publication of "Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race" (1975), which ultimately grew into his two-volume The Invention of the White Race in 1994 and 1997. In his work, Allen maintained several points: that the "white race" was invented as a ruling class social control formation in the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Anglo-American plantation colonies (principally Virginia and Maryland); that central to this process was the ruling-class plantation bourgeoisie conferring "white race" privileges on European-American working people; that these privileges were not only against the interests of African-Americans, they were also "poison", "ruinous", a baited hook, to the class interests of working people; that white supremacy, reinforced by the "white skin privilege", has been the main retardant of working-class consciousness in the US; and that struggle for radical social change should direct principal efforts at challenging white supremacy and "white skin privileges". Though Allen's work influenced Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and sectors of the "new left" and paved the way for "white privilege" and "race as social construct" study, and though he appreciated much of the work that followed, he also raised important questions about developments in those areas. In newspapers and public discourse across the United States in the 1960s, the term "white privilege" was often used to describe white areas under conditions of residential segregation. These and other uses grew out of the era of legal discrimination against Black Americans, and reflected the idea that white status could continue despite formal equality. In the 1990s, the term came back into public discourse, such as in Robert Jensen's 1998 opinion piece in the Baltimore Sun, titled "White privilege shapes the U.S." Study of the concept The concept of white privilege also came to be used within radical circles for self-criticism by anti-racist whites. For instance, a 1975 article in Lesbian Tide criticized the American feminist movement for exhibiting "class privilege" and "white privilege". Weather Underground leader Bernardine Dohrn, in a 1977 Lesbian Tide article, wrote: "... by assuming that I was beyond white privilege or allying with male privilege because I understood it, I prepared and led the way for a totally opportunist direction which infected all of our work and betrayed revolutionary principles." In the late 1980s, the term gained new popularity in academic circles and public discourse after Peggy McIntosh's 1987 foundational work "White Privilege: Unpacking the