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

POOR WHITEISM
Until the 1880s, poverty in Europe was seen as the individual’s failure.
Now it became seen as a failure of the physical and economic environment
(Bundy 1984: 13). Simultaneously, new threats were perceived.
For many concerned Europeans it began to seem that a way to improve
people’s lives was through a state that would implement a eugenic policy.
Before long, the white South African elite followed suite.
In South African social sciences, the 1880s were long accepted as the
start of the period in which the number of poor whites grew rapidly. Colin
Bundy criticised this belief by pointing out that that there was already
a large number of landless and unskilled poor whites in the Cape well
before 1890. Even before urbanisation there were considerable differentiation
and class formation and various types of white poverty existed, especially
landless rural poor such as bywoners, agricultural labourers and
farm servants. There were also small-town unskilled and low-paid wage
earners, and a lumpen proletariat element. The racial relations between
these whites and the people of colour were fluid and interactive. In the
1890s the poverty became ethnicised, and redefined as a social problem
to be tackled by state action. (Bundy 1984: 2-4.) Eugenic thinking played
a large part in these attempts.
Eugenics
During the eighteenth century race became defined as a part of scientific
discourse in Europe and the United States. The differences in the
representations of the Other were interpreted as biological and natural
differences of race. The scientific idea of race was then applied to the human
species in the framework of already existing power relations. (Miles
1994: 51, 63-64.)
The evolutionist thinkers of the nineteenth century perceived the differences
between races from the viewpoint of biological and cultural
evolution. They were pessimistic about the possibility of uplifting the
’child-like savages’, whom they saw as relics that had missed the train
of biological and cultural progress. Only an interbreeding with a more
evolved race, such as the Nordic race, could save them. But while this
miscegenation could perhaps aid the development of savages, it would
conversely deteriorate the pure Nordic or white racial stock. (Voget 1975:
178-185.)
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