Available From UC Press

A pathbreaking history of the development of scientific racism, white nationalism, and segregationist philanthropy in the U.S. and South Africa in the early twentieth century, Waste of a White Skin 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.

This book demonstrates the ways in which U.S. elites supported apartheid and Afrikaner Nationalism in the critical period prior to 1948 through philanthropic interventions and shaping scholarly knowledge production. Rather than comparing racial democracies and their engagement with scientific racism, Willoughby-Herard outlines the ways in which a racial regime of global whiteness constitutes domestic racial policies and in part animates black consciousness in seemingly disparate and discontinuous racial democracies. This book uses key paradigms in black political thought—black feminism, black internationalism, and the black radical tradition—to provide a rich account of poverty and work. Much of the scholarship on whiteness in South Africa overlooks the complex politics of white poverty and what they mean for the making of black political action and black people’s presence in the economic system.

Ideal for students, scholars, and interested readers in areas related to U.S. History, African History, World History, Diaspora Studies, Race and Ethnicity, Sociology, Anthropology, and Political Science.

Tiffany Willoughby-Herard is Associate Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Irvine.
 

"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