Troubled Transformation: Whites, Welfare, and ‘Reverse-Racism’ in Contemporary Newcastle

by Michelle Peens and Bernard Dubbeld (Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Stellenbosch University)

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Abstract

This paper is based on a study of four white families living in the town of Newcastle, South Africa, and focuses on the institutional apparatuses of welfare in the town almost two decades after apartheid. Beginning with a reading of the production of the category of the ‘poor white’ during the first half of the twentieth century, we then discuss the particular rise and fall of Newcastle as an industrial town. We focus on contemporary welfare in the town and the interaction between whites receiving welfare and welfare officials. In the midst of moral evaluations of character, it becomes clear to officials that models of individual reformation and transformation are inadequate to realize substantially improved lives. In these conditions, officials join white recipients in invoking ‘reverse racism’ to explain the continued reliance of these white families on welfare and their inability to improve their conditions, regardless of ‘improvements in character’. Such a claim, we argue, portrays whites as threatened and even attempts to reclaim the pathological figure of the poor white in a bid to remain exceptional, and thus to be recognized as being poor in a manner that would distinguish them from Africans.

Suggested bibliographic reference for this article:
Peens, Michelle; Dubbeld, Bernard; Troubled Transformation: Whites, Welfare, and ‘Reverse-Racism’ in Contemporary Newcastle. Diversities. 2013, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 7-22, UNESCO. ISSN 2079-6595
www.unesco.org/shs/diversities/vol15/issue2/art2

About the authors

Michelle Peens completed her Master‘s degree in Sociology (with distinction) at the University of Stellenbosch with the title: „Moral Order as Necessity and as Impossibility: Common sense, Race and the Difficulty of Change Among Four Poor White Families in Newcastle“. She currently works as a freelance researcher and hopes to soon embark on a PhD.

Bernard Dubbeld is a senior lecturer at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Stellenbosch University, where he teaches social theory. He has written about post-apartheid governance, housing and the transformation of wage work. He is working on a book manuscript provisionally entitled “Unsettled Futures: paradoxes of the post-apartheid project in the countryside”.