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

Throughout the twentieth century their racial status has been intermediate
in a sense that the term Coloured was applied to people who were
neither White nor African. Thus ‘Coloured’ functioned as a residual category
for those people who had no designated official racial category of
their own (such as the Griqua and the Malays). Colouredness carried a
stigma of racial miscegenation and impurity. (Adhikari 2001: 14-19.)
Poor whites were also people in an intermediate racial category, residual
in a sense that those Whites who did not comply with the rules of
being a good white could be categorised as such. Also the marginality,
stigmatisation and doubts regarding racial purity were typical of this
category. But most importantly, both categories were fuzzy, artificial,
confusing and extremely leaky.
One may thus safely state that the category of Coloured is closest in
the social pecking order and structurally most comparable to the category
of poor white than any other social category in South African society.
Sometimes the differentiation is very hard to make. The thin line between
a Coloured and a poor white is often evident in everyday life.
”On a lovely summer’s eve we are sitting on a terrace of a smart restaurant
in Stellenbosch. K. is telling me about the excellent qualities
of the brandy I am sipping. The price of the tot would support a poor
African family for a week. But I am not thinking about that stuff. It is
my night off. Then a rusty car full of poor white boys drives by. Loud
music blasts from within the car. K. makes some comment about ”hotnots”
that I do not properly understand. ”Were those boys coloured?”
I ask him, baffl ed. ”Almost,” he replies in a sarcastic tone. Everyone
at the table chuckles.” (Author’s field notes.)
In today’s Ruyterwacht, the differentiation based on the difference of
habitus between a coloured and a poor white is not only blurred, but has
been inverted in many cases. Most of the coloured residents hold office
jobs; almost all of them have bought their own houses. Previously the
highest occupational position to which a coloured person could aspire
was that of teacher or church minister. Now that all middle-class occupations
are open to them, they are busy climbing the ladder to the positions
that were thus far denied them. The middle-class, white model of embodiment
plays a central role in this. All the bodily signs of being a good
white are there, and consciously represented – the coloured people fulfil
all the prerequisites that were ever set for a good white, often better than
their White neighbours do. (See table 2 in the appendix 3.)
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