Waste of a White Skin: The Carnegie Corporation and the Racial Logic of White Vulnerability - Softcover

Willoughby-Herard, Tiffany

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520280873 ISBN 13: 9780520280878

Verlag: University of California Press, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

A pathbreaking history of the development of scientific racism, white nationalism, and segregationist philanthropy in the U.S. and South Africa in the early twentieth century, Waste of a White Skin focuses on the American Carnegie Corporation’s study of race in South Africa, the Poor White Study, and its influence on the creation of apartheid.

This book demonstrates the ways in which U.S. elites supported apartheid and Afrikaner Nationalism in the critical period prior to 1948 through philanthropic interventions and shaping scholarly knowledge production. Rather than comparing racial democracies and their engagement with scientific racism, Willoughby-Herard outlines the ways in which a racial regime of global whiteness constitutes domestic racial policies and in part animates black consciousness in seemingly disparate and discontinuous racial democracies. This book uses key paradigms in black political thought—black feminism, black internationalism, and the black radical tradition—to provide a rich account of poverty and work. Much of the scholarship on whiteness in South Africa overlooks the complex politics of white poverty and what they mean for the making of black political action and black people’s presence in the economic system.

Ideal for students, scholars, and interested readers in areas related to U.S. History, African History, World History, Diaspora Studies, Race and Ethnicity, Sociology, Anthropology, and Political Science.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Tiffany Willoughby-Herard is Associate Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Irvine.
 

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"This marvelously insightful study scrutinizes with eloquence the busy intersection where race, class, gender, and internationalism meet. The author is equally incisive in the fraught areas of South African history and philanthropy."—Gerald Horne, author of The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the USA

"Tiffany Willoughby-Herard has written an expansive, thoughtful, and authoritative book. Waste of a White Skin brilliantly weaves together the insights of critical race theory, black feminist theory, and postcolonial studies to explain how social sciences and policy narratives about race and class circulate globally. Gender scholars, race scholars, and historians of South Africa stand to gain much from carefully reading this bold and impressive work."—Zine Magubane, Associate Professor of Sociology, Boston College

"A fascinating account, Waste of a White Skin outlines the contours of global white domination as it winds its way from the United States to South Africa via the Carnegie Corporation's Poor White Study. Bucking a central tenet of whiteness studies, Willoughby-Herard explains why white misery is as important to white supremacy as white privilege is; she shows how poor white South Africans are both victims of antiblack racism and key to its very survival. An important and timely contribution to race studies!" —Cynthia A. Young, Boston College

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Waste of a White Skin

The Carnegie Corporation and the Racial Logic of White Vulnerability

By Tiffany Willoughby-Herard

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2015 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-520-28087-8

Contents

List of Illustrations, 
Preface: Possessions, Belonging, Companionship, or Don't Mind the Gap, 
Introduction, 
1. Forgeries of History: The Poor White Study, 
2. The Visual Culture of White Poverty as the History of South Africa and the United States: Repetition, Rediscovery, Playing with Whiteness, 
3. The White Primitive: Whiteness Studies, Embodiment, Invisibility, Property, 
4. The Roots of White Poverty: Cheap, Lazy, Inefficient ... Black, 
5. Origin Stories about Segregationist Philanthropy, 
6. Carnegie in Africa and the Knowledge Politics of Apartheid: Research Agendas not Taken, 
7. "I'll Give You Something to Cry About": The Intraracial Violence of Uplift Feminism in the Carnegie Poor White Study Volume, The Mother and Daughter of the Poor Family, 
Conclusion: Race Makes Nation, 
Acknowledgments, 
Appendixes, 
Notes, 
Selected Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Forgeries of History

The Poor White Study

According to the U.S.-trained South African educator Ernest Gideon Malherbe (1895–1982), the Poor White Study had its origins in his youthful musings. But, as I investigate here the Carnegie Corporation created Malherbe and the other members of the cadre of "race relations technicians"—a mobile community of race relations scholars who endorsed segregation in the United States and South Africa and many other settler colonies in which international philanthropies conducted race relations research. I consider Malherbe's several attempts to establish himself in the annals of intellectual history. Though his research writings were littered with discussion of his exploits, his career did not begin until he was engaged by the Carnegie Corporation to conduct research. What followed was a lifelong collaboration and the creation of a career in race relations that was largely dependent on his time as a Poor White Study researcher. The Carnegie Corporation had an extensive institutional history in South Africa prior to recruiting Malherbe. In addition to the long-standing Dominions and Colonies Fund, the CCNY supported numerous segregationist philanthropic projects. So a study poised to focus on poor white beneficiaries of segregationist philanthropy fit nicely in this research portfolio. The CCNY was interested in propping up Afrikaner Nationalism, which as I am arguing had its most important resonance as a variant of white nationalism.

The CCNY could support Afrikaner Nationalists by extending its long-standing commitments to segregationist philanthropy. Moreover, with its global audiences it could use poor white people as a cover for its segregationist agenda. Poor white people were also of great use as a political football because Afrikaner Nationalism was viewed by the rest of the Anglo-Saxon nation-states as relatively backward and politically immature. At war with itself and quite repulsed by the notion of a "white man's burden," Afrikaner Nationalism could hardly be said to represent a uniform or consistent political ideology or set of policies. Indeed, one goal of the Poor White Study was to create a coherent and unified Afrikaner Nationalist elite that could speak with one voice to its global partners. Well-funded race relations technicians, as experts on the social order, were tasked with correcting this nest of problems.

The Poor White Study research team gave new life to the uses of the poor white "problem" as a set of political symbols. As framed, this problem had very little to do with effective policy making on wages, employment, housing, or the challenges of urbanization for the poor. Even among the research team definitions of who belonged to the social formation "poor white people" varied a great deal. Consequently in the five-volume Poor White Study, researchers numbered the group as being between 58,000 and 300,000 persons. By the 1932 launch of the Poor White Study there still remained an astonishing variation in the precise number of persons who made up this population. The study brought together all the prior data gathered about the rural poor white community by government commissions, church antipoverty programs, and local charitable organizations. The 1916 Cradock Congress on poor whites numbered them at 106,518, according to Minister for Agriculture H. C. Van Heerden. In 1923 the number was stated at between 120,000 and 160,000. In 1926 the census recorded the number of unemployed white men who were at least fifteen years old at 58,000. Ultimately, the research team interviewed 49,434 families and administered intelligence tests to 17,000 children, from which they concluded that there were between 220,000 and 300,000 "very poor" white people.

The wide variation in this number is due to several facts that became 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. Researchers struggled to categorize the location of families and households as changed employment patterns resulted in profound changes in social relations and family life. Researchers secured a lot of data from charity workers, teachers, doctors, reform school managers, and other members of officialdom. Data that were not gathered from officials and intelligence tests were obtained via invasive interviews in people's homes, where the family's standard of living was scrutinized and a plan was made to offer them appropriate scientifically effective antipoverty aid and work reassignment. Overall the data set and who was identified as numbering among this social group were vastly unreliable.

Some researchers included people from the "Basters" community, one whose political and racial status reflect inconsistencies in the definition of impoverished whites. Some researchers included so-called Colored persons in the data set. Others included, though with much disdain, white women who had married Indian men. Most researchers included people who had Dutch and English and non-European people in their family. Held consistent in the enumeration, however, was white people whose lives somehow signaled notions of racial degeneration defined by racial association and social class. In some cases people who were born into poor families were included; in others, only people who had become poor over the course of their own lives were included. Researchers categorized poor white people according to three distinct types: Type A was said to be sinking down into poverty, Type B was said to be intergenerationally poor, and Type C was said to be rising from poverty. Yet since this political constituency was mainly being counted to mobilize and marshal more intense Afrikaner Nationalist public opinion, slipshod counting was useful. The research team's poverty knowledge was created because "the most powerful economic, political, and cultural impulses of [the] social structure impose[d] themselves as codes and desires on the conduct, organization, and imagination of scientists." Parsing out the difference between the material, social, and affective conditions that shaped the experiences of poor white people and the agenda of Afrikaner Nationalist propagandists helps deconstruct how this...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520280873
• ISBN 13: 9780520280878
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 324
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland