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"This marvelously insightful study scrutinizes with eloquence the busy intersection where race, class, gender, and internationalism meet. The author is equally incisive in the fraught areas of South African history and philanthropy."—Gerald Horne, author of The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the USA
"Tiffany Willoughby-Herard has written an expansive, thoughtful, and authoritative book. Waste of a White Skin brilliantly weaves together the insights of critical race theory, black feminist theory, and postcolonial studies to explain how social sciences and policy narratives about race and class circulate globally. Gender scholars, race scholars, and historians of South Africa stand to gain much from carefully reading this bold and impressive work."—Zine Magubane, Associate Professor of Sociology, Boston College
"A fascinating account, Waste of a White Skin outlines the contours of global white domination as it winds its way from the United States to South Africa via the Carnegie Corporation's Poor White Study. Bucking a central tenet of whiteness studies, Willoughby-Herard explains why white misery is as important to white supremacy as white privilege is; she shows how poor white South Africans are both victims of antiblack racism and key to its very survival. An important and timely contribution to race studies!" —Cynthia A. Young, Boston College
List of contents
List of Illustrations
Preface: Possessions, Belonging, Companionship, or Don’t Mind the Gap
Introduction
1. Forgeries of History: The Poor White Study
2. The Visual Culture of White Poverty as the History of South Africa and the United States: Repetition, Rediscovery, Playing with Whiteness
3. The White Primitive: Whiteness Studies, Embodiment, Invisibility, Property
4. The Roots of White Poverty: Cheap, Lazy, Inefficient . . . Black
5. Origin Stories about Segregationist Philanthropy
6. Carnegie in Africa and the Knowledge Politics of Apartheid: Research Agendas not Taken
7. “I’ll Give You Something to Cry About”: The Intraracial Violence of Uplift Feminism in the Carnegie Poor White Study Volume, The Mother and Daughter of the Poor Family
Conclusion: Race Makes Nation
Acknowledgments
Appendixes
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
About the author
Tiffany Willoughby-Herard is Associate Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Irvine.
Summary
Telling the history of the development of scientific racism, white nationalism, and segregationist philanthropy in the US and South Africa in the early twentieth century, this book focuses on the American Carnegie Corporation's study of race in South Africa, the Poor White Study, and its influence on the creation of apartheid.
Additional text
"Willoughby-Herard has made an important intervention by persuasively urging scholars to reexamine the history and legacies of scientific racism through the lens of whiteness studies and intersectionality."
