Search

South African white supremacy has been shaped by over 400 years of settler colonialism and white minority apartheid rule to craft a pervasive and entrenched legacy of privilege and oppression in the post-apartheid context. This paper explores the constructions of white supremacy, specifically its role in shaping the perceptions of first-generation mixed-race identity in South Africa, through semi-structured, in-depth interviews. Through a critical race theory and an intersectional lens, this paper unpacks the personal, political, and social impact of white supremacist structures on the identity construction of first-generation mixed-race people in post-apartheid South Africa; specifically, societal- and self-perceptions of their identity within power structures with which they interact. Moreover, this paper aims to understand how first-generation mixed-race people understand their connections to white privilege. Ultimately this paper argues that although first-generation mixed-race people experience relative privilege, their access to white privilege and acceptance within structures of whiteness is always conditional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I consider a selection of photographs of a man of color from a luxury book of male nudes, Images (1982), aimed at white gay men and published in South Africa by Alternative Books (AB) in the late apartheid period. Given the exclusive association of assimilable homosexuality with whiteness in the national gay press and other homoerotic commodities available in South Africa at the same historical juncture, I propose that these photographs, which interrupted longstanding, racist homoerotic iconographies, elicited experiences of ambivalence (and thus critical reflection) amongst their historical audiences. To this end, I analyze the editorial and commercial content of the newspapers Link/Skakel and Exit for the period that AB was active (1981–1991), anticipating an overlap of readership between these papers and the publisher's titles. More precisely, I discuss the prevalence of the figure of the "good homosexual" and representations of classical (that is, white) male beauty in these papers to plot how apartheid logic was broadly reproduced (and same-sex desire disciplined according to such dictates) in mainstream South African gay movements, institutions, and print cultures during this time, but, notably, not in Images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This creative conceptual paper expands traditionalised academic approaches through integrated narratives, plays, lyrics, and poetry as decolonial method. Based in first person narratives, informal interviews, artistic expression, and music-integration, the author clarifies tensions in decolonial strategy, including moving beyond racial representation to acknowledge and respond to racialised poverty, racism built into the fabric of higher education, and an overarching denial of racial disparities. The paper begins with a discussion of the student-created and produced play, The Fall, which brings the #RhodesMustFall movement onto the stage. Integrating student discussions and reactions to the play, the paper echoes themes from The Fall, suggesting that strategies which interrupt coloniality, while necessary, are insufficient to transform from formal education's capitalistic and exploitative foundation. In centring USA and South African writers, the paper highlights that the purpose of education remains a White supremacist vision and that to move from such anti-Black infrastructures, transformation must align directly with ongoing, student-led decolonial approaches. The paper then parallels higher education protests to the context of the 2010 World Cup's artistic exploitation of South Africa, warning of the power of appropriation, especially on a global stage. The paper concludes with the affirmation that creative, artistic, and Black-centric voices must be fostered and integrated into decolonial strategies to transform the global Whiteness of higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a country with a history of settler-colonialism, the land question in South Africa remains one of the critical issues of redress that is highly contested. Furthermore, opinions on the land question tend to be divided along racial lines. This paper uses white ignorance as a theoretical framework to explain these polarised views on the land question in South Africa post-1994. The paper also uses the concept of honorary whiteness/brownness to explain how differences among 'people of colour' serve to sustain a hierarchical racial order in which whites remain the ultimate beneficiaries. While research on white ignorance mainly focuses on the socio-psychological and material benefits of white ignorance for whites, this paper argues that those classified as honorary white or 'brown' also benefit, albeit minimally, from endorsing willful white ignorance of past and present racial atrocities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Food and identity have much to do with each other. In the African context, however, food is studied through developmentalist lenses far more than through cultural ones. Therefore, we know little about the ways in which food and contemporary, particularly urban, African identities shape each other. I explore this relationship through an analysis of personal food narratives gathered as part of a four-year research project exploring food memories, values and practices in three South African cities. Meat appears frequently in these narratives, and this paper focuses on this powerful food, sandwiching data analysis between short biographical reflections that personalize the paper's intellectual arguments. Using the metaphor of "spillage" as a tool, I show how personal narratives about meat raise questions about identity formation, sometimes surprisingly. These stories about how meat matters, help to deepen understanding of how racial identities take shape in this context. While this is important in itself, these narratives point to the entanglements between race and larger questions: about planetary health, inter-species relationships, morality and humanitude. The contribution of this paper to Food Studies is the demonstration that broader ethical questions about food, specifically meat, cannot be separated from (carefully contextualized) imaginaries and materialities of cultural identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the politics of emotion in white students' experiential narratives about institutional attempts to transform racial demographics and relationships within residences at a historically white South African university. Three distinct narrative forms are presented each with a unique emotional politics constructed around the tropes of "culture" and "tradition". The "white victim" and "white saviour" narratives demonstrate an emotional investment in maintaining a sense of invulnerability combined with a politics of denial of continued racial injustice. In contrast, a third narrative form "out of my comfort zone" demonstrates an opening through which some white students are coming to challenge the comfortable norms of whiteness both internally as well as externally. The paper argues that through coming to embody the emotional position of vulnerability these students have developed a transformative capacity for "critical cultural openness" which represents a different emotional politics to the white victim and white saviour narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the profound connection between race, gender, and culture in post-apartheid education at a public Afrikaans dual-language school in South Africa. Illustrating how the residues and remnants of apartheid legacies propagate arcane constructions of whiteness through interwoven racial and gendered stereotypes, this research maps the dynamic motility of local regimes of power that erase students' individuality, discipline their agency, and influence their identities through their everyday school experiences. Using a critical race theory approach, Foucauldian theoretical frameworks and Bourdieu's notions of cultural capital, this critical ethnographic case study draws on observations and interviews with students and teachers. Written from the positionality of a US researcher, with the critically reflexive view of an outsider to the Afrikaans culture and the South African educational system, this paper considers the power of remaining constructions of whiteness to dominate, reproduce and fortify demoded and baneful gender regimes and racial hierarchies in educational spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of queer politics in South Africa has been framed by tensions between the struggle for gay rights and black freedoms. Christian and cultural beliefs and discourses underlie these past tensions and continue to inform black resistance to the plight of gay black men, and white gay activists’ ambivalence to black freedoms. These same religious influences, along with politics of power, largely exclude women and trans-persons from featuring in either side of the debate. This paper argues that contemporary gay politics has largely developed as a response to the policing of white gay men and in many ways has not developed into an intersectional queer activism. This paper adds nuance to existing critiques of gay politics of contemporary South Africa by analysing the construction of ‘civilised’ white sexuality within the political discourse of South Africa. In addition, this article draws on a queer and decolonial analytic to review literature which has explored the varied agencies of religious, African and trans queer people. In doing so, this paper argues for the development of an ‘indecent’ activism that challenges dominant narratives that frame queer activism in South Africa today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores strategies deployed by a sample of white, British-born South Africans to account for their positions during apartheid and post-apartheid. Whereas literature on white racism identifies denial as a key strategy towards racial discrimination and the maintenance of privilege, the historical and political 10 context of South Africa makes this tactic implausible. The paper contributes to understandings of pluralism within white identifications through investigation of diverse discursive strategies used to frame the overtly racist, apartheid regime and the present post-apartheid, supposedly, 'post-race' state. A range of positions attempting to minimise individual implication are identified. 15 A common feature however is to reimagine the structure of social relations in order to diminish responsibility for the sins of the past or the success of the future; suggesting profound difficulties in adjusting to the new social reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Robin DiAngelo's influential concept of white fragility, while certainly suggestive and critically useful, does not go far enough in accounting for three central aspects of white anxiety as it occurs in the (post-)apartheid South African context. Utilizing Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to sketch a rudimentary paradigm of anxiety, and focusing on textual examples drawn from (post-)apartheid popular culture – including the work of Rian Malan and Neil Blomkamp's 2009 film District 9 – this paper opens up a series of distinct perspectives on (post-)apartheid whiteness. Departing from the construct of white fragility – which is less destabilizing, less dynamic, and less attentive to the dimension of fantasy than is the notion of white anxiety – it offers instead a Lacanian psychoanalytic conceptualization of white anxiety. One implication of such a reading is that, beneath the racist defensiveness of post-apartheid whiteness, an ambiguous mode of unconscious identification racial otherness might indeed be at play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While whiteness studies often begin from the assumption that being ‘white’ means having access to an unspoken centre of power, the third wave of whiteness studies focuses on nuanced forms of whiteness. In the post-apartheid context, various discursive strategies are employed by South African whites to retain privilege. Yet whiteness is also constructed spatially. Through an autoethnographic methodology, the paper explores the ‘inauthentic whiteness’ of the author. Drawing from the case studies of football supporters’ clubs in Johannesburg, South Africa, the actions of the author travelling through different racialised spaces in Johannesburg football fandom destabilised the supporters’ understanding of whiteness and what it was to be white. This inauthenticity created new opportunities for the supporters’ clubs to engage with the other, which had previously not existed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Multiculturalism currently aims for the political accommodation of difference instead of the subversion of the resulting privileges of difference. In the South African context such a distinction is especially important since the economic and symbolic subjugation of the majority of Black South Africans continues despite political transformation, and is exacerbated by an unwillingness to reflect on privilege and inequality. Drawing on Biko and Soudien’s critique of multiculturalism and vision for anti-racist education, this paper describes a classroom activity set for 164 nationally and culturally diverse second year sociology students at a university in Cape Town, South Africa. The activity tasked students to reflect on texts by Peggy McIntosh and Khaya Dlanga (one canonical, the other contextual) and reports on these students’ nuanced understandings of personal biography, experiences of privilege and self-reflexivity that connects personal experience to social structure and historical contexts. It concludes by offering modest implications for moral education in a multicultural university classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the work of nostalgia in Denis Hirson's I Remember King Kong (The Boxer), a poetic memoir of childhood that met with both critical acclaim and remarkable commercial success when it was published in South Africa in 2004. The book provides a telling case study of the multifaceted operation of nostalgia in literature and culture, which is explored in this paper as not only a concern within literature, but also an affect produced in the reading of literature, which may take on ethical, social or political significance as a personal or cultural narrative as well as value as a commodity. Accordingly, the discussion attends both to the literary features of King Kong and to its publication and reception in South Africa. It is argued that the text presents a reflective engagement with memory that foregrounds the fluid and often dissonant relationship between the past and present, individual memory and public history. Yet the reception of this book about white childhood in a predominantly white market, within a society in which white nostalgia is an especially vexed phenomenon, also foregrounds nostalgia's ambivalent potential for both critique and consolation in the post-apartheid literary and cultural field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The real and imagined racial differences and similarities between groups of students and staff have consequences in everyday experiences in South Africa. One aspect of engaging with the challenges facing higher education transformation post-Apartheid is through understanding how the racialized context interacts with the experience of teaching. This paper reports on what the narratives of four white academics reveal about their experience of teaching at the University of Cape Town (UCT). It analyses indicators of their identity as white academics and how they are both positioned and actively position themselves in relation to students and other academics at UCT. Their narratives reveal how academics simultaneously grapple with the privileges and limitations that accompany identifying as white. These tensions are explored through issues of black student development amid an alienating institutional culture and opposition to the behaviour of their white colleagues. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this essay, I describe how white South African drag queen Evita Bezuidenhout uses multiple performance platforms – a television series, a cookbook, and a political party to queer the temporality of national political transition. She does so by combining elements of tautological reasoning with her performance persona as an Afrikaner tannie, or aunty. I call this formation tau(n)tology to name the temporal and performative logics of aunties that assert an alternative reality, one that might often be deemed "needless," redundant, excessive. At various moments of political transition, Tannie Evita's aunty performances establish a particular relationship to time that reflect the sociopolitical context and teach her audience, particularly white South Africans, how to navigate shifting race, gender, and class politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the relative freedoms gained after the transition to democracy in 1994 in South Africa, dominant narratives of Whiteness stemming from settler-colonial and apartheid legacies of White supremacy remain pervasive within all structures of post-apartheid society, including the identity construction and racialisation of first-generation mixed-race people. This research explored how dominant narratives of Whiteness influence the construction of identity among mixed-race youth in post-apartheid South Africa. In-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 10 participants who have one White parent and one parent of colour and were considered 'born frees', as they were born during or after the transition to democracy. Guided by critical race theory, through thematic analysis, three main themes emerged: defying Rainbowism, rejecting Whiteness, and policing identity. Ultimately, this research critically investigates how mixed-race people have constructed their identities while navigating pervasive power structures of White supremacy that continue to shape the rigid racial categorisations in post-apartheid South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South African cricket was awakened to the crudity of racial exclusions when former Proteas fast bowler Makhaya Ntini revealed that he would rather run to the ground and back than take the team bus to avoid his white team-mates who, he felt, were isolating him because of the colour of his skin. Ntini's revelation of the pain of loneliness was followed by a plethora of similar ones by Black cricketers, sparked by young Proteas player Lungisani Ngidi's call in early July 2020 for the team to consider supporting the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. This prompted visceral condemnation from several white former Proteas players. Against this backdrop, this article explores the relationship between whiteness and cricket in contemporary South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay compares South Africa's Voortrekker Monument and the US's This is the Place monument, both built to commemorate cross-country settler movements, for how the two contemporaneous monuments memorialize the nineteenth-century historical event in the service of the racial politics of the twentieth century. While the Voortrekker monument's relief sculptures represent Black Africans as savages and intractable impediments to civilization, the This is the Place monument denies race as a factor in settlement, thus attempting to absolve settlers of the racially motivated violence that attended their colonization of the Great Basin. Perched on hilltops towering over their respective settler communities, both monuments similarly draw from the language of Beaux Arts classicism to venerate their subjects as civilizing heroes amid the chaos of Western colonialism and through comparison, we can see how both assert the colonizers' race and religion as offering a divine sanction to their acts of conquest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a series of insights into the structures and scaffolding of militarising White South African adolescents during the 1980s, including the processes of militarisation from childhood up until induction into the former South African Defence Force. Although this article traces the process and presents personal accounts of militarised childhoods, it ultimately questions how these indeterminate memories attempt to navigate a contested present, namely, a post-apartheid space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the specification of situating context(s) is commonly treated as an indispensable part of social scientific research, the choices this involves are rarely directly explicated. An exception is conversation analysis (CA), which differs from many other approaches in its privileging of participants' orientations as a basis for empirically grounding analytic specifications of context. In this article, I demonstrate how this approach to context, along with CA methods and findings, can be employed in addressing challenges associated with identifying and analyzing (possible) instances of the implicit relevance of racial categories in everyday social interaction. Using the case of implicit whiteness in post-apartheid South Africa as a site for considering these challenges, I examine a collection of interactions in which race becomes (possibly) relevant during the course of complaints about violent crime. I begin with an ambiguous case of a speaker's possible implicit orientation to whiteness, demonstrating the use of CA for the close examination of available evidence for this orientation. I then describe how an approach based on a collection of cases, constituted by similar sequential and action environments to those that characterize the ambiguous case, can be employed to strengthen the analysis of the ambiguous case. The analysis thereby demonstrates the powerful resources CA offers for addressing ambiguity with respect to social categories and the value of detailed examinations of interactional practices for documenting how participants manage and thereby reproduce the consequentiality of their position in a racialized social order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article makes a contribution to literature on "white-talk". Existing literature shows how whiteness has been defended by criticizing black people, culture and government in subtle (and not so subtle) ways that allow speakers to deny racism. In contrast to denial, we focus on how white South Africans confess to feeling guilty for their privilege in comparison with their domestic workers. Confessions of guilt are ways of taking ownership of white privilege, while accountability is achieved by intragroup comparisons with whites whose standards and practices are not motivated by appropriate guilt. We conclude by reflecting on the costs of such confessions of guilt, namely in propping up whiteness and maintaining extant power structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What shapes would-be parents' choices of gamete donors for third-party IVF? Following extensive ethnographic fieldwork in South African fertility clinics and egg donor agencies, I explore the work of donor matching, a process in which translational figures mediate patient desires, donor biography and corporeality, and racial imaginaries to assist would-be parents. In doing so, these figures, or "matchers," draw upon both historical schemas and novel articulations to enact race, and certain forms of whiteness. I describe this through the concept of "curature," a post-apartheid technology of racialization that reflects a neoliberal shift to privatized sites of power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The very act of living across racial boundaries or borders is a challenge to existing ideologies and social structures. Through in depth interviews with ten South Africans, I explore the border patrolling or policing of people who cross race lines in intimate relationships. Interracial partners are concerned with safety and comfort in public places and in the role of parent, they are concerned about their children's sense of belonging. As interracial parents and partners resist border patrolling, they are also resisting racial categories, even as they claim and name locations that may work to reproduce racialisation. The experiences and perspectives of interracial parents and partners presented in this article suggest that racism and other forms of inequality remain entrenched and pervasive. And, despite the dream of unity and non-racialism, inequality between racial groups and classes has grown under neoliberalism in South Africa [Bond, P., 2004. From Racial to Class Apartheid: South Africa's Frustrating Decade of Freedom. Monthly Review, 55 (10), 45. Available from: https:// monthlyreview.org/2004/03/01/south-africas-frustrating-decadeoffreedom- from-racial-to-class-apartheid/] Far from the hope for a rainbow nation the experiences of interracial partners and parents show that race remains significant, hierarchical and defining of ideologies, identities and institution. The interviews highlight that borders of racial categories are contested and charged spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within both the South African and Belgian contexts whiteness manifests as one aspect of national identity and remains (to differing degrees) a normative construction. This article presents the findings of a controlled case comparison of a sample from two community soap operas, 7de Laan and Thuis, broadcast by the South African (SABC) and Flemish (VRT) Public Service Broadcasters respectively, from the perspective of critical whiteness studies. I contend that whiteness functions as an organising principle in the narratives of both soap operas. The goal of this comparative analysis was an investigation into the ways in which whiteness is constructed and positioned in these texts and the implications this has for the politics of belonging. Despite several similarities between the two contexts, they differ significantly, and this created an opportunity to highlight both the consistencies and particularities in the ideological patterning of representations of whiteness, across seemingly unrelated domains, to illustrate its pervasiveness. Notwithstanding their disparate origins, the analysis revealed three rhetorical devices which function to maintain whiteness as hegemonic ideology in both texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the last decade there has been an intense public debate in the South African society on the issue of ‘whiteness’ or ‘whiteliness’. In this article the challenges whiteness and the debate surrounding it pose for practitioners of public theology in South Africa are explored. In the first part some of the origins of the debate on whiteness, as well as some of the main features of whiteness researchers identify, are traced. In the second part a brief sketch is provided of two different kinds of critical response to whiteness in the present South African society, namely critical responses to structural whiteness and critical responses of a more personal nature. In the third part the challenges the present debate on whiteness pose to public theology in South Africa are identified and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses in particular on four white South African female practicing P-12 teachers’ narratives about their own racialized understanding of their classroom practice(s) and their (racio-cultural) self-identity. Each of the four participants reported growing up with what they described as ‘strict fathers’ and shared ways in which their self-identified ‘white-Christian-Afrikaner’ upbringing is at times in conflict with their political and pedagogical commitments as practicing teachers in contemporary South Africa. To better understand the concept of ‘strict fathers’ and its/their impact on these teachers I use George Lakoff’s and Kevin Kumashiro’s notions of ‘framing’ to examine teachers’ conceptions of their racial upbringing and how they view this influence on their classroom practice. Through an engagement with whiteness literature from both the US and South Africa I discuss the implications of thesimultaneityof both essentialist cultural-deficit racial discourse and socially inclusive racial discourse. Finally I discuss implications for future work on whiteness in education, for researchers in the US in particular, on what learning from a context outside the US offers as we continue to (re)theorize whiteness as it impacts teaching and learning. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]