Apartheid scholarship neglected race itself until recently, leaving whiteness and hidden transcripts unstudied.

Evidence

Research which takes race as its immediate and explicit focus is a relatively recent feature in the apartheid literature, which means that there are many new research areas inviting more extensive study. For example, we need to know much more about the ways in which racial identities were forged (including the social meanings of whiteness); how changing racial discourses under apartheid operated as modes of power/knowledge; the differences between what James Scott would call “public” as compared to “hidden transcripts” (Scott, 1990) of race within social movements committed to an ideology of nonracialism. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 595

Categorization

• SEED: Essay angle: the social construction of whiteness under apartheid as an underexplored reverse of blackness studies.
• SHARE: Worth sharing with a scholar of South African historiography who’d value the specific Scott ‘hidden transcripts’ application.
• XREF: connects to: The most race-saturated society hosted an academy that neglected studying race itself. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 547; Apartheid scholarship defined race negatively as whatever is not class, never positively. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 574