Class 9

Ethnography of Race in Cape Town

Origins of Project

• Focus on whiteness, privilege, poor whites.

• Post-apartheid → racial structure persists.

• Student protests challenged white institutional power.

Poor whites

• Contradicted apartheid logic (white superiority).

• After apartheid, forced into racially mixed working class.

Entering the field

• Political motivation → eventually shaped by people’s stories.

• Fieldwork = focused on individual peoples stories

Understanding Brooklyn: 2 Narratives - White model village

• Built for “sinking whites.” Privilege

• Designed to produce respectable whites: housing, jobs, education.

• Racial control:

  • Guards inspected lives.

  • A “total institution.”

• Because scared of blood mixing

Understanding Brooklyn: 2 Narratives - The Gray Area

Gray area= part of town outisde the apartheid control

• Sex work with foreign sailors → mixed children.

• Gangsters, smugglers, cross-racial interactions.

• Apartheid rules ignored in practice.

• Grey areas expanded in the 1980s.

• Play whites / passing for white

Passing whites/ Play whites

People who crossed color lines.

Dilemma: realness & Unrealness of race

• Apartheid trained people to read race off bodies.

• Persistent belief in “authentic” vs. “inauthentic” race.

• Erasmus challenge : must confront racial reality without reproducing essentialism

Researchers need racial gaze to understand passing

Color Line in South Africa

• Population Registration Act (1950) → entire population classified.

• Criteria vague: appearance + social acceptance.

• Took 10 years.

• Borderline cases exposed impossibility of rigid classification.

• Only country who classified everyone

Conclusion

• Play-whites did not simply “pretend” → they resisted racial order.

• Lived experience in Brooklyn made white/coloured divide irrelevant.

• Race becomes re-explained through lived complexity.

• Fieldwork reorients research questions: epistemological humility.

Blas

Darker skin tone

Toxic racial environment: minor detail that could mark you as non white

“The Look”

the look" as a constant, yet problematic, regime of visibility that enforces racial categorization despite modern scientific and anti-racist knowledge