Colour-blind ideologies: The whiteness of liberalism and socialism

Abstract

This chapter argues that although the colour-blind ideologies of nineteenth-century White missionaries and Cape liberals – as well as the twentieth-century South African concept of ‘non-racialism’ – claim to disavow racial categories and ‘race thinking’, Whiteness is a normative value that underwrites these projects. Historically, the way that these ideologies were deployed in South Africa normalised and promoted the notion that Whites possessed an ‘objective authority’ and ‘expert knowledge’ to solving the so-called ‘Native question’ (Bateman 2008). Moreover, colour-blind ideologies historically allowed White liberals and White communists to assume a social role of colonial overlord, while treating their liberal and Marxist ideological projects as some kind of daytime political venture. Thus, Whites liberals could live their White lives in racist South African suburbs characterised by racist White norms in separate White parts of town, without experiencing a psychological discomfort engendered by the blurring of moral values in their lived experiences. This is the parallel colonial universe within which South African Whites were situated and in which they operated throughout most of the twentieth century. In the final analysis, this chapter concludes that colour-blind ideologies in South Africa have historically showed themselves not only to be false narratives, but shameless public performances of White paternalism.