Waste of a White Skin: The Carnegie Corporation and the Racial Logic of White Vulnerability
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Waste of a White Skin: The Carnegie Corporation and the Racial Logic of White Vulnerability
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Overview
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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520959972 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 01/06/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 328 |
| Sales rank: | 773,179 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
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 CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-95997-2
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 philanthropic knowledge was produced and how it shaped governance.
Another brand of racial politics played an important role in manufacturing the poor white problem as a crisis. Research team members blamed competition from and dependence on black people for causing white poverty. This blame game covered over the fact that there were hardly any jobs for unskilled white adult male workers. They recommended a decisive end to reliance on hyperexploited black workers whose availability was said to have been a major cause of the continuing problem of white poverty. Feigning concern for black culture and the peasant mode of production, Poor White Study researchers claimed that black people's urban industrial employment destroyed African culture. African urban workers had been "detribalized," it was claimed, and suffered "cultural degeneration" in the cities. Education in missionary schools had created "school kaffirs" who posed a threat to African and European society. Such slanderous pseudosympathy was steeped in eugenics and economic parasitism that lacked any concrete commitment to higher wages. Carnegie researchers remained silent about the genuine material threats to African culture: the massive land theft of the 1913 Native Land Act and the colonial laws that criminalized black women's presence in the cities and all black people in the society. Cities and industrialists had decided not to provide enough housing for industrial workers and their families. The jobs and houses that were available existed largely in the informal economy, much of which was criminalized and deemed illicit. Most of the new jobs created in the periodic boom times of South African industrialization were available primarily for single young white women, single young white children, and young black men who were forced to leave their families in the rural areas. Ironically, the main urban housing available to poor white people was carved out of boarding situations with black families establishing rights to the city regardless of discriminatory laws. At issue was the profound dependency of urban poor white migrants on black urbanites. Black urbanites socialized poor white migrants into working-class consciousness. Also at issue was the fact that in the aftermath of the South African War (1899—1902) big capital and landlords had openly agreed to force rural bywoners (sharecroppers) into the proletariat. Much of the language about white racial degeneration sought to mystify these forces.
Carnegie researchers concluded that a policy of ejecting black people from the city would preserve unskilled jobs and the scant housing stock for poor white men with families. They further endorsed remanding poor white children to institutional care in trade schools and private domestic work and committing poor white men to labor camps like the Kakamas Labor Colony. Such policy recommendations made it far easier for these researchers to explain white adult male poverty as a function of competition with racial inferiors and fears about white racial degeneration. From corralling people on land settlements to apprenticing/indenturing children, such policy recommendations in effect criminalized poor white people for being poor and made them more available for social control under the guise of rehabilitation via intensive processes of racialization.
PROFESSIONALIZED STATUS SEEKERS AND THE CULTURE OF LEADERSHIP: ON REINTEGRATING THE WHITE MENACE
In a June 1921 Cape Times article on poor white people, Malherbe explained that his effective lobbying of the Carnegie Corporation and Columbia University administrators had resulted in Carnegie president Frederick Keppel's 1927 tour of South Africa. He neglected to mention that the Corporation's Dominions and Colonies Fund predated his article by nearly a decade. Though Malherbe admitted that the Dutch Reformed Church had also been a prominent advocate for Carnegie intervention into what was deemed an intractable social problem in South African politics, he provided a largely inadequate explanation of why. In a fashion that duplicated the white settler colonial habit of creating a military conflict at treaty borders that required external mettle to "resolve," Malherbe's essay raises many questions. Though founded in a country whose foreign policy claimed to avoid the international entanglements of the imperial age, the Carnegie Corporation had long-standing global interests. Moreover, its international entanglements, both corporate and humanitarian, reflected a powerful tension between U.S. isolationism and expansionism. In these years of transition and decline for the British Empire U.S. economic expansionism financed the political and economic status that enabled national leaders' enthusiasm for isolationism. The CCNY did not expend tens of thousands of pounds and four years of personnel time to study poor whites on the other side of the globe because of the lobbying of a promising young Ph.D.; rather this eminent international philanthropy dedicated its resources to protecting its own interests. Malherbe's skills as an academic and public intellectual were deployed to sanitize Carnegie's franchise to govern after the manner of imperial-age racial politics. While on the one hand Malherbe depicts his relationship with the Carnegie Corporation as emerging casually, at later moments in his oft-written and ever-changing life history, he admitted to his long history of lobbying for intervention by this and presumably other U.S. philanthropic organizations in the domestic politics of South Africa and particularly the thorny social position occupied by poor whites. Malherbe was determined to market his own achievements, the Poor White Study was the beginning of his entire career, funded and championed by the Carnegie Corporation, based on segregationist philanthropy. Though Malherbe was a significant functionary linking the CCNY to Afrikaner Nationalism, Frederick Keppel had already gone to southern Africa to find a means by which U.S. philanthropy might contribute to American expansionism in the British colonies. Researching poor whites provided yet another means by which the organization could explicitly endorse segregationism in the guise of liberal humanitarianism.
By the mid-1920s the CCNY had already supported applied research in the United States and South Africa. Carnegie funded research on large-scale black urbanization, industrialization, and land hunger due to the convict lease system and the Native Land Act. It studied sharecropping and tenant farming, the confinement of the black proletariat to slums, white race riots against blacks, and the suppression of black workers' organizations and black anticolonial movements in the United States and southern Africa. Despite these areas of interest Carnegie research funds were explicitly segregationist and sought to produce leadership among racial accomodationists with male-led white supremacy. Unable to fathom the possibility of socially equal black people, the organization used its research to repeat myths about black people's need for white guidance and supervision. In their own bid for paramountcy in Anglophone academia, Carnegie race relations technicians exemplified a leadership cohort trained inexplicably by Booker T. Washington but that came to eclipse him as "outstanding authorit[ies] on the problems of education of underdeveloped peoples." Like prominent segregtionists around the world, CCNY president, Frederick Keppel (1875–1943), was far more compelled to expend substantial financial resources on the Poor White Study because of his organization's shared interests with the white nationalist Afrikaner movement. In many ways Keppel's tour brought international prominence to Afrikaner Nationalism and its proponents' intention to lead industry and the state to give poor white people "eine freie Bahn dem Tüchtigen" (the unfettered development of talent). Carnegie officials also were deeply concerned to systematically reintegrate poor whites into the Afrikaner community, because in their current state they were a "menace to the self- preservation and prestige of our white people, living as we do in the midst of a native population which outnumbers us 6 to 1." Malherbe was an expert mouthpiece.
GUARANTEED LABOR/NO GUARANTEES
In 1924 the Pact Government instituted the "civilized labor policy" guaranteeing employment, wages, and hiring preferences for white men qua members of the civilized race. In fact civilized labor was a more complicated policy in practice. It did not mean more high-paying jobs for white men but in fact guaranteed increasing numbers of low-wage jobs for white men and a massive increase in low-wage jobs for white women. This was followed closely by the dramatic increase in informal sector participation by white women. Many low-wage jobs were available for young white women who were also breadwinners for both themselves and their families in the rural areas. Civilized labor also led to the deskilling of white craftsmen as they were more rapidly compelled to join the urban proletariat. There was a high cost of living for small professionals in new cities like Johannesburg and increasing rates of unemployment for older and unskilled white men. The latter could often get jobs on the railways as blacksmiths, carpenters, plumbers, checkers, painters, dumpsmen, watchmen, and other government public relief jobs.
Scholars explain that prostitution, child labor, liquor and diamond dealing, and government concessions wrested from the black informal and formal economy (spirits manufacture, laundry service, and brick manufacture) constituted huge portions of this new white economy. Families depended on the hustling of sex, liquor, and diamonds; young women's factory wages; and rental housing to meet their basic needs. Young urban and rural white women's wages were critical to families' margin of survival. The very dense urban areas lacked basic public amenities like running water and sewage infrastructure. People already living in cramped neighborhoods relied extensively on boarders and renters to make ends meet. Few white male bywoners made it into the mining sector because of their lack of skills. So while white men earned very low wages, black migrant workers earned even less. Black mine workers, though, because of their large numbers, were the main market for white women and black women as independent traders in the informal economy. The very existence of poor whites reflected the unwieldy project of guaranteeing a white men's country.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Waste of a White Skin by Tiffany Willoughby-Herard. Copyright © 2015 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
List of IllustrationsPreface: 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