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South Africa's Poor Whites and Whiteness Studies:Afrikaner Ethnicity, Scientific Racism, and White MiseryTiffany Willoughby-Herard aa San Francisco State University,

Online Publication Date: 01 December 2007To cite this Article: Willoughby-Herard, Tiffany (2007) 'South Africa's Poor Whitesand Whiteness Studies: Afrikaner Ethnicity, Scientific Racism, and White Misery ',New Political Science, 29:4, 479 - 500To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/07393140701688339URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07393140701688339

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South Africa’s Poor Whites and Whiteness Studies:Afrikaner Ethnicity, Scientific Racism, and WhiteMisery1

Tiffany Willoughby-HerardSan Francisco State University

Abstract This article introduces a new way to evaluate the political and theoreticalsignificance of the Carnegie Commission Poor White Study conducted from 1927 to 1932in South Africa. Building on the recent literature on whiteness and the older literature onscientific racism, I argue that the scientific language about biology and physiognomy that isusually linked to scientific racism must be brought back into conversation with the literary,historical, legal, and cultural analysis of critical whiteness studies to be a more effectivescholarly rejoinder to white supremacy. Critical whiteness studies must track theinstitutional and professional investments in the creation of white supremacy and whitenationalism through various colonial relations across geographical and territorial space. In aproductive turn toward the specificity of South African history, this essay also makes claimsabout the nature of whiteness vis-a-vis Afrikaner and British identity that provide powerfulantidotes to the historiographical obsession with autochthonous ethnic identities amongwhite supremacists. Finally, through close attention to the actual experiences of “poorwhites” a set of moral directives and knowledge claims emerge about the urgency of anti-racist research that makes this racial formation more than simply an add-on in the litany ofradical projects.

Introduction

This article considers the relationship between poor whites in South Africa,critical whiteness studies, and Afrikaner Nationalism—a powerful South Africanform of white supremacy. Building on Charles Mills’2 concerns about makingblackness visible through the ontology of the racial contract, this articledemonstrates that the knowledge claims about the racial construct must alsoaddress racial formations that demonize and mark whiteness in order totransform it into a vulnerable, almost sacred and protected political category.

1 The author wishes to thank Molly Talcott, Julietta Hua, the San Francisco Bay AreaFeminist Philosophy Group (BAYFAP), Jeanne Scheper, and the reviewers at New PoliticalScience.

2 Charles Mills, Blackness Visible (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); CharlesMills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999); Charles Mills andCarole Pateman, Contract and Domination (London: Polity Press, 2007).

New Political Science,Volume 29, Number 4, December 2007

ISSN 0739-3148 print/ISSN 1469-9931 on-line/07/040479-22 q 2007 Caucus for a New Political ScienceDOI: 10.1080/07393140701688339

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Additionally, whiteness has been an important part of the constitution of thesocial sciences, so if we are concerned with decolonizing knowledge productionpractices and with decolonizing knowledge, having a proper account ofwhiteness is imperative. Through discussion of three main knowledge claims incritical whiteness—1) literary, historical, legal, and cultural frameworks thatfocus on the social construction of white identity sans the body, 2) whiteness asproperty and investment, and 3) whiteness as an invisible though regrettableopen secret—I point to the necessity of considering how whiteness is functioningwith regard to the production of racial identity in the case of poor whites. After adiscussion of the literature on critical whiteness studies and AfrikanerNationalism, I describe the Carnegie Corporation Poor White Study from1927–1932, which I argue served as the lynchpin to the political consolidation ofAfrikaner Nationalism in South Africa’s era of grand apartheid in 1948–1994.This is not to exclude the ways that whiteness functions as privilege but tocomplicate theories of whiteness in a way that takes into account those withthe status of contingent whiteness or semi-whiteness. I also use criticalwhiteness studies, the study of the manufacture of white racial identity andwhite supremacy, as a theoretical perspective to raise questions about thelinkage between scientific racist social science and the consolidation of grandapartheid in South Africa, which I argue occurred via the production ofwhiteness and the racial typing of the so-called “poor whites.” The stakes ofoffering a richer theoretical framework for analyzing the function andmeanings associated with whiteness are quite high inasmuch as we areconcerned with dismantling the philosophical architecture of whitesupremacy and what US geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore has calledinfrastructural racism and premature death3 and what US Black politicaltheorist Frank Wilderson has called Black death.4

3 Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Abandonment,” Writing Alternative US Political HistoriesPanel, American Studies Association, Oakland, CA, October 13, 2006.

4 Ibid.; Frank Wilderson III and Denise Silva have commented on this extensively aswell. Wilderson’s “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?” WeWrite 2:1(2005) provides the theoretical underpinnings through a critique of Gramsci’s notion ofexploitation. Wilderson argues that Black domination literally is caused by whites beingtaught that to dominate Blacks is pleasure. He writes: “Black death is the modernbourgeois-state’s recreational past-time” (p. 5) and “Slavery . . . is closer to capital’s primalobsession than waged oppression. . . . The worker demands that productivity be fair anddemocratic . . . the slave demands the production stop; stop without recourse to itsultimate democratization.” (p. 6) Similarly, in Silva’s paper, “The Dead Do Fly Planes,”presented at the 2003 (T)races Conference hosted by the UC Irvine HumanitiesResearch Institute in March 2003, she argued that premature death is precisely the set ofrelations and practices and institutional life that best helps explain the murder of Guineanimmigrant Amadou Diallou, where the police that shot him over 40 times at close rangedescribed their fear of entering a literal and figurative “state of nature” in theneighborhood where he resided. Silva makes the claim that for the only peopleempowered to use the force of arms in civil society to refer to “places where Blacks reside”as akin to the state of nature suggests that blacks are not recognizable as human.Instead they are recognizable as the ultimate threat and those who are scheduled forinevitable and juridically legitimated premature death, ,http://www.uchri.tv/tRACEs_Denise_Ferreir_T1.mov . .

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For the most part, whiteness studies5 has suggested that the antidote to whitesupremacy is historicizing the manufacture of white identities, documenting theintersection of ideologies of class, nation, and gender, and ultimately analyzingwhiteness as unearned privilege. Indeed, some contemporary South Africanscholars have argued that whiteness requires bearing witness to suppressedhistories of violence.6 In this essay, I evaluate the case of the poor whites in SouthAfrica to talk about how the antidote to white supremacy requires bearing witnessto suppressed histories of violence toward Africans, so-called Coloreds, Asians,Chinese, migrants and rural people across Southern Africa but also requiresattention to the process and policies through which some white identities werepathologized in the era of scientific racism. What is necessary is a comparativeracial politics within7 South Africa that discusses how racial formations weremutually constituted through legal, juridical discourse and scientific knowledgeproduction practices.

Far from the revisionist history circulating in post-apartheid South Africa andeven paradoxically created by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission processand report, which builds the post-apartheid nation by insisting that everyone inSouth Africa, and South African history itself, was traumatized by apartheid, I amexplaining the pervasiveness of racial ideology across class in South Africathrough attention to one category of white others.8 By paying attention to the factthat white experiences of apartheid were not homogenous, I am not endorsing the

5 I am referring here to a huge body of research including exemplars David Roediger,George Lipsitz, Ruth Frankenberg, Matthew Frye Jacobson, Thandeka, Richard Dyer, andMelissa Steyn. If I were to offer a brief genealogy of critical whiteness studies I wouldsuggest that there are several strains of scholarship that have developed into the currentpopular scholarship. There is a great deal of potential work to be done on the ontology ofwhiteness and the history of knowledge production about white racial formations.The terrain would have to include a number of marginalized approaches to studies ofwhites: 1) black radical critiques, such as that offered by W. E. B. DuBois in BlackReconstruction, C. L. R. James in Black Jacobins, Robert Fikes studies of white life novelswritten by Black authors, and suggested in the collection of such materials by DavidRoediger in Black OnWhite; 2) white labor historians in American Studies and transnationalAmerican Studies, such as Roediger and Matthew Frye Jacobson, and Noel Ignatiev;3) white feminist often queer radical anti-white supremacy activists, such as Mab Segrest,Dorothy Allison, and Ruth Frankenberg; and 4) critical race theory and comparative ethnicstudies scholars, such as Neil Foley, Chela Sandoval, Toni Morrison, and Saidiya Haartman.A proper international comparison would include South African historians Robert Morrell,Jonathon Hyslop, Marijke DuToit, Liese Van Der Watt, Sally Gaule, and Melissa Steyn.Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, “‘Waste of a White Skin’ or Civilizing White Primitives:Carnegie Commission Study of Poor Whites in South Africa, 1927–1932,” PhD Dissertation,University of California, Santa Barbara. This genealogy of poor whiteness intersects with arigorous history of whiteness studies that does not reify one group of scholars concernedwith this racial formation and its significant impact on the making of white supremacy andon other racial formations.

6 Liese Van Der Watt, “‘Making Whiteness Strange’: White Identity in Post-ApartheidSouth African Art,” Third Text 56 (Autumn 2001), p. 68.

7 Luli Callinicos’s social history offers a useful model here. Unfortunately, though,Callinicos conforms to several of the conventions of South African social history whichinadvertently marginalizes Black worker histories. Luli Callinicos, Working Life: FactoriesTownships, and Popular Culture on the Rand: 1886–1940 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1987).

8 Mahmood Mamdani, “A Diminished Truth,” in Wilmot James and Linda van deVijver (eds), After the TRC: Reflections on Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa (Athens:Ohio University Press 2001), pp. 58–61.

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new post-apartheid literature of absolution (also known as the literature of whitevictimhood),9 which argues that since some Afrikaners were downtrodden duringapartheid, apartheid was not really as bad as has been supposed. Instead, I amsaying that apartheid was worse than we had imagined and, in order to make thatclaim, I have to identify an under-studied area of the origins of apartheid, theracialization of those designated as the beneficiaries of apartheid and thosedesignated as the social and political justification for the legitimacy of apartheid asa political order. Thus, I argue that one important mechanism in the creation ofapartheid, in addition to the displacement, murder, and dehumanizationof African, Colored, and Asian peoples, was the systematic establishment ofprocedures for the regulation, constraint, and racial marking of poor whites asirretrievable and degenerate, as “like the blacks.” Nor am I suggesting that themost effective explanation for the persistence of economic injustice in post-apartheid South Africa is a shift from racial exploitation to class exploitation.10

Instead I am attempting to demarcate one of the most significant strands in thepolitical origin story of the racialization of poverty and the racialization of cultureand group identity, which is the racial formation of poor whites. In so doing,I foreground racial policing of white identity, fears of white degeneration, and thepolitical significance of the “white primitive” or the “white poor” in order to talkabout persistent allegiance to white supremacy and white nationalism. I do notfocus on poor whites to displace the harms to non-whites or to minimize thoseextraordinary and at the same time banal and quotidian practices ofintergenerational dehumanization of Africans, but to talk about precisely howand why white selfhood has been unable to face its own internalized racism andself-hatred. Of course, then, it is hard to recognize the communication of pain fromnon-whites under apartheid (1948–1994) when the stakes of institutional powerand wealth were so high, but the other stakes were that white selfhood then and

9 Shaun Irlam offers a useful political genealogy of post-apartheid literature as ameasure of the apolitical cultural turn in post-apartheid letters. Irlam cautions that thisliterature’s confessional nature and focus on social identities props up myths about therainbow nation and thereby undercuts a necessary focus on material conditions. Irlamreprises a debate on the left captured by Nancy Fraser on the issue of redistribution versusrepresentation, which has been rehearsed by American philosopher Linda Martin Alcoff.Shaun Irlam, “Unraveling the Rainbow: The Remission of Nation in Post-ApartheidLiterature,” South Atlantic Quarterly 103:4 (2004), pp. 695–718. Nancy Fraser, “Identity,Exclusion and Critique: A Response to Four Critics,” European Journal of Political Theory 6:3(2007), pp. 305–338; Linda Alcoff, Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (London:Oxford, 2006), pp.27–30. There must be another critique available to us about the limits andbenefits of this scholarship on South African white identity that grounds that literature insocial identities and in economic history and colonial relations. The necessity of thisbecomes increasingly clear as neoliberal forces always bundle wealth consolidation withculture, aesthetics, identity, and practices of consuming identities. In my writing, I hope toprovoke discussion about what this post-apartheid literature is doing and how it functionspolitically for different social and political strata.

10 Here I am quite convinced by the Marxist social histories that racial proletarianizationon a global scale or the intersection of race and class and nation is the most appropriate wayto view the apartheid, post-apartheid, and globalization era. See C. R. D. Halisi, BlackPolitical Thought and the Making of Democracy in South Africa (Bloomington, IN: IndianaUniversity Press, 1999); Patrick Bond, “South Africa Tackles Global Apartheid: Is theReform Strategy Working?” South Atlantic Quarterly 103:4 (2004), pp. 817–839; and AdamSitze, “Denialism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 103:4 (2004), pp. 769–811.

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now, in the era of what Patrick Bond has called “global apartheid” (1994–present),has not reconciled itself to the requirements and possibilities of economically just,anti-racist, pro-human selfhood.

Put simply, where whiteness scholars have been mostly concerned withwhiteness as privilege and unearned rights, I am concerned with whiteness asmisery11 and whiteness as a project of diminishing white selfhood. I speak ofdiminished white selfhood in the face of the predominant though inadequatehistoriography of political change under South African apartheid advanced byT.D. Moodie and Heribert Adam, which suggests that ethnic conflict betweenAfrikaner and British is a meaningful and salient explanation for colonialdomination.

This school of thought argues that Afrikaner identity was an autochthonousoriginal sort of identity instead of one manufactured by intellectuals and aspiring“political entrepreneurs”12 in the early twentieth century. Clear indications of themanufacture of Afrikaner identity exist in many forms of political advocacyamong the Dutch in South Africa, including: the adoption of spoken Afrikaans asthe language of the putative Afrikaner Nation; the co-optation of said languagefrom the Khoi slaves of the Dutch in South Africa; the creation of dictionaries andnational songs; the founding of Afrikaner-only schools and political, professional,and financial associations and combines; hosting national festivals attempting toestablish an Afrikaner literary tradition; national monuments; and nation-building festivals commemorating the migration from the Cape Colony to thenewly founded Dutch Republics. This ferment of Afrikaner nationalism was ableto consolidate and capture state power through the proliferation of the scientificmovement symbolized by an academic leadership who participated in thePoor White Study. This problematic history, which excised the numerous Dutch-British marriages and the large numbers of Khoi, Colored, so-called Bastard, andAfrican slaves and laborers who traveled with Dutch farmers on the Great Trek(the European migration in the 1830s that created the basis for a history of theOrange Free State and the Transvaal as Afrikaner Republics), has beendisseminated widely without the necessary corrections. These terra nullius“Afrikaner spaces” are more appropriately described as multilingual, multiracial,and multi-ethnic communities. And the story of the practices of resisting anddeploying Afrikaner identity at key moments in economic history and to protectkey colonial relations is an important one. The Orange Free State and theTransvaal Republics were Afrikaner in terms of political and state power butnever in terms of the actual constitution of labor, demography, land ownership,and social make-up. To perpetuate the idea of these ethnic spaces is to repeat adangerous mythology of grand apartheid. However, Afrikaner identity wasseized upon as a useful political identity to make a claim that a type of racial orcultural or ethnic or linguistic homogeneity existed among these people when itnever did exist.

11 Thandeka, Learning to White: Race, Money and God in America, 2nd edn, (New York:Continuum Publishing, 2000).

12 Beverly Crawford and Ronald Lipschultz’s term “political entrepreneurs” intends todestabilize this replacement of a conversation about race with a conversation aboutentrenched and primordial ethnicities. Beverly Crawford and Ronnie D. Lipschultz, Myth of“Ethnic Conflict”: Politics, Economics, and “Cultural Violence, International and Area StudiesResearch Series, no. 98, University of California, Berkeley, 1998.

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While the political conflict between Afrikaner and British is an importantexplanatory variable, it is not the only explanation of social and political change inSouth Africa, and since both groups were subject to similar forms of themanufacture of white identities, I propose mapping the term “white” onto bothgroups to deliberately discuss the racialization of identity and the racialization ofclass. Here I take seriously various critiques of the replacement of race withethnicity. From Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s critique that white ethnicityenables liberal democracies to perpetuate the idea that non-whites exist outside ofinevitable historical evolutions binding nations to territories to Kennan Malik’sintellectual history of racism and eugenics, which finds that the origins ofethnicity are far less linked to autochthonous originary groupings and far morelinked to post-World War II civilities about a persistent and re-emerging ideologyof race, I am deeply concerned with the idea of ethnicity in politicalhistoriography.13 Thus, in consideration of the manufacture of white identitiescoincident with the manufacture of settler colonies as nations I am more thansuspicious of explanations of Afrikaner identity as ethnicity and propose a radicalturn toward consideration of the shared aspiration toward white privilege thatunites the sentiments and political ideologies of Afrikaner and British SouthAfricans.

The larger manuscript of which this article is a part investigates the politicaland institutional origins of grand apartheid (1948) in South Africa through thelegacy of the five-volume Carnegie Corporation Poor White Study in South Africa:Report of the Carnegie Commission,14 published in 1932, resulting from nation-wideresearch conducted in South Africa from 1927 to 1932.15 My larger project extendsthe political history of this episode of race relations theory and policyimplementation in an international context that was instantiated through sub-national institutions, international organizations, and philanthropic and academicprofessional associations that profoundly influenced national political cultures,racial politics, and anti-poverty policy. I take it to be significant that the CarnegieCorporation, an American foundation, funded research to benefit a minority-rulewhite government in Southern Africa during the height of the American eugenicsmovement. The political process by which the institutional linkages were

13 Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960sto the 1990s, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 14–23, cited in Tracy Sedinger,“Nation and Identification: Psychoanalysis, Race and Sexual Difference,” Cultural Critique50 (2002), p. 45. Kennan Malik, The Meaning of Race: Race, History and Culture in WesternSociety (New York: New York University Press, 1996), p. 135–144, 174.

14 Carnegie Corporation of New York, Poor White Problem in South Africa: Report of theCarnegie Commission (Stellenbosch: Pro Ecclessia-Drukkery, 1932).

15 But there are numerous other locations in which poor white identity has beendocumented, historicized, and theorized, including: James Weldon Johnson, Autobiographyof an Ex-ColoredMan (New York: Dover, 1995 [1912]), pp. 75–95; W. E. B. DuBois, “The WhiteWorker,” and “Transubstantiation of a Poor White,” in Black Reconstruction, 1860–1880(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992 [1935]), pp. 17–31, 237–324. See also C. L. R. James,Black Jacobins, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage, 1989 [1938]); Dorothy Allison, Trash (Ithaca, NY:Firebrand Books, 1988), Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina (New York: Plume, 1992);Dorothy Allison, “Question of Class,” in Skin: Talking About Sex, Class, and Literature (Ithaca,NY: Firebrand Books, 1994), pp. 13–36; Robert Morrell, White but Poor: Essays on the Historyof Poor Whites in Southern Africa 1880–1940 (Pretoria: UNISA, 1992); and Neil Foley,The White Scourge, Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley, CA:University of California, 1999).

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developed and the philosophical process by which poor white identity was madeto function as a social problem helps us think through both the limits andopportunities provided by contemporary critical whiteness studies. Situatedsquarely in the midst of an international debate over the significance of nature ornurture, heredity or culture/environment, the Poor White Study—as text and asresearch agenda—raises many questions that cannot be answered by criticalwhiteness studies without a return to the scholarship on eugenics.

Eugenics was an international campaign resulting from a highly self-consciousand mobile white settler community/white minority-rule polity in erstwhileracial democracies. With its goals of protecting white civilization, eugenicscampaigns used genetic monitoring, sterilization, mental testing, forced removalsand detentions, and a host of interventions into poor white communities toincrease the amount of cultural capital and ultimately to civilize poor whites. In itsvisage as a civilizing mission, the wave of eugenics campaigns—and scientificracism as a set of enduring disastrous epistemological claims—helps us thinkabout the way that racialization impacts what I call “whiteness as misery.” Geneticmonitoring, sterilization, mental testing, forced removals and detention wereregimes of misery, punishment, torture, public humiliation, and racialdemonization. These regimes functioned like and in tandem with the ideological,institutional, and material mechanisms to transform African life worlds into laborunits and to literally destroy Africans in Southern Africa. The relationshipbetween these two systems of dehumanization that created the “poor white” andthe “detribalized African” are essential keys for understanding why and howapartheid was successfully endorsed as a legitimate political order in the family ofnations. This relationship has been suggested in the political philosophy ofHerrenvolk democracy and what Charles Mills has called the global racialcontract. However, I am suggesting that the ontology of whiteness that wascreated in South Africa also requires us to interrogate the process through whichwhite privilege was created. Moreover, the history of eugenics and the role offoundations in sponsoring it and other early social sciences that interacted with itsuggests that racism targeting non-Europeans was first enacted in rehearsals16—enduringly re-enacted—through racial hierarchy embodied among Europeans.

Poor whites have been conceptualized as the remnants of a flourishing whitecivilization, as evidence that white civilization is vulnerable to internaldisintegration and degeneration17 and at the same time as a group that can berehabilitated. Thus, the complex array of approaches to solving the social problemthat their very existence represents tends to focus on rehabilitation and theirpotential upward mobility to the neglect of theorizing about or even acknowl-edging the ways that racialization first and foremost is about inculcating shame,guilt, and self-denigration18 in the white mind through practices of highlyscripted body modification and surveillance of the body. Racism, in its firstand last instance, I argue, is about controlling white people, reinforcing an amoral

16 George Frederickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study of American and SouthAfrican History (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 85–99.

17 Malik, op. cit., pp. 84–109, and Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The UnitedStates Encounters Foreign Peoples At Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill and Wang,2001), pp. 148–172.

18 Thandeka, op. cit., pp. 1–80.

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self-abnegation, and attenuating moral accountability in order to exactcompliance with the administrative, ideological, and material annihilation ofwhites and non-whites. Moreover, where the annihilation and premature death ofnon-whites is resisted and survived through multiple forms of radical resistance,mimicry, signifying, rebellion, and imaginative assertion of the praxis of thedecolonial imaginary,19 there remain very few moral locations for the creation ofwhite selfhood outside of “race-traitorship.”20

Recent research on critical whiteness studies defines whiteness as anormalized social identity that has been granted mobility, institutionalized andprivileged access to citizenship, class status, a valued cultural and moral ethos,property and wealth, and protected and revered gender and ethnic identities.Most importantly, whiteness has been complicated by its reputed “invisibility,” orthe capacity to make privileged access look like a natural, neutral, universal, andexpected process. The trouble, according to critical whiteness studies scholars, isthat whiteness, or white raciality, is generally invisible while it is producingunearned advantage and power. Therefore, subjecting whiteness to the samepeculiar ocular fascinations that blackness(es) have been subject to demonstratesthat white privilege can be framed and interrogated, ultimately revealing it—white supremacy—to be a social problem, a corrosive agent that erodes anynumber of aspects of justice. However, the Poor White Study as an influentialacademic textbook and as a research project that intended to influence and shaperace relations policy in South Africa raises a number of important questions forhow to think about the significance of whiteness and its function historically: howis this critical whiteness studies to account for that whiteness that does not resultin categorically privileged access—like that whiteness compromised by ethnicity,class, gender, nationality, or race which reveals how precisely contingent access towhite privilege truly is? How is this critical whiteness studies to account forwhiteness that surfaces in the abject station usually understood to be the home ofnon-whites? How did international intellectual debates about race relations—andthe moral need for racial segregation—contribute to the making of a South Africansocial science that endorsed grand apartheid? Finally, what role did the study ofabject whiteness play in the making of both grand apartheid and the social sciencethat found it to be an appropriate accommodative social structure for regulatingracial difference?

In response to these questions, in the following, I argue that the origins ofgrand apartheid—the 1948–1994 manifestation of white supremacy in SouthAfrica—are better understood through an examination of the intersection ofwhiteness as cultural/legal/historical byproduct and whiteness as that attributeglorified and surveilled by the scientific racism of eugenicists and their forbears.Critical whiteness studies as an intervention against morally repugnant whitesupremacy will not do enough to track the shifts and changes in race relationsdiscourses because critical whiteness studies derives from scholarship that makes

19 See Emma Perez, The Decolonial Imaginary (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,1999).

20 Noel Ignatiev and Mab Segrest have done extensive work in this area. Noel Ignatiev,Race Traitor (New York: Routledge, 1996); Mab Segrest, Memoirs of a Race Traitor (Cambridge,MA: South End Press, 1994). There is also a journal, founded in 1992, of the same namewhich focuses on neo-abolitionism as a response to white supremacy.

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two fundamental errors: the contention that biological explanations of race havedisappeared and the contention that biological explanations of race emerge onlyto denigrate the non-white body.21 In fact, despite criticism to the contrary,sociology of knowledge suggests with a few notable exceptions that empirical,positivistic, and scientific measurement of raced biological differences dis-appeared through the profound cultural, environmental, and ecologicalexplanations for race and ethnicity offered by Franz Boas. Thus, the interventionof Black feminist/womanist/post-colonial feminist scholar Oyeronke Oyewumiabout the pervasive nature of “bio-logic or body-logic” and the similar critique ofGargi Bhattacharyya about the “obsession with spectacular looking” are potentreminders that biology and scientism persist as essential colonial relations in ourcurrent historical moment.22 Because scientific racism studies points to the chronicand enduring deployment of biological explanations of race to surveill the whitebody and protect against potential genetic and racial barbarism, primitivism, anddegeneration in the white body, the scholars who focus on scientific racism raisecritical questions for the explanatory model of critical whiteness studies thatcategorizes whiteness as naturalized, normalized, invisible privilege alone.Patricia Hill Collins’ explanation of the “new racism” highlights the significanceof the body, particularly in this era of global consumer culture and the massmarketing of de-racination. Hill Collins suggests that we pay closer attention tothe aspiration for race-change because if we do not track the processes by whichwhiteness is being attained at least at the level of cultural representation somescholars may be at risk of minimizing the persistence of racism.23 I begin in thisproject from the belief that racism persists and has always included white people’sdesire to truly prove and legitimate white privilege as an exclusive preserve.

My goal is not to challenge the imperatives of anti-racist philosophy andpractice that compel critical whiteness studies but to help us to account for thecomplexity of racialization and to insist that racism and white supremacy cannotbe undone without attention to the monitoring and regulation of the poor whitebody. Thus, I make four claims about whiteness: 1) whiteness and white privilegeis hyper-visible not invisible; 2) whiteness is embodied as well as sociallyconstructed; 3) there are far more inherent unaccounted for risks associated withthe idea of the possessive investment in whiteness as property; and 4) it is indeedpossible to distance white identity from desires for proprietorship and thus tohumanize it. But, unlike other anti-racist thinkers who seek to challengewhiteness, I am not convinced that talking about whiteness as benefit oraccomplishment is the operative strategy. Instead, I suggest that we begin to talkabout whiteness as pathology, whiteness as diminished selfhood, whiteness assoul injury, and whiteness as death. This turn toward whiteness as misery is notthe first time that certain kinds of whiteness have been represented in this fashion,but I hope to provide a useful addition, and in some places correction, to thecritical whiteness studies scholarship that foregrounds what black people see

21 See Malik, op. cit., and George Stocking, The Ethnographer’s Magic (Madison:University of Wisconsin Press, 1992).

22 Oyeronke Oyewumi, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western GenderDiscourse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 11; Gargi Bhattacharyya,Tales of Dark Skinned Women (New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 77–78.

23 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans Gender, and the New Racism(New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 34.

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when they see whiteness—empty unearned privilege and therefore a worthlessexistence crying for the opportunity to live actual life. It is the pursuit of whitesupremacy, the racial contract, and life motivated by preservation of Herrenvolkdemocracy that has caused the devastation and suffering of human existence.We cannot undo the attractiveness of the pursuit of white supremacy by talkingabout how it always wins and how it always satisfies human greed. Instead, wemust begin to talk about white supremacy as being anti-human in the sense that itcreates devastation and premature death for those designated as non-white andfor those designated after long processes of dehumanization as white.

According to Stephen J. Gould and Sandra Harding, to racialize a groupthrough scientific racism means to ascribe negative and static characteristics tothem as a group that can be measured in their physical bodies, their genetic orhereditary structure, their physiognomy, their intellectual capacity, their approachto gender roles, their approach to child rearing, their approach to modes ofproduction, their approach to migration or settlement, or their capacity for self-rule.24 Further, it includes attaching pejorative estimations to their economicsystem, labeling them unevolved/primitive/atavistic and disapproving of theirright to self-defense or political agitation on their own behalf. Ultimately, scientificracism is a positivist and systematic way of naturalizing the social and politicalstatus of a group, which may be considered alternately sub-human and super-human—in the sense of freakish and beyond human—by mapping that socialstatus onto their bodies. Scientific racism produces data sets construed asknowledge, empirical systems, and rules for gathering data which can replace theintimate, physical, and emotional knowledge of brutality and physical pain andgenocide that accompany one of an array of “soul destroying anesthesia[s]necessary for maintenance of power.”25 The ability to convince people of theirsuperiority through statistics and measurement counters their humanity, becausebeing human cannot ethically be measured by empirical data linked to racialcharacteristics. Indeed, since the goal of this type of measuring humanity is simplyto prove racial superiority, such measures simply reify social status and powerinequalities. What I am most concerned about in this instance is the image ofwhiteness in the white mind and the ways that Eurocentric scientific practiceshave been part of the project of filling the social category of whiteness with notonly characteristics of power and but also with the possibility of failure andshame. As a black scholar, I suppose I am sensitive to any moment when humanexperience is pathologized, and yet I am not afraid to say that whiteness reveals aprofound misunderstanding about the nature of human life. I am also bold toclaim that despite premature death and systematic intergenerational suffering,blackness reflects a better understanding of what it means to live and to be ourbest as human beings. The difference between these two worldviews cannot beaccounted for only by talking about white privilege, we must also account forwhite self-annihilation that is embedded in white privilege.

24 See Stephen J. Gould, Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981), and SandraHarding, The Racial Economy of Science: Toward a Democratic Future (Bloomington, IN:Indiana University Press, 1993).

25 Mab Segrest, “The Souls of White Folk,” in Brigit Rasmussen, Irene Nexica et al. (eds),The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), p. 54.

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The Poor White Study

While looking at documents on South Africa’s history of racial proletarianiza-tion—in this case the history of the Black industrial worker—in the South AfricanNational Archives, I returned numerous times to the Inspectorate of White Labor,a government agency designed to replace African and Indian and Coloredlaborers with white laborers, the so-called “poor whites,” in unskilled work inorder to institutionalize the Color Bar in the workplace, thus writing non-Europeans out of the history of industrial, working-class, and socialist histories ofthe country.26 Since only whites could represent the discussion of race and povertyand class, poor white worker identity was deployed to represent and occlude alldiscussion of the plight of all Other workers. However, at the same time, poorwhites were such a despised caste in South Africa that the representations of themtold the story of a disappearing group that was in the process of beingmechanistically transformed by uplift training and anti-poverty employmentschemes. As the beneficiaries of racial segregation, the deserving poor became thedeserving white middle class. Yet it is critical to keep in mind that the samecivilizing mission that demonized and later rehabilitated poor whites used asimilar logic to demonize blacks with the distinctive outcome of insisting thatblacks could not be rehabilitated as modern social, political, or economic beings.

The Poor White Study evaluated the causes of poverty among an estimated220,000–300,000 “very poor” white persons27 and the anti-poverty projects28 thathad been conceived to address poor whites’ supposed unique vulnerability toeconomic transition. Researchers administered questionnaires to 49,434 familiesand intelligence tests to 17,000 children in 35 districts around the Union. A gooddeal of the information was gathered via interviews in people’s homes, where thefamily’s standard of living was scrutinized. According to their findings andrecommendations there were three distinct classes of poor whites.29 Knowingwhich type of poor white an interviewee was would provide tools for offering

26 Blacks remain in many of these histories as traitors to the working-class cause. Moreimportantly, during the interwar years in South Africa, cross-race worker’s movementsrepeatedly were sabotaged by their inability to immobilize the proliferation of globalwhiteness.

27 The Poor White Study brought together all the prior data gathered by governmentcommissions, church anti-poverty programs, and local charitable organizations about therural poor white community. The wide variation in this number is due to several facts thatbecome central definitional concerns throughout the five-volume study; the researchersmade a distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor, calling the former thewhite poor and the latter the poor white. Some researchers included Colored persons in thedata set indicating the confusion in the time period over which phenotypes should beclassified as “white.” Intensive discussion of this follows in my paper, “Lapses intoDegeneration: Scientific Racism and Methodology.” In economic historian J. F. W.Grosskopf’s volume of the Poor White Study, as of the 1916 Cradock Congress, Mr. H. C. VanHeerden, minister for agriculture, stated that there were 106,518 poor whites, in 1923 thenumber was stated at between 120,000 and 160,000. J. F. W. Grosskopf, “Economic Report:Rural Impoverishment and Rural Exodus. Part I,” Report of the Carnegie Commission ofInvestigation on the Poor White Question in South Africa (Stellenbosch: Pro-Ecclesia-Drukkery,1932), p. I–22.

28 Such projects including being corralled onto land settlements, being criminalized forbeing cash poor, and being targeted for rehabilitation and social control.

29 Type A was said to be sinking down into poverty, Type B was said to be inter-generationally poor, and Type C was said to be rising from poverty.

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them appropriate anti-poverty aid and work reassignment. The research teambrought together female charity workers, male theologians and female laity, andyoung social scientists. All these researchers shared a commitment to proto-socialwork as well as Afrikaner nationalism. In fact, they would best be described as theintellectuals who struggled over the theories, cultural markers, and social policiesthat would mar South Africa’s political order for four decades. The Poor WhiteStudy was a unique forum for intellectuals who were invested in vastly differenttypes of Afrikaner nationalism and who were coming from very differentinstitutions (government, churches, and universities) to build relationships andinstitutionalize interdisciplinary approaches to poverty reduction among whites.Where class, profession, and gender in the past mediated the effectiveness ofAfrikaner nationalism to become a potent party-political force, the CarnegieCommission project flattened debate, mystified varied political interests, andgenerated a scientific basis for unified political action. I am arguing that theresearchers, both American and South African, had a clear nationalist agenda tosupport white supremacy. As race relations technicians, the Carnegie Corporationtrained and nurtured a mobile community of race relations scholars whoendorsed segregation in the United States, South Africa, and in many of the othersettler colonies in which they conducted race relations research.

Trends like women’s public service as charity workers, bilingual bi-culturalwhites championing monolingual education and cultural events, and theincreasing legitimacy granted to universities and researchers over churches andstate agencies in responding to social problems can all be observed through theresearch team members and their contributions to the study. The differentmethodologies that each research team member used (even those who did notwrite final volumes but left other documentation that reflects on theirparticipation in the Poor White Study) were all infused by the following: 1)religious missionary work to redirect the moral life of the poor because this wasbelieved to improve their economic status; 2) the competition over what type ofwhiteness would be allowed to flourish within Afrikaner nationalism; and 3) theinvasiveness of door-to-door home visits, interviews with school officials,principals, doctors, police, big landowners, and clergy that resulted in hundreds ofpoor white children being removed from their homes. These home visits explicitlyjudged the character of the poor by whether or not they maintained raciallysegregated and sexist middle-class standards of living. Contradictorily, thepublished report urged compassion for poor whites, as that would be a moreeffective means for rehabilitation. Contributors to the Poor White Study insistedthat structural reasons had contributed to the creation of poor whites while at thesame time evincing a promiscuous interest in eugenic explanations for whitepoverty—especially hereditary degeneration.

The Poor White Study pointed to industrialization as a particularly damagingpolitical, economic, and social transition for poor whites—as whites. In response,the joint recommendations of the Poor White Study concluded that raciallysegregated high-quality housing and non-skilled employment in urban areascould alleviate the misery of poor whites. Moreover, the study concluded thatSouth African industrialization had become dependent almost solely onunderpaid African, Indian, and Colored unskilled and skilled labor. Not onlyhad this national economic dependency displaced whites that were supposed tobe the natural beneficiaries of urban industrialization, but the research team

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concluded that dependency on non-white laborers had subjected non-whites todetribalization and cultural degeneration in the cities. When poor whites,especially unemployed and unemployable white male workers,30 migrated to theurban areas in search of low paying “kaffir-work”31 they became the visible face ofthe social costs of South African industrialization. Note that white supremacy didnot allow any other persons, namely blacks, who shouldered the heaviest burdensof South African industrialization, to be considered in a sympathetic light. The keyexception was when industrialization was blamed for “detribalizing Africans”and thus creating people without an appropriate attachment to a hopelesslyunchanging premodern culture. The discourse about inherent white superioritywas revealed to be mythological simply by the presence of poor whites. Race wasbelieved to determine which rights and which quality of life one ought to havehad. Racial discourse guaranteed that whites flourished economically, but thiswas not the case in real life. The Poor White Study revealed that the ideology ofwhite supremacy could not guarantee white success.

Poverty among Africans, Indians, and Colored people, according to whitesupremacist discourse, was due to cultural resistance to the modernization ofindustrialization and to cultural backwardness that stymied non-white ability toprofit from industrialization. Ultimately, in these theories, success or disadvan-tage were directly attributed to race. White poverty had to be shown to be due tosomething else but the available discourse of race, the ranking of races—at thetime which was defined often in the same way that we use the terms nations orethnicities—according to phenotype and “development,” caught poor whites inthe biologism of scientific racism. Resorting to the eugenic-inspired biologicalexplanations for the existence of poor whites was natural in the context of theproliferating race relations theories about the so-called primitive races,propagated in English-language social anthropology and its mirror social scienceAfrikaans-language, volkekunde.

At issue in the Poor White Study was the struggle over whether poor whitesshould be considered white and thereby receive all the legal, social, and politicalbenefits of white privilege considering their otherness and divergence fromstandards associated with whites. The white poor—poor, rural, urbanmiscegenationists that they were—did not demonstrate the high points of whitecivilization and so revealed gaps in the narratives upper-class whites told abouttheir own noble origins. According to E.G. Malherbe, the most acclaimed researchteam member of the Poor White Study research team, the dependency that poorwhites manifested made them an insult to the noble memory of the Trekboers, the

30 The 1926 Census recorded the number of unemployed white men who were at least15-years-old at 58,000. “Joint Findings and Recommendations of the Commission,” Report ofthe Carnegie Commission, op. cit., p. vii.

31 Many of the volumes scolded poor whites for being malingerers unwilling to takemanual labor employment because it was associated with Africans, who often had nochoice in whether they were doing the most dangerous and heavy labor. While the researchteam members reproached poor whites for not taking these jobs, they also advocated racialsegregation in the workplace so that work crews would be all white and would pay a“white man’s wage” to change the negative stigma attached to working alongside Blacks inlow-paid jobs. Kaffir is one of a host of derogatory terms used contemporary to thepublication of the study to describe Africans. Its Arabic origins are both defined as “infidel”and “people/person who do not follow the Holy Scripture.”

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1830s generation of Afrikaner nationalist pioneers whose migration away fromBritish-dominated coastal colonial cities has a central place in South African racialhistoriography. Malherbe’s complaint about poor white dependency was steepedin a racialist logic about white people, and their innate superiority and innateindependence. Malherbe was deeply disturbed by the existence of any people thatconfirmed that whites were not conquerors bringing civilization, urbancosmpolitanism, and industrial progress to South Africa. Indeed, Malherbe’scomments reflected a mystification about the origins of white poverty whichlocated white poverty in hereditary, genetic, and character flaws. Poor whiteswere a threat to the idea of white supremacy in South Africa because theysuggested that whiteness in and of itself guaranteed nothing. They revealed thatwhiteness was a sham, a case of false advertising that was only believed in bythose who had the most to gain from it.

In other words, the Poor White Study suggests that racialization of poor whiteswas essential to the consolidation of grand apartheid and was linked to theracialization of Africans, Indians, Chinese, and Mixed Race persons. The policingof the borders of whiteness among whites was a critical terrain on which to map SouthAfrica’s racial hierarchy and to demonstrate the Carnegie Corporations racerelations technical expertise.

In the definitive history of scientific racism in South Africa, Illicit Union:Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa, Saul Dubow argues that the mental testingof poor whites was focused on the goal of a specific social reform agenda, endingwhite poverty. Moreover, Dubow writes that the great level of detail and theelaboration of a rigorous research agenda in dozens of studies had to do with thehigh priority placed on the needs of poor whites. In comparison, non-Europeanswere not studied as extensively because it was a matter of ideologicalunderstanding that these persons were simply inferior intellectually andhereditarily.

As far as tests for mental deficiency were concerned, it should be noted that almostall the energies were directed towards white children. Tests on Africans, colored’s,and Indians were mostly for the purposes of making racial comparisons, whereastests on whites were generally oriented towards schemes of social reform . . . thefear of “feeble-mindedness” was fueled by eugenic concern with the apparentdegeneration of poor whites. Targeting white mental deficiency was thereforeprimarily a matter of defending an existing social order founded on unquestionedwhite supremacy. . . . But the assessment of mental retardation within the Africanpopulation was almost an irrelevance.32

But the obsession with measuring the intelligence of poor whites in every partof the country, and taking pictures of them and documenting their everydayhabits, also can be understood to be the first salvo in a long campaign againstEuropean and non-European racialized subjects. By suggesting that mentaltesting, the search for the missing link, removal of children, work-retrainingprograms, forced removal of whites from integrated residential districts, andsterilization of whites was linked to the set of administrative practices andprocedures that reinforced the ideology of non-European inferiority, I am arguing

32 Saul Dubow, Illicit Union: Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa (Johannesburg:University of Witwatersrand Press, 1995), p. 234.

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that whites also were racialized in an embodied fashion. Mental testing inparticular, though now disregarded by many as a flawed attempt to measureintellectual capacity, functioned by attacking the body. By insisting that somethingabout the human character could be measured in a physical attribute like bone orface structure or intelligence quotient, white as well as non-white bodies werebeing made subject to racial hierarchy. The five-volume Poor White Studyincluded photographs and appendices on the physiological basis of poor whiteidentity, which sought to illustrate the way that degeneration looked, the way thatbeing a poor white scarred the white body. Laws, policies, and scientificknowledge all get enacted on specific bodies, both white and non-white.

So, my intervention in this project is to focus on the creation of the white body,the manipulations and the controls of that body that is both the signifier ofcivilization and domination but, like non-white bodies, is subject to manipulation,albeit manipulation via hegemony. Talking about the manipulation and violationsenacted on white bodies is quite difficult because such bodies also have access toprivilege, power, and state-sanctioned authority in ways that non-white personsdo not. Nevertheless, as the project of critical whiteness studies moves further, itwill be permanently stymied and theoretically unaccountable if it does not addressthe ways racist biology has been made complicit in making white bodies perfect,beautiful, and adored bodies and non-white bodies degraded and even sub-human bodies. The denigration of the Black body in particular can only occur ifthere is a similar misapprehension of the white body, a sculpting, categorizing,cataloguing, and dissection that objectifies and exoticizes white people’s bodies.White people did not become white solely by culture and popular interpretationsof segregation laws; white people became white through monitoring andmanipulation of their bodies. In settler societies, practices such as residential red-lining, electoral gerrymandering, anti-miscegenation laws, anti-immigration andwhite-only immigration campaigns, racial profiling, English-only policies, andname changing have all contributed to a massive re-scripting of white identity,white language, and new understandings of the white body in space, all detainingand containing the white body through protectionist policies. But all of thesepolicies have biological corollaries and depend to a great extent on social scientificand biological knowledge.33 The deliberate scientization of the experience of poorwhites in the transition to urban industrial life in the Poor White Study illustratesthat the existence of a contest among whites over position in the racial hierarchyhas been repeatedly resolved by biology-based categorization and classification ofrace. Though whiteness has often been defined as that which normalizes andpredicts white privilege, and white capacity to possess, study, and make aspectacle of the Other, the Poor White Study functioned by demonizing poorwhites, making a certain type of whiteness hyper-visible and subject to increasedscrutiny.

Critics of my position would agree with Dubow that the ultimate outcome ofuplift and improved social status and provision of social welfare and government

33 Policies such as red-lining and gerrymandering have biological origins in theoriesabout cleanliness and genetically or group-linked diseases. Similarly, English has beenpromoted throughout the colonial era as not simply a lingua franca but as a superiorlanguage that can carry modern concepts and modern ideologies better than otherlanguages.

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employment demonstrates that despite the processes and procedures of scientificracism, poor whites fared decidedly better than their non-European compatriots inthe South African political order. However, a key insight is provided by thinking ofthe intense scrutiny of poor whites as a civilizing mission that had the political goalof eliminating them as a distinctive community of whites who were also membersof racially integrated urban areas and racially integrated families and households.Whiteness in the South African poor white case is an explicit set of requirementsand prescriptions for those who might be able to access white privilege and therebybecome white, thus leaving behind their experience of nuanced contingent, semi-whiteness.

Environment, Heredity, and Uplift

In 1931 R.W. Wilcocks, a South African psychologist and author of volume twoof the Poor White Study, provided a similar example of the complexity of theinterest in poor whites. Wilcocks’s presidential address to the South AfricanAssociation for the Advancement of Science of “Intelligence, Environment, andHeredity,” claimed that “on the whole, then, it may safely be said that . . .

heredity is an important factor in determining the level of intellectualefficiency.”34 Wilcocks’s presidential address begins with the infamous andnow finally put to rest Jukes Study. This manufactured study of criminalityamong poor whites in upstate New York claimed to have located an entirefamily of hundreds of persons who had all been placed in public care mostly inreform schools and jails over the course of several generations.35 Wilcocksargued that an IQ of 89 was required to pass Standard VI,36 drawing on M.L.Fick’s Report while commissioner for mental hygiene.37 Mental hygiene, a fieldof public policy that emerged directly from the eugenics movement, wasexceedingly concerned with being able to weed out people with a defectivecharacter or low intelligence. This weeding out was intended to be deliberateand for the betterment of the stronger and more fit. Wilcocks applied his data tothe 23.3% of poor white children who did not score an 89 on the IQ tests. Thesepersons would be recommended for vocational education and would thus bedenied liberal education above elementary school level, the precise set ofmeasures that would be instituted a generation later for the supposed benefit ofAfricans by the highest ranking educational official in South Africa, a formerPoor White Study research team member.38

34 R. W. Wilcocks, “Intelligence, Environment and Heredity,” South African Journal ofScience 28, p. 67. Killie Campbell Collection, KCM 56979 (263) File 477/6, University ofNatal, Durban (July 1931).

35 Scott Christianson’s review of this archive is a very helpful introduction to the Jukescontroversy and reveals the problems with this sort of research on genetic degeneration.Scott Christianson, “Bad Seed or Bad Science: The Story of the Notorious Jukes Family,”New York Times, February 8, 2003.

36 Primary school.37 In footnote number nine, Wilcocks comments that in their study they had found not

one single child with an IQ under 89 in Standard VII. Report of the Carnegie Commission,op. cit., p. 147.

38 Mokubung Nkomo, Pedagogy of Domination: Toward a Democratic Education in SouthAfrica (Trenton: Africa World Press: 1990).

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After reviewing dozens of studies in the United States and South Africa onthe IQ of twins, siblings, and parent/children intelligence scores, Wilcocksfound that environmental modification made very little impact on theintelligence of children.39 Wilcocks’s claim flies in the face of one pre-eminentscholar of race relations: Franz Boas. Boas led the charge as a contemporary ofWilcocks against hereditarian and biological explanations for social phenom-enon made popular by the Eugenics Records Office and the internationaleugenics movement. Meanwhile, South African social science was firmlyentrenched in the idea that suggested that nature and innate biologicalcharacteristics determined social status, group membership, and level of humandevelopment. Six decades later, South African historian of international racerelations Saul Dubow discounted the legacy of the research of R.W. Wilcocks,writing that “Wilcocks ascribed this decline [poor white children’s IQ fell in testsfrom age 10–13] to the unfavorable environmental conditions under which poorwhite children lived . . . intelligence test scores could not truly represent theirinherent potentialities.”40

Here, Saul Dubow argues that South Africa’s scientific racism was a milderform, more concerned with inspiring national prestige than with codifyinghereditary science and endorsing biological explanations for social status. But, inorder to make this argument, Dubow has to acknowledge contradictions in thishistory, such as the above-mentioned research by Wilcocks, which veers wildlybetween hereditary and structural explanations for white poverty. Indeed, evenDubow must acknowledge that “Wilcocks was by no means clearly committed toan anti-hereditarian position, believing that the intelligence of an individually waspreponderantly determined by inherited factors.”41 Though Wilcocks ends hisvolume of the Poor White Study with recognition of the importance of environmenton intelligence, he insists throughout the volume and the 1931 presidentialaddress that heredity is more significant than environment for determiningintelligence. Wilcocks’s deep ambivalence about environmental and hereditaryexplanations for white poverty—and the difficulty that even anti-racist historianshave with accounting for this ambivalence—is precisely why a theory of theracialization of poor whites is necessary. The Poor White Study research team, forSaul Dubow, represented a shift from intellectuals’ endorsement of state policythat encouraged “survival of the fittest” to policy that encouraged “improvedsocial welfare.”42 Despite their allegiance to environmental and structural causesfor explaining white poverty, the Carnegie Commissioners not only “enter[ed]directly into a serious dialogue”43 with eugenicist theories, but, I argue, on thestrength of their concurrent political organizing around race and developmentand their evaluations of poor whites, were actively drawing on scientific racism.By describing the hereditary failure, organic shiftlessness, and native “tramping”

39 Wilcocks, “Intelligence, Environment and Heredity,” op. cit.40 Dubow, op. cit., p. 226.41 Ibid.42 Ibid., p. 174.43 Ibid., p. 179.

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way of life, the Carnegie Commissioners reduced poor whites to biologicalinferiors.44

Like Boas and Dubow, contemporary research in the area of whiteness studiesreflects the turn away from race and biology and the turn toward culture andsocial construction to explain racism, apartheid, and white supremacy. In mywork, however, I focus on the continuities and the relationship between thesebodies of literature—biological and cultural—rather than insisting on the decisivebreak between these two periods, because this turn toward culture and socialconstruction ignores the persistence of older explanations for racialized status—biological, physiognomic, and genetic ones—and ignores the most significantcontribution of whiteness studies, which is a focus on the manufacture of whiteidentity. Manufacture of white identity occurs not only at the representational,narrative, juridical, and ideological level. If white identity is indeed manufacturedit occurs at the level of biological recognition; not because actual bodies arechanging but because the way we recognize our bodies is changing—and thatchange in meaning-making is biology.

In each interview that was conducted, Poor White Study research teammembers gave lots of poor whites access to a very sophisticated scientific racistconversation by subjecting them as both “model subjects’ and “errant subjects”to scientific racist testing. So to call the hierarchy of races among whitespredominantly a popular culture, narrative, and representational event, as Dubowdoes,45 minimizes the effects of this study on the interviewees, who understood itas a threat, a type of upper-class elite harassment, and imposition on their bodies.When some interviewees reflected their absolute resistance to the process of beingscrutinized as poor people and as “white” people by not answering questions, byturning the questions back on the interviewers, and by challenging the impositionof being scrutinized in their homes, they were indicating a resistance to beingunderstood as white in the ways that the research team were framing them.

The truth about the white man’s burden and its horrifying consequences areneeded not solely for the people’s that were colonized, it is also needed to rectifythe white subaltern—that class unable to prove its dignity, sacrifice, participationin consumer culture, or its humanity.46

44 One such structural and economic barrier was the readiness of the state and the DutchReformed Church activists to remove children from homes and thereby prevent theirultimate degradation, because their parents were sure to raise them to be failures at life.This practice of separating families and even encouraging unsafe forced child labor for poorwhite girls and boys (domestic labor and apprenticeships were characterized by sexualviolence and other physical violence provoking kids to run away from orphanages andchildren’s hostels) is not unique but should be seen in comparison to the Servants andApprentices Act used to control African child laborers. Report of the Carnegie Commission,op. cit., Part V, pp. 8–13.

45 Dubow, op. cit., p. 10.46 Frances Fukuyama put it this way, saying we are at the “end of history.” The

arrogance of erasing the many millions of forms of exchange, consumption, andcommercialization that characterize life on the planet into this curious psychology ofacquisitiveness, consumption, and justifications for deserving was rendered impotentwhen anticipated by Richard Sennet and Jonathon Cobb, Hidden Injuries of Class (New York:Norton, 1993).

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In the analysis of “white” traits, features, characteristics and culture, those who donot conform to the “conventions” and norms move outside the definition and areplaced beyond the pale; thus, a boundary is created. This frequently positioned the“other” and the working classes similarly, as evidenced by nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century English photographers who documented the poor in that countryas the “heathen” at home.47

Here, Sally Gaule illustrated the complicated relationship between the experienceof racialization of whites and non-whites. But, it is not simply that the other andthe working class are parallel social locations, they are also intersectional sociallocations and racial formations. Gaule indicated that the work of critical whitenessstudies is to recover poor white identity so that it has humanity but not so it haspower over other identities. In this vein, it is important to note that my goal is not arecovery of whiteness; I am not attempting to make whiteness beautiful,48 becausethe privilege, power, and inflated sense of supremacy attached to it make it a mostdangerous and unnecessary social category. Nevertheless, the root of volkekundewas located in fear of and study of white primitivism not confined to class,ethnicity, or nationality but to a racialized white identity. So, to interrogate whiteracial power is also to interrogate the racialization of poor white people and totrack the discourse and politicization of white primitivism.

Whiteness can paradoxically and simultaneously constitute unmarkedprivilege and marked/commented-upon discrimination. Whiteness alwayscarries with it colonial economies, “nations, races, cultures, and ethnicgroups,”49 as well as dependent “suffering bodies” that need missionary rescue,counsel, and sympathy for their very existence. This is the same colonial economythat is obsessed with tropes like “the plight of the detribalized African.”50 Indeed,these colonial economies rarely imagine white bodies suffering under the regimeof white supremacy policing whites, because membership alone in white groupidentity is supposed to guarantee unfettered expression of subjectivity and theability to observe, name, and theorize about the other.

And yet, passing for white among whites comes with its own set of disasters.

47 Sally Gaule, “Poor White, White Poor: Meanings in the Differences of Whiteness,”History of Photography 25:4 (2001), p. 334.

48 Much of the US debate on critical whiteness studies has had to explicitly cautionagainst the recuperation of whiteness as privilege. This is because so often to mention thewhite body is to play into glorifying it. When whiteness is normalized as universal humanfoibles, it gets harder and harder to criticize it as linked to particular sets of power relationsand privilege. The policing of whiteness was frequently an attempt to encourage an evendeeper loyalty to the nationalist project of perfecting white bodies. Making whitenessvisible is not about making sure that white people as a category receive their fair share ofpity in the multicultural re-ordering of retribution and acknowledgement of pain,displacement, and legally sanctioned violence.

49 See Chela Sandoval, “Theorizing White Consciousness for a Post-Empire World:Barthes, Fanon, and the Rhetoric of Love,” in Ruth Frankenberg (ed.), Displacing Whiteness(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), pp. 74–107.

50 See Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of LateColonialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). By focusing on urban–ruralmigrations as the measure of post-colonial experience, Mamdani troubles the notion of tribeand other non-white group identities extending the location and set of “traditions”associated with such membership. Thus, he takes us toward political identities that are notunchanging and static.

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Consequences of Calling Whiteness Invisible

Whiteness has been theorized as being invisible and unmarked, making it hard tochallenge white privilege and white supremacy. Ultimately, this body of researchargues that whiteness benefits an audience that cannot see its own privilege. Thus,processes like de-industrialization, downward mobility, erosion of the urban taxbase, tax laws that make Black savings a financial reserve for white investors havebeen made invisible because liberal individualism convinces some that racism isnot enacted systematically or institutionally.51 Thus, some scholars only recognizeracism in individual acts against Blacks and other non-whites and not also in theracist cultural explanations for social inequality that link white privilege to non-white disadvantage.52

Thus, whiteness scholars recover white agency and responsibility by makingwhite complicity with structures of inequality tangible. But what if therelationship between white privilege and non-white disadvantage is actuallyutterly visible, tangible, and subject to constant comment and critical inquiry?What if the notion of an invisible whiteness invokes some aspects of historical andstructural advantage and masks others? In contrast to Richard Dyer and GeorgeLipsitz, I would argue that whiteness is visible, because it is scrutinized by non-whites and it is contested by “lesser whites.” As Ruth Frankenberg and DavidRoediger insist, the scrutiny by non-whites of whiteness should make us ask thequestion: who is it that can’t see whiteness?53 And how does the script aroundinvisible whiteness function? The idea that whiteness is invisible may be aprofound misreading and a deep resistance to acknowledging somethingconstantly commented on by its victims and beneficiaries

Conclusion

Work such as I am doing, bringing together critical whiteness studies andscientific racism studies, hopes to tie together the nodes of an international socialscience of race bent on creating a racialized poor white in South Africa and inmany other settler societies.54

51 See Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997) and George Lipsitz, The PossessiveInvestment inWhiteness (Philadelphia: Temple, 1998), pp. 18, 20. There is a compelling argumentto be made here in the contemporary experiences of predatory lending, which has transformedBlack wealth in housing markets into new wealth speculation opportunities for white (notalways racially marked in this case) investment capital in the same market. Bill Swindell,“Members Differ on Liability for Subprime Mortgage Sellers,”CongressDaily, May 8, 2007, p. 5;Mike Wallace, “House Committee Moves Forward on Predatory Lending,” Nation’s CitiesWeekly30:16, April 23, 2007, p. 3. See also Howard Karger, “America’s Fringe Housing Market,”Journal ofPolicyPractice6:3 (2007), pp. 25–44. The types of racialization of space that are possiblein putative racial democracies have been commented on extensively in the literature oncomparative racial democracies. See also Hjalte Tin and Franco Frescura on housingdiscrimination and urban devastation under apartheid in Social Identities in the New SouthAfrica, ed. Abebe Zegeye (Johannesburg: Kwela Press, 2001).

52 See Dyer, op. cit. and Lipsitz, op. cit.53 Ruth Frankenberg, “Introduction: Local Whiteness, Localizing Whiteness,” in

Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism (Durham: Duke UniversityPress, 1997), p. 4; David Roediger, Black on White: Black Writers on What it Means to Be White(New York: Random House, 1998), p. 41.

54 Robert Morrell, op. cit.

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Simply saying that whiteness is unmarked or invisible continues thepathologization of Blacks for existing, for not being white, and for being themythical “Black problem.” This construction normalizes the hyper-visibility ofblackness when really the real function of racism is to constrain white behaviorand diminish white capacity and accountability. Saying whiteness is invisibleerases the many ways that whites create impossible self-negating requirementsthat other whites must meet to qualify for even limited membership in whiteprivilege. Ultimately, saying whiteness is invisible also erases the process bywhich poor whites become another racial target. By calling attention to this racialformation, poor whites, I have stepped into a crack in the literature on criticalwhiteness studies, a crack that is productive and meaningful. First of all, criticalwhiteness studies needs a better genealogy that explicitly links the past andcontemporary biologism of scientific racism. Second, to be a more effectivescholarly rejoinder to white supremacy, critical whiteness studies must track theinstitutional and professional investments in the creation of white supremacy andwhite nationalism through various colonial relations across geographical andterritorial space. In a productive turn toward the specificity of South Africanhistory, this essay also makes claims about the nature of whiteness vis-a-visAfrikaner and British identity that provide powerful antidotes to thehistoriographical obsession with autochthonous ethnic identities among whitesupremacists. Finally, through close attention to the actual experiences of “poorwhites” a set of moral directives and knowledge claims emerge about the urgencyof anti-racist research that makes this racial formation more than simply an add-on in the litany of radical projects.

A brief review of those published in this journal and those steering its course asmembers of the editorial board suggests that this is a journal of concern for thoseworking for and researching economic, political, and racial justice. I send thispiece to this group in hopes of providing a useful account of more recent work onrace that will compliment and extend the current interests in the prison industrialcomplex, empowering people of color in the electoral process, the defense ofmarriage act, and other critical areas of concern for progressive people. I amdeeply connected presently to the scholarly community that has generated thegreat work of Race and Class, Social Identities, Safundi, and Jenda. However, it is mycontention that it is time that the set of institutional breaches between theintellectual communities of scholars concerned with race and class in a global andnational context be stitched—in the most flexible and yet durable fashion. As aninterdisciplinary scholar, I find that I do my best work when speaking acrossdisciplines and when I am building necessary bridges for my generation ofscholars. Given the historical urgency of this particular moment, being able toconsider those things that have compromised the great hope of the post-apartheidera, with humility and seriousness, without blame, and with hope for the ability totransform democracy through building relationships and bridges, I send my workto this esteemed group. At this stage of history, our political linkages must heedKate Rushin’s words “Stretch or Die.”55 Progressive scholars that do not clearlyinterrogate white supremacy as also producing white misery are missing the

55 Kate Rushin, “The Bridge Poem,” in Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, This BridgeCalled My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (New York: Kitchen Table Press, 1983),pp. xxi–xxii.

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insidious heart of whiteness. Finally, by building on the work of Blackphilosophers like Sylvia Wynter, Lucius Outlaw, Patricia Hill Collins, LewisGordon, Anthony Bogues, Charles Mills, Emmanuel Eze, Joy James, and T. DeneanSharpley-Whiting, and of course Cedric Robinson, I am arguing for epistemo-logical ground for the study of racial formations. Without consideration of thenature of the racial contract and the way that racism has come to constitute whatcounts as political philosophy we shall not be able to properly recognize or evensee the most urgent and pressing issues of this historical moment.

500 Tiffany Willoughby-Herard