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

Being a poor white was considered an illness, an unhealthy and unnatural
state of being.
“The Poor White Problem includes two main questions. There is, fi rst,
the question of the extent and causes of this social ill; and secondly,
the question of the means by which it may be cured and prevented.”
(Malherbe 1932: v.)
This social malady could be cured if, once isolated and analysed, the right
measures were taken, and the ideal of a healthy and functional member of
society, a good white, was pursued. The cures varied from proper education
to prevention of racial mixing, since:
“ ..long-continued contact with inferior coloured races has in some
respects had deleterious social effects on the European.” (Malherbe
1932: xix.)
One of the important considerations was money. Even the most liberal
social engineers of that time (e.g., the leading Carnegie Commission
investigator E.G. Malherbe), agreed that material support alone was
insufficient to drag poor whites out of their degraded state and inferior
mentality, if they did not internalise the right (i.e. middle-class) values
(Malherbe 1932: xvii-xviii).
Family was the point of departure and very central to these discussions.
In Europe, the process of linking morality to economic factors and governing
families through normalisation had begun a century earlier when
the influence of the traditional patriarchal family had grown progressively
weaker and thus also its mission to ensure public order and govern
its members. In order to feed the growing population and reorganise the
labouring population in a disciplined manner, a liberal state needed an
independent and self-governing family.
Philanthropy offered effective advice and preserved norms instead
of repressing its subject or handing them gifts and charity. It educated
women and children, choosing the family as the locus of social control
and surveillance. In the liberal state, the poor were to become moral citizens
of substance who did not turn into passive parasites of the society,
but learned how to help themselves. (Donzelot 1979: 48-70.)
The family was guided towards autonomy. The more economically
independent it was, and the better it solved its own problems, the smaller
the risk of outside intervention was. The inability to be economically in-
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