Research Explorer

Project

Poor Whites, Play Whites and Grey People: Working-class lives on the colour line. Cape Town 1930- 2020
Code
01CD07024
Duration
01 November 2024 → 30 April 2025
Funding
Regional and community funding: Special Research Fund
Research disciplines
  • Social sciences
    • Social differentiation, stratification and social mobility
    • Postcolonial studies
Keywords
Apartheid Racialisation White Working Class Cape Town Social Mobility
 
Project description
 A social history of a White working-class ‘model community’ turned ‘grey area’, this research reconstructs the attempted co-optation of a White underclass into the South African White Nationalist project. It explores the failure to fully incorporate Cape Town’s ‘mixed’ inner-city population into a strict racial order and traces the implications of Apartheid’s ‘incompleteness’ into the democratic era.