White Women and Antiracism in the (Post)Colony of South Africa

Feminist scholars such as Ann Laura Stoler and María Lugones have shown how colonial patriarchy, or patriarchal coloniality, constructs and relies on a vulnerable, sexually pure, and passive white femininity in oppositional relation to a rapacious Black masculinity. This logic serves four political agendas: it racializes the colonized, secures and justifies (paternalistic) patriarchal control over white women and their reproductive sexuality, legitimizes racial segregation and dispossession and the control and surveillance of Black men, and renders Black women disposable, beyond the reach or concern of the law. In the South African (post)colony, as in colonial situations everywhere, the imposed vulnerability of the white woman (constructed as a foil for a heroic and protective white nationalist masculinity) has historically served as a justification for both patriarchal and white racial control, installing the white man at the top of the naturalized racial-sexual order. This positionality renders the cooperation of the white South African feminine subject key to the maintenance of the colonial structures of white power. In contrast to the work of scholars like Samantha Vice and Robin DiAngelo, who hold silence and guilt to be the only valid contribution that white people can offer to antiracist struggles, we recast the white woman's positionality as one that contains specific power and potential for resistance against systems of colonial racialization. We argue that white women are uniquely able to speak and act productively against systems of racism because of their racial/gendered subject positioning in relation to white male power.