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Paper short abstract

Afrikaners, the architects of South African Apartheid, leverage language to inflect phenotypical markers in delimiting the racialized boundaries of a peculiar form of “indigenous” whiteness, in dialogical tension between British coloniality and African indigeneity.

Paper long abstract

The Afrikaners, the white Afrikaans-speaking architects of Apartheid, are customarily understood as the apex of white supremacy, underpinned by intransigent phenotypically determined racial boundaries.

Conflating the severity of Apartheid racial oppression with a purported rigidity of the Afrikaner colour line, however, understates the laborious relational identitarian narratives and the role of non-phenotypical dimensions in producing Afrikaner whiteness.

Drawing on 21 months of ethnography in South Africa, I highlight the dialogical tensions emerged among the Afrikaner’s white self-concept, the racialization of the culturally proximate “Coloured” speaker, and the serendipitous categorizing uncertainties introduced by the ethnographer’s ambiguous Afrikaans-speaking Balkan whiteness.

I argue that Afrikaner whiteness relies on what I term the White Afrikaans Raciolinguistic Project (RLP), whereby language blends with linguistic purism, church segregation, class habitus, and ancestral mythologies to inflect and infuse racialized meanings to locally salient phenotypical markers of whiteness.

Afrikaners leverage RLP to construct a peculiar form of African “indigenous” whiteness, which legitimizes their presence in South Africa in relation to the more dominant but “less African” British colonizer, while insulating Afrikaner whiteness from the “browning” inherent to its proximity to the “Coloured” Afrikaans speaker.

The synergistic interaction between Afrikaans and phenotype in the constitution of Afrikaner whiteness, promotes the inclusion of ephemeral, customarily ethnicity adjacent dimensions such as embodied linguistic and class habitus in studies of racialization.

Furthermore, the Afrikaner’s location within the cline between British whiteness and African indigeneity, reiterates the importance of comparative approaches in unearthing the idiosyncrasies of localized iterations of global systems of whiteness.