Whiteness must fall

Abstract

Whiteness as a form of identity and power is founded on discrimination, exclusion and violence. Yet as an academic field, whiteness is often met with hostility and the presumption that it is a bogus field of enquiry. In South Africa, these sentiments coincide with a major concern expressed by activist-intellectuals, that white people can no longer be at the centre of history. This chapter acknowledges and seeks to address these contradictions. Particularly, it asks whether it is possible to write antiracist histories of white people that also contribute to the decolonial turn. The chapter draws largely on South African history writing, although it does also include instances where South African whites and whiteness have featured in accounts from other disciplines. It begins by mapping how whites feature in South African history – especially the social history movement – and in the more culturally oriented ‘whiteness studies’ undertaken outside of the discipline. Challenging dominant South African approaches to studying whiteness, it then proposes a ‘new’ history of whites, positioned as part of a social history of race and racisms. The new approach should draw on some of the innovations and turns that have shaped social history more generally – for instance, towards agency and affect. It should be self-consciously insurgent in both its antiracist orientation and its commitment to writing against the moral and historiographic certainties of South African history. And it should be situated closely to the politics of the day – notably, decolonisation.