The Making of a Good White - E-thesis - Helsinki.fi

scribed in the conclusion of the previous chapter grew more elaborate.
The residents kept to themselves, took every advantage of the professionals’
help and/or took the social workers for a ride. For the residents of
Epping Garden Village this did not necessarily mean a decrease in their
agency – if you were aware of the rules of the social field, it was business
as usual. However, from the perspective of those who lived in the ‘normal’
White society, the residents appeared marginal and even repulsive.
There were also success stories in which the aspirant whites learned
to ‘play the game’, and presented the right, embodied signs of whiteness.
If all this was well managed, the trappings of whiteness were there to be
taken. After joining the proper category of a good white, it was usual to
cut all ties with the past. During my fieldwork I heard countless stories of
those who had left Epping Garden Village never to refer to it again. Senior
ladies - the volksmoeders - told of their numerous offspring who lived
in upmarket areas, and whom they have not seen for years. Paradoxically,
the whole process is a reminder of that of passing for white – only this
was whites passing for White.
In the 1970s a white person who had still not ‘made it’, and did not fit
the picture of a good white, became an embarrassment for all the whites.
While the racial ideologies had convinced many White South Africans of
their superiority, the poor whites were a living example of the opposite.
The existence of this contradiction reflected the large-scale dissolution
of the apartheid ideology. Hyslop (2000) notes that the racial-ethnic system
lost its coherence as the constant attempts of the apartheid regime to
renovate the official ideology only bewildered the whites more, causing
a ”conceptual confusion which undermined whites’ previously absolute
sense of ethnic and racial boundaries”, a situation a reader of Mary Douglas
would identify as a ”system at war with itself” (1966: 173-195).
In fact, while the white middle-class largely believed in these boundaries,
they had never been very clear or absolute in Epping Garden Village.
And while the poor whites were still trained to maintain the racial boundaries,
the ideological disorder increased in the other sections of white
society, leading the way to the social changes of the 1990s. The apartheid
system, unable to convincingly maintain its internal racial categories or
their external boundaries, had lost its war against itself.
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