Waste of a White Skin: The Carnegie Corporation and the Racial Logic of White Vulnerability by Tiffany Willoughby-Herard (review)

This book examines an important interdisciplinary study of white poverty conducted in interwar South Africa that was funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Although the book focuses on this report, the 1928‒32 Carnegie Inquiry into the Poor White Problem in South Africa, and the Carnegie Commission of Investigation that wrote it, Willoughby-Herard creatively invokes a wide range of analytic concepts now associated with African diaspora studies, comparative politics, and whiteness studies. Building on the work of Cedric Robinson, Ann Stoler, George Lipsitz, Cheryl I. Harris, and many other scholars, she coins the term “global whiteness.” Instead of examining philanthropy and race science as if they were nationally bounded, she argues that white fears about racial degeneration, social science research, racial uplift schemes, public health discourses, and, perhaps most crucially, the kind of white-on-white violence that she says prefigured cross-racial violence were not exceptional to South Africa, but were shared widely across settler colonial territories.

Chapter 1 presents E. G. Malherbe, a prominent member of the Carnegie Commission, as part of a global cadre of race-relations technicians trained in South Africa and the United States to promote segregation. The author suggests that the Carnegie Corporation directly promoted Afrikaner nationalism (a claim that is not as well supported as other claims in this book). Chapter 2 discusses the Carnegie Commission’s stark photographs of poor whites, plus political cartoons by D. C. Boonzaier, including one sardonic drawing of the Rev. Dr. A. D. Luckhoff, a Commission member and Dutch Reformed clergyman, conferring with Gen. Jan Smuts. As they gesture toward a poor white family, the caption reads, “Certainly those of our calling will let none go down” (56). Chapter 3 discusses R. W. Wilcocks’s 1931 address to the South African Association for the Advancement of Science titled “Intelligence, Environment, and Heredity.” Amid calls for compulsory birth control and sterilization of poor whites, this psychologist used 1920s IQ studies from South Africa and the United States to argue that environmental stimuli could do little to improve childhood intelligence. The author fails to mention that Malherbe expressed somewhat different views about heredity, at least in public. Here and elsewhere, Waste of a White Skin too often depicts Carnegie-funded human science research as a monolith.

Building on a 1995 essay by Cheryl I. Harris, chapter 4 makes the incisive and timely argument that “investment in whiteness” can be risky, because “for all its returns, it so thoroughly dehumanizes those who aspire to achieve it” (94). This chapter explores interwar attempts by the state and the church to confine poor whites to labor colonies designed to teach thrift and labor discipline. Willoughby-Herard highlights interwar representations of black workers as unfairly lowering the wages of white workers. Rather too sweepingly, however, she accuses social historians of unthinkingly reproducing this myth. Chapter 5 touches on early twentieth-century studies of white poverty that preceded the report of the Carnegie Commission. Here the author makes the subtle yet provocative observation that “white misery” was as important to white supremacy as white privilege. This is perhaps the best-supported point in this book. We see numerous relatively wealthy white experts—predominantly men—policing the bodies of poorer white people. Attributing considerable agency to global philanthropies—and much less to political parties, individuals, schools of thought, or industry lobbyists—the author posits that the Carnegie Corporation propagated knowledge that legitimated this intense policing of poor whites by trained experts in interwar South Africa, but that it also supported the closely related, more extensive, and ultimately more violent policing of black bodies.

Chapter 6 describes the Carnegie Corporation’s Overseas Visitors Program as yet another vector of colonial education. Citing Edward Berman, the author suggests that the Carnegie Corporation extended the legacy of the Phelps...