Putting Whiteness in its Place

When the United States announced that white Afrikaners would be eligible for refugee status, many commentators treated it as an oddity, even an embarrassment. But the move is not an anomaly. It is a symptom. It marked a moment in which whiteness, long associated with power, privilege and protection, was publicly reframed as endangered. In this reframing, white grievance is elevated to humanitarian crisis, while the structural precarity faced by black, queer, migrant, and indigenous communities continues to be ignored, dismissed or criminalised. A narrative that had circulated for years on the fringes, the myth of a white genocide in South Africa, suddenly found its way into the language of policy. What had once been conspiratorial came to be recast as state-recognised suffering. Humanitarian language is made a mockery of. Historical responsibility is turned on its head. And whiteness, far from retreating, is finding new ways to assert itself as the supreme form of life, reinventing itself as vulnerable, deserving, and in need of rescue to the detriment of all of its racialised others.[i]

We felt an urgency to gather and confront the reactionary politics gaining momentum across the globe, and convened a symposium titled ‘Whiteness in Relation’ with scholars and activists from different backgrounds and places.[ii] .This article highlights key themes and issues related to global whiteness that emerged from the symposium’s research and discussions.

Whiteness, ‘Invisibility’ and Power

Our thinking is framed by Shona Hunter and Christi van der Westhuizen’s writing which defines ‘whiteness’ as “a dynamic, shifting, but durable system of domination through, under, against and within which people live, work, and relate”.[iii] They also argue that, in contrast to received wisdom in critical whiteness studies in the Global North, whiteness does not work through ‘invisibility’. Whereas in the Global North white privilege was seen as an invisible “knapsack”, as Peggy McIntosh famously described it, from the Global South whiteness can adopt hypervisibility as a way to assert its power. A glaring example is the apartheid-era ‘whites only’ designation in the use of public amenities. Moreover, whiteness is a highly adaptable racial formation of power.  It learns. It travels. It appropriates political techniques from opposing ideologies, paradoxically strengthening itself with the resultant contradictions.

We need to understand how whiteness operates across borders. How institutions, media platforms, emotional registers, and political alliances are used to recreate and reorganise whiteness as its hegemony is challenged. In speaking back to the field of whiteness studies as shaped in the Global North, we believe theorisation from the Global South must be deliberately foregrounded, as in the writing of  William Mpofu and Shona Hunter. This is not about adding ‘other perspectives’ for balance, but for us to think and speak from where we are. It is about analytical clarity. The legacies of dehumanisation that settler colonialism, apartheid, and racial capitalism bequeathed make it impossible to pretend that whiteness is merely a cultural expression. For example, Pieter du Plessis’s work shows how interactions among forms of colonial and postcolonial whiteness across continents historically bolster white supremacism. These harsh histories and their material effects demand that we place whiteness as central to the structuring of power.

Whiteness is Organised Power 

Reflecting on these various aspects, it has become clear again that whiteness is organised power that shifts over time. White grievance is channelled through institutions, lobbying strategies, minority-rights frameworks, digital infrastructures, and transnational alliances, as research by Jody Metcalfe and Danelle van Zyl-Hermann shows. From this perspective, the US refugee decision appears less as a sudden rupture and more as the outcome of long-term political work that perversely exploits the moral authority of humanitarian language. This insight resonates far beyond South Africa. We see similar patterns in contemporary geopolitics. The genocide in Gaza reveals how unevenly humanitarian concern is distributed. Entire populations can be subjected to mass violence, displacement, and starvation, while powerful states debate semantics or offer unconditional support to the perpetrators. 

At the same time, renewed talk of territorial seizure and resource theft, such as the US’s threat to annex Greenland, follows older colonial logics dressed up as security or necessity. Perennial US interference in Venezuela, framed in the past as the promotion of democracy or of regional stability, has been overtaken by an explicit claim to the country’s oil wealth in a resuscitation of 19^th century imperial demands. These issues are not separate to whiteness. They are connected by a shared logic in which power justifies itself through selective urgency, sometimes couched in the language of morality, sometimes in the language of naked power grab.

Belonging under Threat and Entitlement

Whiteness is increasingly articulated as a claim to belonging that is under threat. This is evident in the case of transnational media platforms sympathetic to Afrikaner causes, casting this ethno-racially defined group as an ostensibly endangered population in narratives circulated between South Africa, Europe, and North America, as Zuziwe Nokwanda Msomi has argued. South Africa’s shift to a non-racial constitutional democracy is reinvented as a warning of a foreboding future in which white people are punished after the loss of racial and state-structured dominance. Visions of such a future are then mobilised elsewhere to justify harsher borders, exclusionary citizenship regimes, and authoritarian politics. It is also the case that many white South Africans who have moved abroad continue to shape how South Africa is narrated and understood, often through stories of crime, decline, and persecution. This not only shows how whiteness circulates globally through migration, but how these narratives travel easily in media environments primed for racialised fear, as Rachel Lara van der Merwe has shown. Whilst not simply reflecting anxiety, the narratives actively contribute to global right-wing imaginaries in which multiracial democracy itself is cast as dangerous.

At the same time, research has challenged any idea that whiteness might be singular or homogeneous, for example, a case study of a poor white community in post-apartheid South Africa by Nonkululeko Mabaso demonstrates how economic marginality can exist alongside enduring racial privilege. These contexts help explain why claims of “reverse oppression” are so effective. Whiteness does not need to lose power to claim injury. Its strength lies in its flexibility, in its ability to turn insecurity, stigma, or loss of status into renewed entitlement.

Whiteness does not Need White Skin to Function

Research and analysis also show that whiteness does not need white skin to function. Again and again, whiteness appears not as a biological fact, but as an ideological and structural formation. It can be taken up, reproduced, and enforced by actors who are not phenotypically white, but who participate in and benefit from systems organised around extraction, domination, exclusion, and disposability. In this sense, whiteness operates as a way of ordering the world. It shapes which lives are protected, which deaths are grieved, and which forms of violence are rendered normal or necessary.

These dynamics are especially visible in contemporary Afrikaner whiteness in South Africa. It has a history of conditional belonging, marked by a sense of never quite being secure, and never entirely accepted. That history helps explain why apocalyptic language and victimhood narratives resonate so strongly with some Afrikaners today, as Hannelie Marx Knoetze shows in her work. Yet there are also internal contestations. Alongside grievance politics are voices calling for accountability and ethical responsibility. This commitment to challenging the unresolved legacies of apartheid rather than fleeing from them can be seen in a recent letter from concerned Afrikaners rejecting the Trumpist appropriation of Afrikaner identity.

Whiteness at the Intersections of Gender and Sexuality

The reframing of whiteness as victimhood is inseparable from internal and external gendered and sexual hierarchies. Analyses of media narratives around violence show how whiteness is articulated through selective humanisation. White male perpetrators are frequently portrayed as complex, traumatised, and redeemable, while black male perpetrators are rendered dangerous and disposable, as shown in Baleseng Maeneche’s research. Similar dynamics can be traced within sexual politics. Lwando Scott’s work shows that, even within movements that claim progressive values, whiteness can secure itself through respectability, silence, and access to capital. These hierarchies of empathy mirror humanitarian regimes that construct white families as ideal victims, while racialised and gendered migrants are treated as threats or burdens.

The Emotional Life of Whiteness

It is important to also pay close attention to the emotional life of whiteness - in other words, feelings through which whiteness is experienced and is politically mobilised. The deployment of shame, guilt, empathy, and respectability shows how whiteness is reproduced not only through denial, but through managed feeling. Feelings can be politically mobilised, as seen in populist politics that drive grievance and rage. But shame can also be a catalyst for ethical responsibility and antiracist practice, as Judy-Marie van Noordwyk explores in her research. Unacknowledged shame can mutate into grievance and feed narratives of victimhood and minority protection. Christi van der Westhuizen’s concept of ordentlikheid[iv] helps articulate how moral aspiration continues to structure who is seen as respectable, deserving, or redeemable within whiteness itself.

Putting Whiteness in its Place 

Responding to these dynamics requires more than critique. It requires rethinking how knowledge is produced and whose knowledge counts. Insights from the Global South and particularly from Africa shed light on the postcolonial working of whiteness. It becomes clear that whiteness is sustained through epistemic and institutional infrastructures just as much as through policy and media. This reflection is shaped by what becomes visible when we engage in open and frank conversation across the boundaries and barriers of the global racial order. 

The US decision to grant refugee status to white Afrikaners did not initiate these conversations, but certainly focuses the mind on better understanding and confronting white supremacism in its 21^st century guises.  Current US politics exemplifies a broader global trend in which humanitarian language is used to invert victimhood, historical accountability is reframed as persecution, and universal rights are selectively applied to protect those who have long benefited from racial hierarchy. What is needed now is not neutrality, but integrity in staying the course of anti-racism. Thinking about whiteness relationally, transnationally, and from the South and specifically Africa does not offer easy solutions. But it does help us to name what is happening, trace how it is sustained, and put whiteness in its place - by refusing the fiction that justice can be built on the rescue of those in positions of privilege and power.

Pieter du Plessis is a South African PhD candidate in the Philosophy Department at Maastricht University. His interdisciplinary project focuses on transnational forms of whiteness in the context of Dutch-Afrikaner relations, through the case of Het Zuid-Afrikahuis, a cultural and knowledge centre on South Africa in Amsterdam.

Christi van der Westhuizen is Professor of Sociology at the University of the Western Cape, author of White Power & the Rise and Fall of the National Party and co-editor of the Routledge International Handbook of Critical Studies in Whiteness.