Apartheid grew out of whites’ racialized fear of contamination and extinction

Evidence

By the 1920s, as a broad generalization, English-speaking whites in South Africa came to represent, to stand for, capital, industry, and liberal capitalism. Blacks had little else but their collective labor power, constrained as it was. And Afrikaners held land, where they held anything at all, and were forging both a world and world-view – the segregating sociality of skin – compelling not just to Afrikaners but increasingly to other whites also. This sociality of the skin represented for whites generally the threat of dissolution in a sea of proliferating blackness, of competition over jobs for poor whites of every ethnic background, of disease promising to seep out from every corner of surging urban slum life (this, after all, was the time too of the “sanitation syndrome”), of crime, moral devaluation, and cultural pollution. For Afrikaners, in particular, so caught up with concerns about group extinction, it meant above all survival and selfsecuritization, as much as a group as individually. The sense of selfsuperiority whites took to be identified with this sociality of the skin in relation to black groups was a superiority so threatened by contamination and fear that one can only conclude that the sense was more wish and worry than wisdom, more projection than prospect. The heightened form of separation, racially predicated, that came to be known as apartheid was nurtured out of these senses of threat, survival, and security. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1505

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the ‘sociality of the skin’ as the white self-conception driving segregation, and situates apartheid’s origin in perceived threat rather than ideology alone.
• XREF: connects to: Anticipatory status threat against Indian businessmen, not just Africans, drove apartheid’s formative legislation. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1500; Anticipatory threats of dissolution and extinction drove apartheid’s creation — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1505; The apartheid-idea premised racialization of laws on white supremacy. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 552