South Africa's Poor Whites and Whiteness Studies: Afrikaner Ethnicity, Scientific Racism, and White Misery

Abstract

This article introduces a new way to evaluate the political and theoretical significance of the Carnegie Commission Poor White Study conducted from 1927 to 1932 in South Africa. Building on the recent literature on whiteness and the older literature on scientific racism, I argue that the scientific language about biology and physiognomy that is usually 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 effective scholarly rejoinder to white supremacy. Critical whiteness studies must track the institutional and professional investments in the creation of white supremacy and white nationalism through various colonial relations across geographical and territorial space. In a productive turn toward the specificity of South African history, this essay also makes claims about the nature of whiteness vis-à-vis Afrikaner and British identity that provide powerful antidotes to the historiographical obsession with autochthonous ethnic identities among white supremacists. Finally, through close attention to the actual experiences of “poor whites” 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 of radical projects.

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

Notes

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

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

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

⁴ Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Abandonment,” Writing Alternative US Political Histories Panel, American Studies Association, Oakland, CA, October 13, 2006; Frank Wilderson III and Denise Silva have commented on this extensively as well. Wilderson's “Gramsci's Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?” We Write 2:1 (2005) provides the theoretical underpinnings through a critique of Gramsci's notion of exploitation. Wilderson argues that Black domination literally is caused by whites being taught that to dominate Blacks is pleasure. He writes: “Black death is the modern bourgeois-state's recreational past-time” (p. 5) and “Slavery … is closer to capital's primal obsession than waged oppression.… The worker demands that productivity be fair and democratic … the slave demands the production stop; stop without recourse to its ultimate 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 Humanities Research Institute in March 2003, she argued that premature death is precisely the set of relations and practices and institutional life that best helps explain the murder of Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallou, where the police that shot him over 40 times at close range described their fear of entering a literal and figurative “state of nature” in the neighborhood where he resided. Silva makes the claim that for the only people empowered 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 for inevitable and juridically legitimated premature death, < http://www.uchri.tv/tRACEs_Denise_Ferreir_T1.mov>.

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, and Melissa Steyn. If I were to offer a brief genealogy of critical whiteness studies I would suggest that there are several strains of scholarship that have developed into the current popular scholarship. There is a great deal of potential work to be done on the ontology of whiteness and the history of knowledge production about white racial formations. The terrain would have to include a number of marginalized approaches to studies of whites: 1) black radical critiques, such as that offered by W. E. B. DuBois in Black Reconstruction, C. L. R. James in Black Jacobins, Robert Fikes studies of white life novels written by Black authors, and suggested in the collection of such materials by David Roediger in Black On White; 2) white labor historians in American Studies and transnational American 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 ethnic studies 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 a rigorous history of whiteness studies that does not reify one group of scholars concerned with this racial formation and its significant impact on the making of white supremacy and on other racial formations.

⁶ Liese Van Der Watt, “‘Making Whiteness Strange’: White Identity in Post-Apartheid South 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 which inadvertently marginalizes Black worker histories. Luli Callinicos, Working Life: Factories Townships, and Popular Culture on the Rand: 1886–1940 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1987).

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

⁹ Shaun Irlam offers a useful political genealogy of post-apartheid literature as a measure of the apolitical cultural turn in post-apartheid letters. Irlam cautions that this literature's confessional nature and focus on social identities props up myths about the rainbow nation and thereby undercuts a necessary focus on material conditions. Irlam reprises a debate on the left captured by Nancy Fraser on the issue of redistribution versus representation, which has been rehearsed by American philosopher Linda Martin Alcoff. Shaun Irlam, “Unraveling the Rainbow: The Remission of Nation in Post-Apartheid Literature,” 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 and benefits of this scholarship on South African white identity that grounds that literature in social identities and in economic history and colonial relations. The necessity of this becomes increasingly clear as neoliberal forces always bundle wealth consolidation with culture, aesthetics, identity, and practices of consuming identities. In my writing, I hope to provoke discussion about what this post-apartheid literature is doing and how it functions politically for different social and political strata.

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

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 to destabilize this replacement of a conversation about race with a conversation about entrenched and primordial ethnicities. Beverly Crawford and Ronnie D. Lipschultz, Myth of “Ethnic Conflict”: Politics, Economics, and “Cultural Violence, International and Area Studies Research Series, no. 98, University of California, Berkeley, 1998.

¹³ Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2^nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 14–23, cited in Tracy Sedinger, “Nation and Identification: Psychoanalysis, Race and Sexual Difference,” Cultural Critique 50 (2002), p. 45. Kennan Malik, The Meaning of Race: Race, History and Culture in Western Society (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 the Carnegie Commission (Stellenbosch: Pro Ecclessia-Drukkery, 1932).

¹⁵ But there are numerous other locations in which poor white identity has been documented, historicized, and theorized, including: James Weldon Johnson, Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (New York: Dover, 1995 [1912]), pp. 75–95; W. E. B. DuBois, “The White Worker,” 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, 2^nd 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 History of 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).

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

¹⁷ Malik, op. cit., pp. 84–109, and Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States 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.

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 name which focuses on neo-abolitionism as a response to white supremacy.

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 Gender Discourse (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.

²⁴ See Stephen J. Gould, Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981), and Sandra Harding, 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.

²⁶ Blacks remain in many of these histories as traitors to the working-class cause. More importantly, during the interwar years in South Africa, cross-race worker's movements repeatedly were sabotaged by their inability to immobilize the proliferation of global whiteness.

²⁷ The Poor White Study brought together all the prior data gathered by government commissions, church anti-poverty programs, and local charitable organizations about the rural poor white community. The wide variation in this number is due to several facts that become central definitional concerns throughout the five-volume study; the researchers made a distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor, calling the former the white poor and the latter the poor white. Some researchers included Colored persons in the data set indicating the confusion in the time period over which phenotypes should be classified as “white.” Intensive discussion of this follows in my paper, “Lapses into Degeneration: 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. Van Heerden, minister for agriculture, stated that there were 106,518 poor whites, in 1923 the number 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 of Investigation 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 for being 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.

³⁰ The 1926 Census recorded the number of unemployed white men who were at least 15-years-old at 58,000. “Joint Findings and Recommendations of the Commission,” Report of the Carnegie Commission, op. cit., p. vii.

³¹ Many of the volumes scolded poor whites for being malingerers unwilling to take manual labor employment because it was associated with Africans, who often had no choice in whether they were doing the most dangerous and heavy labor. While the research team members reproached poor whites for not taking these jobs, they also advocated racial segregation 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 in low-paid jobs. Kaffir is one of a host of derogatory terms used contemporary to the publication of the study to describe Africans. Its Arabic origins are both defined as “infidel” and “people/person who do not follow the Holy Scripture.”

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

³³ Policies such as red-lining and gerrymandering have biological origins in theories about cleanliness and genetically or group-linked diseases. Similarly, English has been promoted throughout the colonial era as not simply a lingua franca but as a superior language that can carry modern concepts and modern ideologies better than other languages.

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

³⁵ Scott Christianson's review of this archive is a very helpful introduction to the Jukes controversy 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 South Africa (Trenton: Africa World Press: 1990).

³⁹ Wilcocks, “Intelligence, Environment and Heredity,” op. cit.

⁴⁰ Dubow, op. cit., p. 226.

⁴¹ Dubow, op. cit.

⁴² Dubow, op. cit., p. 174.

⁴³ Dubow, op. cit., p. 179.

⁴⁴ One such structural and economic barrier was the readiness of the state and the Dutch Reformed Church activists to remove children from homes and thereby prevent their ultimate 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 poor white girls and boys (domestic labor and apprenticeships were characterized by sexual violence and other physical violence provoking kids to run away from orphanages and children's hostels) is not unique but should be seen in comparison to the Servants and Apprentices 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.

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

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, and commercialization that characterize life on the planet into this curious psychology of acquisitiveness, consumption, and justifications for deserving was rendered impotent when anticipated by Richard Sennet and Jonathon Cobb, Hidden Injuries of Class (New York: Norton, 1993).

⁴⁸ Much of the US debate on critical whiteness studies has had to explicitly caution against the recuperation of whiteness as privilege. This is because so often to mention the white body is to play into glorifying it. When whiteness is normalized as universal human foibles, it gets harder and harder to criticize it as linked to particular sets of power relations and privilege. The policing of whiteness was frequently an attempt to encourage an even deeper loyalty to the nationalist project of perfecting white bodies. Making whiteness visible is not about making sure that white people as a category receive their fair share of pity 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 Late Colonialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). By focusing on urban–rural migrations as the measure of post-colonial experience, Mamdani troubles the notion of tribe and 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 not unchanging and static.

⁵¹ See Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997) and George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness (Philadelphia: Temple, 1998), pp. 18, 20. There is a compelling argument to be made here in the contemporary experiences of predatory lending, which has transformed Black wealth in housing markets into new wealth speculation opportunities for white (not always racially marked in this case) investment capital in the same market. Bill Swindell, “Members Differ on Liability for Subprime Mortgage Sellers,” Congress Daily, May 8, 2007, p. 5; Mike Wallace, “House Committee Moves Forward on Predatory Lending,” Nation's Cities Weekly 30:16, April 23, 2007, p. 3. See also Howard Karger, “America's Fringe Housing Market,” Journal of Policy Practice 6:3 (2007), pp. 25–44. The types of racialization of space that are possible in putative racial democracies have been commented on extensively in the literature on comparative racial democracies. See also Hjalte Tin and Franco Frescura on housing discrimination and urban devastation under apartheid in Social Identities in the New South Africa, 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 University Press, 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.

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