Threatened privilege drove Dutch colonists into a homogenizing white Afrikaner identity

Evidence

Membership in the Dutch Reformed Church in the closing decade of the century, perhaps not unrelated to this surge in millenarian resistance, increased notably, and became overwhelmingly if not exclusively white. Loss of formal power and easy access prompted a cross-class coherence among Dutch descendants threatened otherwise with dispersal. Afrikaners were born of the double threat of ethnoracial evaporation to boer identity. Conjured as interactively British and black, this threat was to become, with the arrival of the surging British as the old century closed and the new one opened, the troubling catalyst of Afrikaner self-conception, but also its distinction, its rupture, from its classically Dutch origins. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1382

Categorization

• XREF: Direct instance of threatened-privilege identity formation exactly as the reader’s research posits — anticipates key mechanisms in later whiteness/‘insecure majorities’ literature. — connects to: Anticipatory threat of mixture forged Afrikaner ethnic mobilization and racial theology. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1383; British concessions deliberately consolidated Afrikaner national identity with ruling aspirations — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1482; Afrikaner collective identity inverted nearly every Dutch cultural trait in reaction to racial mixture — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1383 (+9 more)

Broader Connections

• Threatened Afrikaner interests produced organized collective political struggle #expands (0.90)
• Afrikaner identity formed as a reaction against the threat of racial mixture #corroborates (0.88)
• Afrikaner identity crystallized from the perceived twin threats of British and black #expands (0.85) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1382
• Afrikaner collective identity inverted nearly every Dutch cultural trait in reaction to racial mixture #corroborates (0.82) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1383
• British concessions transformed the boers into the self-conscious Afrikaner nation #expands (0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1482
• Boer racism is a pre-ideological reaction to desperate colonial conditions #corroborates (0.78) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 509
• South African nation-building cohered through a shared white racial identity #expands (0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1473
• The Afrikaner Broederbond originated partly from fears of demographic swamping and white degeneration #exemplifies (0.75)
• Colonial color hierarchies assigned privilege by proximity to European whiteness #expands (0.72) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3223