White Workers in the Late Apartheid Period: A Report on the Wiehahn Commission and Mineworkers’ Union Archival Collections

2015 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
pp. 229-258 ◽  
Author(s):  
Danelle van Zyl-Hermann
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Black Population ◽  
Racial Privilege ◽  
History Of ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Labour Legislation ◽  
White Workers ◽  
High Politics

Abstract:This paper offers a critique of the existing historiography on the late apartheid period, arguing that white workers’ role in and experience of the unraveling of racial privilege in the labor arena has been obscured by a focus on the high politics of reform and on anti-apartheid resistance emanating from African labor and the broader black population. Reporting from the archive, it discusses two under-utilized archival collections – that of the Commission of Inquiry into Labour Legislation and of the Mineworkers’ Union – as sources for starting to write white working-class organization, politics, identity, and experience into the history of reform and resistance, thereby adding a new dimension to South Africa’s broadly conceived struggle history.

British Television's Lost New Wave Moment: Single Drama and Race

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 612-627 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleni Liarou
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Black Population ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Audiovisual Material ◽  
British Drama ◽  
History Of ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Written Sources

The article argues that the working-class realism of post-WWII British television single drama is neither as English nor as white as is often implied. The surviving audiovisual material and written sources (reviews, publicity material, biographies of television writers and directors) reveal ITV's dynamic role in offering a range of views and representations of Britain's black population and their multi-layered relationship with white working-class cultures. By examining this neglected history of postwar British drama, this article argues for more inclusive historiographies of British television and sheds light on the dynamism and diversity of British television culture.

If All We Did Was to Weep at Home: A History of White Working-Class Women in America

1980 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
pp. 653
Author(s):  
Alice Kessler-Harris ◽  
Susan Estabrook Kennedy
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
History Of ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
At Home

The Ordeal of Assimilation: A Documentary History of the White Working Class

1975 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 283
Author(s):  
Murray Binderman ◽  
Stanley Feldstein ◽  
Lawrence Costello
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Documentary History ◽  
History Of ◽  
White Working Class

scholarly journals Revisiting White Labourism: New Debates on Working-Class Whiteness in Twentieth-Century Southern Africa

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Duncan Money ◽  
Danelle van Zyl-Hermann
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
Transnational Migration ◽  
Class Politics ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
White Workers

Abstract This article is a contribution to and reassessment of the debate about the concept of ‘white labourism’ hosted in this journal in 2010. White labourism is a concept formulated by Jonathan Hyslop to describe an ideology combining an anti-capitalist critique with racial segregation that he argued was dominant in a transnational white working class in the British Empire in the early twentieth century. The debate about this concept has focused on the appeal and extent of this ideology in South Africa during the early twentieth century. In light of recent scholarship on Southern Africa, we take a longer-term perspective to critically examine the concept and the debate. Specifically, we make three interventions into this debate: we consider the role of white workers outside British imperial networks; we examine how radical and revolutionary ideas disappeared from white-working class politics in the mid-twentieth century; and we reassess the connection between transnational flows of people and ideas. Racial divisions in the working class and labour movement in Southern Africa were persistent and enduring. We argue that racial segregation had an enduring appeal to white workers in Southern Africa, and the sources of this appeal were more varied and locally rooted than simply transnational migration to the region.

Fathering Orphans

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessie B. Ramey
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Child Care ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Family Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
History Of ◽  
White Working Class

This chapter begins with the James Caldwell story, which brings the experience of fathers into sharp relief—a significant, and all but forgotten, aspect of orphanage history—as well as the broader history of child care, in the United States. While many orphanage children had living fathers, the institutional managers constructed “orphans” as fatherless, perpetuating a gendered and racialized logic of dependency. Yet for those men using the orphanages as a form of child care, their experiences as widowers differed from those of solo women with children. Furthermore, the experiences of African American and white working-class men were also quite different. Ultimately, the orphanages help reveal the extent to which each group of men was involved with the care of their children, as well as the connection between their breadwinning role and family life.

If All We Did Was to Weep at Home: A History of White Working-Class Woimen in America

1980 ◽  
Vol 85 (4) ◽  
pp. 992
Author(s):  
Philip S. Foner ◽  
Susan Estabrook Kennedy
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
History Of ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
At Home

Racial Conflict and Split Labor Markets

1998 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 319-347
Author(s):  
Cliff Brown
Keyword(s):  
Labor Markets ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Racial Conflict ◽  
Racial Privilege ◽  
History Of ◽  
Racial Lines ◽  
White Workers ◽  
Significant Attention ◽  
The U.S

Recently, scholars have devoted significant attention to race relations in the history of the U.S. labor movement. This research has explored the militancy of African American workers, examined how racism divided particular organizing drives, and documented white workers’ efforts to preserve racial privilege. Much of this work has also emphasized workers’ agency but has obscured the racial implications of labor market characteristics (for exceptions see Maloney 1995; Sugrue 1996). This article argues that racial conflict during the 1919 steel organizing drive resulted from the development of split labor markets, which constrained workers’ opportunities to exercise agency based on class position but encouraged workers to exercise agency in terms of their racial interests. In 1919, the sources of workers’ empowerment diverged along racial lines.

Making Blanket Statements: Rethinking the History and Politics of American Social Class

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 280-286
Author(s):  
ANDREW SEAL
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
American History ◽  
White People ◽  
White Trash ◽  
History Of ◽  
White Working Class

In Joan C. Williams's White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America and Nancy Isenberg's White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, the reader will find a nation riven by abiding class prejudice. Both have written explicitly with the goal of forcing readers to confront the deep, ugly, and ultimately destructive effects of elite snobbery towards working-class or impoverished white people. They both believe that educated readers tend to minimize or ignore how much class matters and has mattered in American history and to deny their own class biases; these books are meant to make that denial harder to sustain.

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