a pervasive social reality.

You"ll be hearing more about The Cost of Privilege at this blog in the weeks to come, but since you can't get your own and dig in just yet, I have a small treat to whet your appetite. As 2006 drew to a close, I got a happy bit of news from Jeff Perry. He told me that an invaluable 1975 pamphlet by the late Ted Allen, "Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: " has been posted on the web. It is the seed from which sprang Allen's magisterial two volume study, The Invention of the White Race, published by Verso, and a fine introduction to the contributions this too-little-recognized thinker made to the cause of revolution in the US.

So read the "The Invention of the White Race" pamphlet, and keep checking this site for breaking news about the forthcoming book.

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