{"id":48297,"date":"2016-07-16T15:25:48","date_gmt":"2016-07-16T15:25:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=48297"},"modified":"2016-07-16T15:25:48","modified_gmt":"2016-07-16T15:25:48","slug":"the-myth-of-white-purity-and-narratives-that-fed-racism-in-south-africa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=48297","title":{"rendered":"The Myth of White Purity and Narratives That Fed Racism in South Africa"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Myth of White Purity and Narratives That Fed Racism in South Africa<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Wire<\/a>
\n2016-06-18<\/p>\n

Nicky Falkof<\/strong><\/a>, Senior Lecturer in Media Studies
\nUniversity of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\nAn apartheid<\/a>-era sign from South Africa<\/a>. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.<\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

The rhetoric of racial purity is full of suggestive terms like illness, weakening and dilution. These imply the medicalisation of the nation.<\/em><\/p>\n

In this extract from her book <\/em>The End of Whiteness: Satanism and Family Murder in Late Apartheid South Africa<\/a>, Nicky Falkof explores how ideas about disease, risk and danger that the apartheid<\/a> government applied to black people were transposed onto fears about Satanism<\/a> during the 1980s.<\/em><\/p>\n

The grand apartheid<\/a> regime\u2019s most pressing fear was gelykstelling<\/em>, an Afrikaans<\/a> word that means \u201cequalisation\u201d. It believed that this would bring on the \u201cmishmash cohabitation\u201d and eventual bloedvermenging \u2013 blood mixing \u2013 that threatened the purity of the white race.<\/p>\n

During the run-up to the 1938 election, the National Party<\/a> campaigned on the argument that the ruling United Party\u2019s policy of allowing mixed marriages would cause mass miscegenation. This, in the words of Afrikaans intellectual N.J. van der Merwe<\/a>, would lead to \u201cmixing of the blood and the ruin of the white race\u201d.<\/p>\n

During the 1970s Afrikaans genealogist J.A. Heese uncovered records of more than 1,200 European men in South Afric<\/a>a who married non-white women between 1652 and 1800. Through this he determined that approximately 7.2% of Afrikaner<\/a> heritage was non-white. This complicated history was not admissible within the apartheid imaginary…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Myth of White Purity and Narratives That Fed Racism in South Africa The Wire 2016-06-18 Nicky Falkof, Senior Lecturer in Media Studies University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa An apartheid-era sign from South Africa. Credit: Wikimedia Commons. The rhetoric of racial purity is full of suggestive terms like illness, weakening and dilution. These […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1295,8413,459,8,520],"tags":[24498,20728],"class_list":["post-48297","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-africa","category-communications","category-history","category-media-archive","category-south-africa","tag-nicky-falkof","tag-the-wire"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48297","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=48297"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48297\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48298,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48297\/revisions\/48298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=48297"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=48297"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=48297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}