This article introduces a new way to evaluate the political and theoretical significance of the Carnegie Commission Poor White Study conducted from 1927 to 1932 in South Africa. Building on the recent literature on whiteness and the older literature on scientific racism, I argue that the scientific language about biology and physiognomy that is usually linked to scientific racism must be brought back into conversation with the literary, historical, legal, and cultural analysis of critical whiteness studies to be a more effective scholarly rejoinder to white supremacy. Critical whiteness studies must track the institutional and professional investments in the creation of white supremacy and white nationalism through various colonial relations across geographical and territorial space. In a productive turn toward the specificity of South African history, this essay also makes claims about the nature of whiteness vis-à-vis Afrikaner and British identity that provide powerful antidotes to the historiographical obsession with autochthonous ethnic identities among white supremacists. Finally, through close attention to the actual experiences of "poor whites" a set of moral directives and knowledge claims emerge about the urgency of antiracist research that makes this racial formation more than simply an add-on in the litany of radical projects.

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Feminist literary critics and historians have examined the role of a triad of social locations that are also recognisable as psychological conditions, structures of feeling and motivations for action: guilt, innocence and culpability. Feminist literary critics and historians have examined this triad guilt/innocence/culpability in cultural representations of v^hite femininity in the post-apartheid era, because they are trying to write white women into the history of apartheid not simply as zombified non-actors. The attention to white women as perpetrators of anti-black and other forms of racialised violence has been critical for excavating the many forms of domination that constituted apartheid in the period prior to 1994 and in the political project of re-making a post-apartheid society. Thus, they wish to place white women into the history of apartheid as perpetrators of antiblack violence. I cm concerned with this, but also with white women as perpetrators of racialised anti-white violence, because intra-racial violence is so intimately connected to the creation of interracial violence and the maintenance of white supremacy. Thus, while white women's pursuit of status as caretakers and social guides for blacks has been unmasked as a feature of domination and white supremacy, white women's relationships to poor white women have not been critiqued with the same robustness. This article utilises Marie Elizabeth Rothmann's (1875Rothmann's ( -1975 (1932) to consider this subject in the vignettes, oral histories and life histories collected for inclusion in the Poor White Study, and in order to urge greater attention to the Poor White Study as a data set for re-thinking guilt, innocence and culpability. I discuss the race, class and gender dynamics of the racialisation of poverty among poor whites, because poor whites were an essential racial formation in the manufacture of Afrikaner nationalism as a gendered national project, and because the institutions and practices of rehabilitation of poor whites participated in a colonial logic of demonisation. I argue that Marie Elizabeth Rothmann's report for the Poor White study provides a cartography of how the history of philanthropy and welfarism bound poor white women and upper-class white South volume for The Poor White Study on The Mother and Daughter of the Poor Family

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