South African nation-building cohered through a shared white racial identity

Evidence

Differences in racial disposition of whites between the various regions of what was becoming a unified country if not yet under single cohering rule were a matter mostly of degree more than kind. Regional unification into a common country cohered under one government was effected through race. Racial cement collected settler Europeans and their legacy into a wall of common whiteness, notwithstanding ethnic sub-division and different emphases in racial conception. British, Dutch boers, Italians, Greeks, Irish, Germans, East European Jews, and later Portuguese largely lost their emphatic ethnic heritage. Together they became much more firmly and unambiguously, even unambivalently, vested in the religiosities of whiteness and its sources of wealth and privilege than in the US case, notwithstanding the long-simmering and long-lingering contest between British and boer legacies. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1473

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels whiteness-formation arguments in Critical Race Theory and connects to the ‘racial cement’ idea in settler-colonial scholarship. — connects to: British concessions deliberately consolidated Afrikaner national identity with ruling aspirations — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1482; South Africa’s post-Union state institutionalized white interest as its prime structural purpose — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1489; Apartheid unified all whites as beneficiaries, not just Afrikaners, beyond mere demographic expediency — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1491 (+2 more)
• SEED: Essay angle: how heterogeneous immigrant ethnicities (Jews, Greeks, Italians) were welded into a single ‘white’ identity more completely in South Africa than the US — a comparative case study of racial assimilation.