Repertoires for talking white: Resistant whiteness in post-apartheid South Africa

‘It's just taking our souls back’: discourses of apartheid and race

“…He didn't want to go to the Soweto uprisings he was kind of like aah umm, you know he had no choice but now I feel like it's still my fault B: Ja C: and I'm like I wasn't born then A: Yeah C: I didn't see anything, I went to school with black people and didn't hate on any of them The speakers are protective of their fathers' reputations: while they reject any culpability themselves for 'the sins of the father', they also claim the right for their fathers to be victims too. This kind of 'victimperpetrator' reversal is characteristic of the discourse of white participants in other studies (Steyn and Foster 2008, Verwey and Quayle 2012, Walker 2005b). In addition, their 'equalising rhetoric' (Steyn and Foster 2008: 31), explicit distancing of themselves from apartheid which they construct as 'over' and their 'power evasive colour blindness ' (2008: 29) makes their discourse typical of white participants in other studies, both locally and internationally (see also Twine and Gallagher 2008, Wale 2014, Walker 2005a.…”

“…It seems that the discourse being constructed in both groups is carefully non-racial, in the sense that little othering work is evident. In this way, their discourse typifies what Steyn and Foster (2008) refer to as 'white talk', a way of speaking which enables white South Africans to defend their continuing privilege without opening themselves up to the criticism of racism or the need to acknowledge their inherited privilege. Instead, their discourse is rather overwhelmingly preoccupied with rejecting the role of perpetrator frequently associated with white South Africans.…”

“…This is reminiscent of Steyn and Foster's (2008) discussion of amnesia/silencing/distortion where white people engaging in 'white talk' are said to ignore or reframe the past. For Amber's friends, apartheid ended abruptly in 1994 and has had no after-effects, structural or individual, since then.…”

“…Although apartheid officially ended in 1994, race has continued to permeate many aspects of private and public life as debates on equity, whiteness, redress and transformation weave through our public discourses (Bundy 2014, Mbembe 2008, Steyn and Foster 2008. Ansell (2004), for example, explores what she terms the 'two nations of discourse' that suffuse written submissions on race to the South African Human Rights Commission in 2000.…”

We Cannot Become Oppressors: Towards a Critique of Safety through a Reading of Students’ Reflective Journals on Issues of Race and Racism

“…This factor exacerbates the discomfort experienced by white subjects when they are confronted with this privilege and their personal implication in the racist distribution of power [8,4,5]. Often such difficult knowledge elicits a variety of defensive stances, such as asserting that white South Africans have become the real victims of a race-obsessed post-1994 government [9]. Maintaining the viability of such defence stances involves a broad range of power-evasive explanations for racial disparity and ideologically-productive accounts of race that are typically expressed in wellrehearsed patterns and with a pseudo-logic, as identified in studies of white resistance discourse [4,6,7,9].…”