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

class South Africans are still embarrassed by their existence. The image
of a poor white still shows the white, ordentlike 197 Afrikaner middle-class
the boundaries of their identity.
The experienced worlds of the social workers and the residents reflected
each other, and were mutually dependent. While the residents, in
the purest de Certeau sense, constantly used tactics, the social workers
too had to do so at times (for example, when the question of pass-whites
surfaced in EGV). In the end, both groups had to cope with the demands
of the outside world, which set the standards for those who wanted to be
included in the category White.
The failure to build a pure and credible category White was at its
most visible in EGV, where the true boundaries of whiteness were sited.
Before apartheid, an individual’s failure to understand the location of a
racial category’s symbolic boundaries caused a fall from this category,
but with the onset of apartheid the symbolic and concrete boundaries of
the category White had to be united. However, there were still too many
people outside those symbolic boundaries, and no amount of trimming
of their habitus, or increase in their cultural or economic capital could
change this.
The strategy of the apartheid regime aimed at creating a fixed and flawless
social order by means of engineering a social structure. However, a
structure is always only an idea, which can never be fully compatible with
reality and experience. The South African racially based system produced
many anomalies because it had to reject a multitude of elements from its
social categories. In the end, those categories could not endure the social
changes and the increasing weight of the anomalies that they generated.
They lost their credibility, collapsed and were redistributed.
The account of the category White in EGV/Ruyterwacht thus demonstrates
the eternal interplay of the forces of structure and agency, as well
as the ephemeral, ever-changing essence of identity as an articulated and
temporary point of ‘suture’. 198 The strategies imposed from above and
the tactics adapted by the residents defined the transformation of a White
identity – which had little stability, or a primordial ‘essence’, despite the
social engineers’ claims to the contrary.
197 Decent, reasonable, ordinary.
198 The expression ‘suture’ in this connotation is used following Stuart Hall (1999: 22).
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