Paper short abstract:

What happens when the material and symbolic privileges provided by whiteness are threatened? This paper takes a historical approach to this question by focusing on white working class discourses responding to democratisation in South Africa, and how these are reinvented post-apartheid.

Paper long abstract:

This paper turns whiteness on itself by investigating intra-race class tensions within the white population of South Africa against the backdrop of economic and political transformation. Starting in the late 1970s, when the ethnic labour-business-government alliance which underpinned the economic prosperity of the 1960s started to break down under pressure from black labour unrest, this paper follows the response of an all-white blue-collar union in the mining industry to the withdrawal of state support of working class privilege based on whiteness.

This response includes discourses of exploitation, disempowerment and resistance expressed in class terms and directed against fellow whites. As democratisation spreads from the industrial arena to South African politics and society at large, a discursive shift towards a more race- and ethnicity-based discourse occurs. The union's antagonism switches seamlessly from the white NP government to the black ANC government, while its originally working class discourses of disempowerment and discrimination are recast to appeal to all whites.

In the post-apartheid context of increasing intra-racial inequality and the growing visibility and politicisation of white poverty, this seemingly contradictory yet concomitant project of declassing whiteness serves to obscure class cleavages amongst whites. This has allowed this previously right-wing union to generate both the material and symbolic resources needed to reinvent itself as a mainstream "social movement" articulating a post-nationalist white, particularly Afrikaner identity and displaying the characteristics of a state within a state.