About
How were whites implicated in and shaped by apartheid culture and society, and how did they contribute to it?
In Ordinary Whites in Apartheid Society, historian Neil Roos traces the lives of ordinary white people in South Africa during the apartheid years, beginning in 1948 when the National Party swept into power on the back of its catchall apartheid slogan. Drawing on his own family's story and others, Roos explores how working-class whites frequently defied particular aspects of the apartheid state but seldom opposed or even acknowledged the idea of racial supremacy, which lay at the heart of the apartheid society. This cognitive dissonance afforded them a way to simultaneously accommodate and oppose apartheid and allowed them to later claim they never supported the apartheid system.
Ordinary Whites in Apartheid Society offers a telling reminder that the politics and practice of race, in this case apartheid-era whiteness, derive not only from the top, but also from the bottom.
In Ordinary Whites in Apartheid Society, historian Neil Roos traces the lives of ordinary white people in South Africa during the apartheid years, beginning in 1948 when the National Party swept into power on the back of its catchall apartheid slogan. Drawing on his own family's story and others, Roos explores how working-class whites frequently defied particular aspects of the apartheid state but seldom opposed or even acknowledged the idea of racial supremacy, which lay at the heart of the apartheid society. This cognitive dissonance afforded them a way to simultaneously accommodate and oppose apartheid and allowed them to later claim they never supported the apartheid system.
Ordinary Whites in Apartheid Society offers a telling reminder that the politics and practice of race, in this case apartheid-era whiteness, derive not only from the top, but also from the bottom.
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Reviews
"This is really a remarkable book, most notably for how the narrative of apartheid society in its early years is meshed with selected visual and textual moments from the author's family autobiography. What is important is that for the most part the linkages are not always self-evident, and it is left to the reader to make the connections."
Leslie Witz - University of the Western Cape)
"Neil Roos's book is a landmark book in South African historiography. This is a very compelling book, beautifully written and structured. Social history is not easy to write because it demands that a mass of detail, ordinarily considered uninteresting because it documents the unremarkable, the quotidian, be rendered as a narrative that eschews great events."
Robert Morrell
"This is a rich, compellingly written book that draws on extensive archival research, with the sections devoted to Roos's family making for especially interesting and often poignant reading."
SE Duff