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

The conversations followed a basic pattern, which is exemplified by
the dialogue below:
A: She is a Naika. (An Indian woman.)
B: No way man, look at those eyes, sy is mos ’n kleurling
(She is coloured.)
A: Ag, man, there is no way a coloured girl has a hair like that.
B: But I have seen that many times on a meidjie. (Coloured girl.)
This continued until the disputants had agreed on a clue that really settled
the issue. A person who has no identifiable race is a strange, if not impossible
anomaly. In everyday social interaction it was and still is crucial to
know a person’s race. In the census of 1996 only less than one per cent
of South Africans had declared their race as ‘Other’ when the alternatives
given were white, African, Indian and coloured.
What makes these distinctions even trickier – particularly in coloured
Cape Town – is the commonness of Southern European, in particular
Portuguese, immigrants in South Africa. In the prevailing racial ideology
the Southern Europeans were seen as White, resulting in many South African
whites using ’Latin blood’ as an explanation for their darker complexions.
This has also made darkish whites claiming Southern European
ancestry the butt of many jokes.
Several social scientists have presented estimations on the number of
mixed marriages and the generality of mixed descent in the group classified
as White during apartheid. These estimations vary from ten per cent
to 40 per cent (van den Berghe 1964: 36).
Since it was difficult to tell whites and coloureds apart purely from
physical difference, other things became important. Being White in South
Africa meant, and still means for many people, living and acting according
certain embodied standards and ideals. The essence of whiteness was
about what you were, but equally importantly, how you were.
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