SOIFER, ISABELLE: QUESTIONING AN ETHNOGRAPHIC TEXT: WILLOUGHBY-HERARD, TIFFANY: WASTE OF A WHITE SKIN

What is the text “about” -- empirically and conceptually? This text is about white fragility, white poverty, and the manner in which the Carnegie Corporation sought to both uplift and deny poor Afrikaners in South Africa via the Poor White Study. In the process of producing knowledge and providing programs to render whites to their perceived superior positionality due to their whiteness, Carnegie Corporation engaged in antiblackness. The author argues that by injuring white people as collateral damage of antiblackness, treating them like blacks, “white supremacy has limitless possibilities to criminalize, intervene in, and interrupt black radical resistance and to minimize and naturalize black racial suffering.” The author strives to put black feminism in conversation with colonial feminism, civilizing missions, and programs of economic development that structure the making of poor whites and their key role in extending antiblackness. This text utilizes a feminist, critical race theory lenses to engage in a critical examination of global whiteness and its perpetuation of segregationist philanthropy and scientific racism.

What modes of inquiry were used to produce it? The author engages in historical analysis of the Poor White Study and the Carnegie Corporation, and examines visual culture of white poverty via ethnographic photos, political cartoons, and press coverage, drawing from the Black radical tradition in her analysis. 

How is the text structured and performed? The text is structured based on  a break-down of each aspect of the Poor White Study and the historical events surrounding it that perpetuated antiblackness in South Africa, beginning with the historical and visual components, then moving on to discuss antipoverty policy and politics, and the influence of the international eugenics movement, the management of labor, segregationist policies, and uplift feminism. She breaks down the many ways in which antiblackness is perpetuated by global whiteness/the white global imaginary and its hand in knowledge production both in the U.S. and South Africa. 

How can it circulate? This text can circulate among those interested in understanding whiteness and its relation to antiblackness, even for poor whites who themselves become the targets of antiblackness. The text is useful for those interested in knowledge production, race relations, philanthropy and “development.”

What is the text about – empirically?

What phenomenon is drawn out in the text?  A social process; a cultural and political-economic shift; a cultural “infrastructure;” an emergent assemblage of science-culture-technology-economics? The phenomenon of antiblackness as perpetuated by philanthropic organizations, reproducing antiblackness in order to alleviate white suffering, at the expense of black suffering. By attempting to alleviate white poverty, black poverty is naturalized and struggles by blacks to counteract the effects are stifled/silenced/discounted. I would say this is a critique of traditional writings regarding race in South Africa, as well as an explanation of a component of South African cultural “infrastructure” (white poverty) that would otherwise be quite difficult to understand in light of traditional manners of writing about race whereby whites are the beneficiaries of white supremacy. The notion that whites can be impacted by antiblackness as well is extremely crucial and applicable in many different settings. 

Where is this phenomenon located – in a neighborhood, in a country, in “Western Culture,” in a globalizing economy? Located primarily in South Africa, but also within the white global imaginary as presented by the author. This appears to include the interconnectedness of whites across the world who strive to maintain white supremacy, including in the U.S.

What historical trajectory is the phenomenon situated within?  What, in the chronology provided or implied, is emphasized -- the role of political or economic forces, the role of certain individuals or social groups?  What does the chronology leave out or discount? The phenomenon is situated in the early 20th century, at around the time of the publishing of the Poor White Study. The role of political forces and social groups are most emphasized, including the Carnegie Corporation, white middle class feminist uplifters, and poor whites (specifically poor Afrikaners). The chronology does not account as much for the historical developments in the U.S., specifically any research that was done on white poverty there—it may have been interesting to compare/contrast it with South Africa. 

What scale(s) are focused on -- nano (i.e. the level of language), micro, meso, macro? What empirical material is developed at each scale? Primarily meso (poor Afrikaner suffering as portrayed visually/textually in the Poor White Study, segregationist policy in South Africa) and macro (global white imaginary, eugenics/scientific racism, Carnegie Corporation and connections between U.S. and South Africa).

Who are the players in the text and what are their relations?  Does the text trace how these relations have changed across time – because of new technologies, for example? Carnegie Corporation, poor whites, Ballen (photographer), white male republican workers, poor blacks, poor ”colored people,” upper class white women. The author primarily focuses on the relations between Carnegie Corporation/white uplifters and their attempts to manage poor whites, at the expense of blacks and via the naturalization of antiblackness and black poverty. There is also a connection established across boundaries, between the U.S. and South Africa, two nations run by white supremacy. Does not really trace how relations have changed across time, but rather focuses on one particular era  in the history of South Africa.

What is the temporal frame in which players play?  In the wake of a particular policy, disaster or other significant “event?”  In the general climate of the Reagan era, or of “after-the-Wall” globalization? Early 20th century, around the time of the publication of the Poor White Study and during apartheid in South Africa and Jim Crow era in U.S., both united by their racist and segregationist polices. During a time when the Carnegie Corporation sought to prop up whiteness in other countries, informed by the eugenics movement at the time.

What cultures and social structures are in play in the text? Anglo-Saxon in contrast to the Noble Boer, Afrikaner Nationalism. Black radical tradition, uplift white feminism/masculinity, white liberal segregationists, global whiteness/white supremacy, philanthropy/welfarism, scientific racism, colonial archaeologies, visual culture, “culture” of poverty/”the poor white”

What kinds of practices are described in the text?  Are players shown to be embedded in structural contradictions or double-binds? Poor Afrikaners are caught in the double-bind of having the supposed privileges of being white, but not fulfilling the ideal of whiteness as being well-to-do, hence being treated in many ways  as nonwhites. White middle/upper class women serve as “uplifters” for poor white Afrikaner women while simultaneously differentiating between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor. White women and men of upper class strive to “decontaminate” poor white subjects from their complex dependencies on nonwhite subjects and to surveil them under the guise of charity. The author argues that the root of intrawhite violence is embedded in the maintenance of white supremacist power as antiblack violence. 

How are science and technology implicated in the phenomenon described? Scientific racism and eugenics, as informed by the labeling of wealthy, white individuals’ beliefs as scientific innovation in the public service. These “sciences” perpetuated by social scientists working for the Carnegie Corporation are in turn used to promote a “global color line,” informing white supremacist polity and public policy making. Included in this form of science is the means of explaining white poverty as a function of competition with racial inferiors and fears about white racial degeneration. The author analyzes the manner in which scientific racism as a racial regime promoted the devaluation of the work, labor, and products of its racial targets, as well as the makers of that work, labor, and production, enacted on bodies both white and nonwhite but in the process promoting antiblackness.

What structural conditions– technological, legal and legislative, political, cultural – are highlighted, and how are they shown to have shaped the phenomenon described in this text? The author’s primary focus is on the champions of poor whites (Carnegie Corporation) and the social world they sought to consolidate (the global color line) through domestic and global knowledge projects, working into the segregationist, white supremacist, antiblack policies of South Africa to further the aim of “uplifting” poor whites, even as poor whites were left worse off than before. The phenomenon the author sets out to examine is the “waste of a white skin,” defined as a false equivalency that co-opts and displaces contemporary and historical black suffering and black flourishing for the sake of sympathy, albeit with white supremacy. This in turn enables the criminalizing, intervention in, and interruption of black racial resistance and minimizes/naturalizes black racial suffering. The author transcends the “national” to comprehend the global “racial development scheme” as governed by the Carnegie Corporation, the likes of which makes policy recommendations that criminalize poor white people for being poor and endorses segregationism in the guise of liberal humanitarianism.  

How – at different scales, in different ways – is power shown to operate?  Is there evidence of power operating through language, “discipline,” social hierarchies, bureaucratic function, economics, etc? Power is shown to operate at multiple levels, including within the Afrikaner Nationalist tradition as conveyed in the Poor White Study, operating under the guise of knowledge production via social sciences and visual culture to render poor whites the key to consolidating white nationalism at a local level. Within this study, poor whites are portrayed as deserving of sympathy for the reason that they are “ugly and deformed” rather than for the reason that they reflect racialized and gendered exploitation and ill-gotten gains by upper-class white South Africans. The author engages with the global scale as well, examining how the international eugenics movement influenced national political cultures, racial politics, and antipoverty policy, having a marked influence on the Poor White Study. This movement would influence the scientific management of labor practices both in the U.S. and South Africa, with laws being organized to privilege the white male republican worker, at the expense of the African and African-American working classes. According to the author, the Carnegie Corporation hoped to reinforce the notion in South Africa that all social problems were associated with being African. In South Africa, governmental policy aimed at reinforcing the idea that blackness was the living standard of poverty; as one example, health officials were more concerned with proving the “scientific linkage” between blacks and disease than with making cities habitable for residents. The author also describes white women in the history of apartheid and their attempts at articulating (and policing) poor whites as white subjects apart from black people. She affirms that Afrikaner Nationalist women’s masculinist practices accompanied their acquisition of political leverage in the public sphere. 

Does the text provide comparative or systems level perspectives?  In other words, is the particular phenomenon described in this text situated in relation to similar phenomenon in other settings?  Is this particular phenomena situated within global structures and processes? The text engages to a degree in comparative and systems level perspectives, utilizing the notion of global white imaginary/white supremacy as a phenomenon that cuts across national borders, largely through the practices of corporations such as Carnegie. Poverty is racialized both in South Africa and the U.S., two sites impacted by the corporation’s knowledge production practices as informed by the work of social scientists via the eugenics movement. The author argues that the comparative approaches to racial politics that foreground states fail to account for the impact of international politics, mistakenly buy into white nationalisms, and avoid critique of the exceptionalist and imperialist imaginary of white nations as they shape domestic racial politics and scripts of national identity. The workings of the Carnegie Corporation thus fit within and inform the mission of the global color line, providing scientific justifications in which race relations consist of white people using force and violence to “civilize” the world of nonwhite people, which in the end includes poor whites due to their failure to live up to the global white imaginary.

What is the text about – conceptually?

Is the goal to verify, challenge or extend prior theoretical claims? The goal of this text is to put black feminism into conversation with colonial feminism, civilizing missions, and programs of economic development that structure the making of poor whites and their key role in extending antiblackness. In addition, the author reintroduces gendered black internationalism and Third World left politics to complicate the rubric of the nation-state and conversations about comparative racial politics that otherwise underanalyze transnational processes. 

What is the main conceptual argument or theoretical claim of the text?  Is it performed, rendered explicit or both? The main conceptual argument of the text is for a denaturalization of the existence, spatiality, and temporality of the white settler colonial nation, and to insist that addressing racial politics as if it can be confined to national borders is insufficient. She argues that the racial in the domestic scene has been positioned powerfully over the racial in the global scene, resulting in stilted research agendas that amass and identify cases of racial domination without fully elaborating the reason or purpose. I would argue that her main conceptual argument is both performed and rendered explicit at various moments in the text—she performs the need for a more globally-oriented analysis of international debates on race and race relations and their effects on domestic racial citizenship, and she explicitly urges for an analytics that comprehends racial suffering and understands its costs through her analysis of the Poor White Study. 

What ancillary concepts are developed to articulate the conceptual argument? White-on-white violence, masculinity/male domination, white supremacy/global whiteness, white misery, antiblackness, black racial resistance, (“scientific”) knowledge production, racial division of knowledge and racial labor hierarchy.

How is empirical material used to support or build the conceptual argument? The Poor White Study provides the author with literal and visual empirical material to build her argument through depictions of white misery and the naturalization of black suffering—discussion of poor whites obscured discussion of the plight of black workers. The visual and literary evidence from this study also challenged the belief that  the racial labor hierarchy was the result of divine order, challenging the naturalization of white supremacy. She examines ethnographic photos, political cartoons, and press coverage of poor whites in genre plays and films in order to expose rediscoveries of white misery, playing with whiteness, and the constant need to reconsolidate the unstable racial regime of white nationalism and the “global whiteness” that institutions such as the Carnegie Corporation sought to defend. According to the author, enduring tropes of white destitution, as perpetuated by these materials, created a bourgeois history of the white settler past that equated poor whites with African people, miserable and tied to the land, in turn giving meaning to the paradoxical presence of poor whites in South Africa. The author also examines segregationist policies such as redlining and gerrymandering, the likes of which have biological origins in theories about cleanliness and genetically or group-linked diseases, laws established at the expense of “parasitic” blacks and to make poor whites hypervisible and subject to increased scrutiny.  

How robust is the main conceptual argument of the text?  On what grounds could it be challenged? The main conceptual argument of the text is very robust in terms of examining the portrayal of poor whites as they fit within global racial politics. However, I would challenge the author to provide more evidence on the side of black racial resistance and the manners in which this may contribute to the denaturalization of the white settler colonial nation. In addition, there may be examples of texts that examine racial politics at the domestic level that may be powerful on their own without engaging with the global (albeit I cannot think of any off the top of my head). Perhaps providing more examples of other texts that failed to live up to her main conceptual argument could in turn strengthen her claims.   

How could the empirical material provided support conceptual arguments other than those built in the text? The Poor White Study archival materials could be utilized to explore more in-depth any one of the areas the author covers in her text, whether it’s the role of photography and the colonial gaze in the social sciences, the power dynamics of upper class white women and their poor white counterparts from apartheid to post-apartheid, or discussion of development in not only South Africa but in other locales where Carnegie Corporation engaged in its “research,” such as in the U.S. The interviews with poor whites in South Africa could be utilized to discuss the role of antiblack rhetoric to perpetuate both cycles of aid and discrimination against poor whites. If there are any materials shedding light on employees of Carnegie Corporation itself, this could provide a means to engage in arguments about corporations as perpetuating whiteness within their own ranks.

Modes of inquiry?

What theoretical edifice provides the (perhaps haunting – i.e. non-explicit) backdrop to the text? Identity (raced, classed, gendered) and Critical geography

What assumptions appear to have shaped the inquiry?  Does the author assume that individuals are rational actors, for example, or assume that the unconscious is a force to be dealt with?  Does the author assume that the “goal” of society is (functional) stability? Does the author assume that what is most interesting occurs with regularity, or is she interested in the incidental and deviant? The author assumes that the philanthropy/developmentalist frameworks through which the Carnegie Corporation was operating were entirely/largely informed by antiblackness. The author does not really account for middle-class or upper-class blacks and how they may be differentially positioned from lower income counterparts in terms of their worldviews and goals. The author frames her argument within the time of the publishing of the Poor White Study, but then also draws larger conclusions without addressing temporal and spatial changes and the adaptability of people who are working through global forces such as white supremacy and the global white imaginary, and how people may not always entirely be molded by them and their agency even in the face of oppression. 

What kinds of data (ethnographic, experimental, statistical, etc.)  are used in the text, and how were they obtained? Primary documents from the five-volume Carnegie Corporation Poor White Study, both literary and photographic materials, obtained from her archival research in South Africa 

If interviews were conducted, what kinds of questions were asked?  What does the author seem to have learned from the interviews? Did not conduct her own interviews, but did have data from interviews conducted by the Poor White Study research team. The author learned from these interviews the resistance to the process of being scrutinized as poor people and as ‘white’ people by not answering questions, turning questions back on interviewers, and challenging the imposition of being scrutinized in their homes. They indicated a resistance to being understood as white in the ways that the research team members conceived of them.

How was the data analyzed?  If this is not explicit, what can be inferred? The data was analyzed through the lenses of critical race theory and black feminist studies, centering race, gender, and class in the analysis of documents.

How are people, objects or ideas aggregated into groups or categories? People and ideas are grouped primarily by race, but also by class, gender, nationality, and scale.   

What additional data would strengthen the text? I believe that some additional sources outside of the Poor White Study could potentially strengthen her argument, perhaps other studies conducted by governmental institutions, demographic data, and South African and U.S. social scientists who may have published their own studies at the time separately from the Carnegie Corporation. 

Structure and performance?

What is in the introduction? Does the introduction turn around unanswered questions -- in other words, are we told how this text embodies a research project? Interestingly, the introduction confirms that this text is not an ethnography of poor whites, but rather focuses on those who claim to be the champions of poor whites, namely Carnegie Corporation. Drawing from critical race theory, the author calls for critical geography to comprehend how forced labor, racial oppression, colonial conditions, and capitalist exploitation served as the global processes that both incorporated black people through empire building and figured the “poor white” as in need of “proper” racial uplift. The author sets out to research white on white racial violence in order to provide a more robust account of the ongoing surveillance of poor whites and how this links to more intractable forms of anti-black racism. 

Where is theory in the text?  Is the theoretical backdrop to the text explained, or assumed to be understood? Theory plays a less prominent role in this text compared to other ethnographies I have encountered, serving as a backdrop to the text that is brought up and explained throughout each example that the author provides to further her argument. 

What is the structure of the discourse in the text?  What binaries recur in the text, or are conspicuously avoided? Each chapter could hold up on its own, focused on one particular aspect of the Poor White Study and how it connects to the broader discussion of the global white imaginary and the fear of white racial degeneration. Each chapter focuses on particular parties and individuals involved, including photographers and cartoonists, white feminist uplifters, segregationists,  and labor. The author carefully works to avoid the black-white binary that is often propagated in discussions of race and class in South Africa, pushing home the point that the attack on poor whites crucially inform the processes by which freedom in South Africa actually comes to mean subordination, order and submission. The lines between masculinity and femininity are also blurred: according to the author, white women can engage in and embody masculinity and male domination practices that accompany their acquisition of political leverage in the public sphere. However, the author also argues that nonwhite poverty continues to be portrayed as normal and culturally appropriate, whereas white poverty is seen as a paradox or civilization-threatening social crisis. The author also strives to combat the binary of the colony construed as causing death by culture whereas metropoles offer the conditions for emancipation—rather, by disrupting this binary she argues for a refiguring of the boundaries of the nation. 

How is the historical trajectory delineated?  Is there explicit chronological development? The text focuses on a specific time period during apartheid in South Africa when the Poor White Study was released, in 1932. There is no particular chronological development. 

How is the temporal context provided or evoked in the text? The author begins each chapter delineating which group of people/processes she will be focusing on, primarily in relation to the Poor White Study, drawing from various resources such as quotes, articles, critical race theorists, and the Study itself to provide the temporal context and the pertinent social processes at play at the time. For example, she introduces the mobilization of urban activists in the black radical tradition in South Africa for at least two generations by the 1920s, and the fears at the time that poor whites would organize and collaborate with Africans, Indians, and “Coloreds.”

How does the text specify the cultures and social structures in play in the text? The author tends to jump between different scales of cultural and social structures, within each chapter as well as between them. She specifies cultures and social structures by drawing on the colonial/historical contexts of South Africa and the U.S., and their shared interests in maintaining and perpetuating a white supremacist worldview through promotion of white nationalism. This includes the perpetuation of white on white violence in the service of domination over and suppression of black political imaginaries. In each chapter she tends to focus on particular subsets of these social-cultural structures, whether it’s white feminists, Afrikaner/British political philosophies, the role of colonial archaeologies for informing labor practices, or perpetuation of the myth of black labor competition as causing white poverty in the job markets of South Africa.   

How are informant perspectives dealt with and integrated? The author does not draw much from informant perspectives, aside from in a couple of chapters where she discusses quotes from poor whites regarding their antiblack views. In this sense, she uses these perceptions to further her argument that poor whites sought to leverage their own positionalities and obtain access to resources at the expense of their black counterparts. In turn, engagement with poor and working-class white people constituted a “poverty knowledge” that was highly racialized through the logics of scientific racism, in turn denying the relations of dependency between black and white rural people.  

How does the text draw out the implications of science and technology? At what level of detail are scientific and technological practices described? The text draws out the implications of scientific racism as it informed race relations both within and betwixt the U.S. and South Africa. She argues that the racial attack on black people sits at the heart of global affairs and the emergence of social science, disavowing racial suffering and allegedly providing the analytics to understand its costs. The author does not go into great detail regarding the eugenics/scientific racist movement, but she does convey powerfully the manner in which it underlay justifications for policies such as “separate development” and the wages of working class people based on race, while simultaneously permitting an attack on poor whites who endured their own forms of racial subordination via social scientific justification of which poor were deserving and undeserving.   

How does the text provide in-depth detail – hopefully without losing readers? The author divides the book in such a manner that the salient details for each section are brought forward to create a coherent narrative without overwhelming/losing readers. She holds these details together well with overarching themes and social processes specifically addressed to each chapter’s argument and aim.

What is the layout of the text?  How does it move, from first page to last?  Does it ask for other ways of reading? Does the layout perform an argument? The text layout is informed by her approach to critical geography, which strives to complicate the nation-state and analyze transnational processes. Starting from global whiteness, she focuses in on various players who contributed to and depended on the Poor White Study to justify racial imperialism. The layout performs an argument in that as opposed to selecting specific geographies to focus on, she engages specific social-cultural processes of racial regimes (labor markets, white feminism, etc.) as they play out within and between “racial regimes,” in this way reconsidering the national boundaries of South Africa and the U.S. as “exceptionalist.” She strives to locate the common history of settler colonialism and racial imperialism championed by white ethnic movements through origin stories.

What kinds of visuals are used, and to what effect? The author introduces several of the images from the Poor White Study to convey the racialist and unsympathetic photographer’s colonial gaze on poor whites, systematically dehumanizing and simultaneously making themselves indigenous. The author argues that these images are disturbing due to their echoes in the colonial-racial-slavocratic obsession with humans without divine agency, the soulless. 

What kind of material and analysis are in the footnotes? The author provides historical background information on some of the materials and their producers informing the Poor White Study and white nationalist movements more generally, expands on explanations of concepts and texts introduced by critical race theorists, and references key texts she uses in her book as evidence.

How is the criticism of the text performed?  If through overt argumentation, who is the “opposition”? The author overtly critiques histories that fail to mention poor whites as contributing to the stalling of the black working class, as well as works that reaffirm national boundaries and perpetuate the exceptionalism of “racial regimes” such as the U.S. and South Africa. The author performs this critique throughout the text with her analysis of the Poor White Study through a variety of socio-cultural lenses and key players, maintaining a critical geography in every analysis she performs. 

How does the text situate itself?  In other words, how is reflexivity addressed, or not? The author situates the text and her positionality from the outset in the preface, centering her political consciousness as an African American woman who drew from the lessons of exiles who had been tortured into fundamental antagonism with the project of American Empire. She was raised in black Detroit by South African dissident theologians, antiapartheid activists, and civil rights warriors. Seeing the situation of black South African women intellectuals striving to make decisive and lasting scholarly interventions in critical theory and history and the incredible personal costs they paid, the author made an ethical choice not to write about and research black South African women, while knowing that as an “American” her findings would be regarded as more insightful and powerful than those of women from black South Africa and the diaspora. 

Circulation?

Who is the text written for?  How are arguments and evidence in the text shaped to address particular audiences? The text is written for those interested in African Diaspora Studies, comparative racial politics, racial political, comparative political thought, non-Western political thought, and studies of race and nation. However, the text can also be read by the very groups who the book is written about: philanthropic organizations. The text is shaped to dismantle preconceived notions surrounding racial uplift and its positive effects for South Africa and other colonial nations. The text also provides evidence to disrupt scholars and social scientists in general who insist on the importance of centering the nation-state for engaging in effective social analysis. 

What all audiences can you imagine for the text, given its empirical and conceptual scope? The audiences I imagine are critical race theorists, international/diaspora studies scholars, scholars and social scientists who either work for or write about philanthropic organizations, scholars and others interested in studying the history of race relations in South Africa and the U.S. I could also see this as being a useful text for high schoolers who may benefit from being exposed to an alternative rendering of global studies, one that can shed light on the possibilities of analytics outside the confines of the nation-state.

What new knowledge does this text put into circulation?  What does this text have to say that otherwise is not obvious? This text puts into circulation knowledge of the positionality of poor whites in white supremacist nations where ideas of “white privilege” and white supremacy are often questioned due to the existence of poor whites. By presenting a case for how poor whites have been utilized to further rather than hinder white supremacist goals, the author provides an incredibly important intervention into what would otherwise not be an obvious explanation for white poverty and how it is imagined/dealt with by colonial powers.  

How generalizable is the main argument?  How does this text lay the groundwork for further research? I believe that the main argument is very much generalizable due to the nature of its scope—it’s based on the premise that white poverty connects various colonial nations and their racial politics together. The author asserts that Carnegie Corporation provides comparativists with a rich bounty of underanalyzed archival materials on racial politics, thus laying the groundwork for further research that could go in a variety of directions to address white supremacy in international affairs.

What kind of “action” is suggested by the main argument of the text? The author calls on readers to dismantle their preconceived notions about the sufficiency of the nation-state and the whiteness/blackness binary for analysis of racial politics: she affirms that domestic race relations “problems” are only inadequately and partially analyzed within national borders. In addition, she calls on the reader to pay close attention to the productive turns in scholarship that have sought to correct the marginalization of sustained black political imaginaries and campaigns opposed to racism and white supremacy in international affairs.

Other modes of expression? 

Describe how the material and arguments of this text could be presented in a form other than that of a conventional scholarly book -- as a graphic novel, museum exhibit, activist stunt, or educational module for kids, for example? This text could be presented as an educational module for kids both in the U.S. and South Africa, particularly in rural areas. The text could be broken down into its component parts, discussing labor, white feminism, global white imaginary, as well as a touch of colonialism to provide context for the segregationist eras in both countries. Students could be asked to read excerpts from the Poor White Study, using the critical lenses from the author’s text to engage in an in-depth analysis. I believe they would be particularly fascinated by the photos, the likes of which resemble the type of photos of people typically seen in mass media and outlets such as National Geographic. Students could engage in a comparative analysis of these types of photos, learning how powerful images can be in either informing people or potentially harming others through the perpetuation of stigmas/stereotypes/the racist gaze.

Another interesting format for presenting this text would be an online platform that breaks down into the component parts of the text, providing a presentation of the history surrounding the Poor White Study, and possibly even providing quiz questions and other interactive features in case teachers select to use the website for educating their students. The website could include videos, historical overviews, photos, current events in South Africa and the U.S., interactive maps, etc.