Paper short abstract:

This paper historicizes the intersections of race and class in imaginaries of ‘lower class’ residents. It seeks to reinterpret contemporary far-right fantasies of white working class by exploring how sociologists--in the wake of colonialism--imagined ‘anti socials’ in the Netherlands in 1950-1960.

Paper long abstract:

How is ‘class’ constituted on ‘race’ and how does this legitimate the devaluation of populations at this intersection? This article explores this question by contrasting imaginaries of ‘class’ in 1950-1960 with present-day imaginaries. Whereas nowadays ‘class’ evokes racialized white identities in which ‘lower class’ people are imagined as part and parcel of ‘the social’, in the 1950s ‘class’ included white ‘lower class’ populations (and non-white post-colonial migrants) that were imagined in adversity to ‘the social.’ We discuss these imaginaries through a shared lens of racialization.

In 1950-1960 in the Netherlands, imaginaries of ‘lower class’ were indirectly tied to colonial legacies. Policies for white anti-social families in the 1950s developed hand-in-hand with policies for non-white post-colonial migrants from Indonesia, and the ‘civilizing mission’ in general drew parallels between white Dutch people considered ‘lower class’ and ‘savages’ from overseas. White anti-socials and non-white post-colonial migrants were explicitly portrayed as not belonging to (middle-class) white society and distanced from (and positioned in adversity to) sociality.

We juxtapose this historical imaginary of ‘lower class’ with contemporary imaginaries of ‘class’ that are evoked in academic and public debates that seek to explain the rise of the far-right. Critical social theorists have observed that, in these debates, ‘class’ is being ‘whitewashed’: through ahistorical fantasies of ‘working class,’ ‘lower class’ is imagined as white—thereby pushing non-white workers out of view. Based on ongoing archival research, this paper brings this present-day ‘whitewashing’ of class in interaction with how sociologists constructed to category of anti-social families in 1950-1960.