By the 1970s, the National Party (NP) maintained its social contract with conservative white labour and commitment to the protection of white working-class interests that had brought it to power in 1948. Yet as the decade brought economic and political turmoil, the NP defied working-class interests by moving to reform the race-based labour dispensation. Going beyond conventional historical explanations, the chapter argues that this shift was not simply a function of the changing nature of the NP’s support base and priorities. Rather, the move towards reform marked important changes in the local political imaginary and mirrored global shifts in the relations between states, labour, and capital in this period. This chapter employs parliamentary debates, media reports and sources from the secretive Afrikaner Broederbond to examine the changing politics surrounding white labour amid the 1970s’ emerging crisis. It demonstrates that the plight and power of white labour were central preoccupations shaping the political elite’s response to the crisis. Observing widespread labour unrest in countries including Britain, they were adamant that trade unions such as the Mineworkers’ Union be made subservient to the ‘national interest’. This saw the NP abandon its long-standing commitment to the protection of white workers.

In 1977, the NP appointed the Wiehahn Commission to investigate the reform of the apartheid labour legislation. This chapter represents the first extensive utilisation of the Commission’s documentation for historical research, providing new insights into issues of race, labour, and citizenship in the late apartheid state. It shows that white organised labour was at the forefront of the investigation, with unions testifying before and workers’ representatives serving on the Commission. Exposing the limitations of existing race-focused scholarship which views white labour as homogeneous and reform as a ‘scheme’ to safeguard white supremacy, it shows that reform was not in the interest of lesser-skilled whites whose position relied on the rightlessness of black labour. Granting industrial citizenship to Africans undermined the established convergence between rights and race. While the redesign of labour relations had little impact on middle-class and elite whites, for white workers it marked the beginning of the long transition: more than a decade before the end of apartheid, labour reform amounted to the withdrawal of state support for working-class whiteness and initiated the dismantling of white workers’ racially privileged citizenship.

This chapter argues for a reinterpretation of the nature of white working-class privilege in twentieth-century South Africa. Presenting the structural and subjective formation of the white working class in the context of South Africa’s industrial and political development since the late nineteenth century, it shows that, rather than a labour aristocracy, white workers represented a privileged precariat – benefiting from the advantages bestowed by their white skin, but remaining precariously dependent on state benevolence to protect them from black labour competition. Challenging simplistic understandings of white embourgeoisement, it shows that, on the eve of the 1970s’ crisis of capital accumulation and liberation struggle, there remained a materially more vulnerable group of whites in South Africa. Their social position and political priorities were defined by their class position. The chapter introduces the whites-only Mineworkers’ Union, whose members exemplified this position of labour vulnerability concealed by race-based status. With this argument, the chapter lays the foundation for this book’s assertion that the shape and legacy of white working-class formation are crucial for understanding white workers’ responses to reform efforts from the 1970s and the subsequent dismantling of the racial state, presented in subsequent chapters.

This chapter examines the role played by Irish American Catholic novels published between 1830 and 1880 in the US nation-building project. The novels of what Charles Fanning has labelled the ‘Famine Generation’ dominate the period in question. Famine Irish American literature has been considered insular, aimed primarily at keeping alienated immigrant readers within the Catholic flock. The literature’s US nation-building role has been ignored by Americanists and Irish studies scholars alike. This chapter strives to correct that anomaly. Situating Famine Irish writing firmly within the unfolding narrative of the US racial state, it shows the ways in which the Famine generation of Irish American writers performed crucial ideological functions on behalf of the US state.

A systemic racism approach to understanding racial states like the United States is well-validated in much historical and contemporary social science research. Here we emphasize a number of the key contributions of this contemporary approach to assessing the US racial state. We use “state” to mean a socially and territorially bounded community with a national government complex and many local government institutions. We include aspects of the state accented by the classical theorist Max Weber – national states’ territorial sovereignty and their monopolization of coercion – and also the state’s executive bureaucracy, legislatures, courts, legal norms, and overall political operations (2015 [1919]).

Since its first publication in 1986, Racial Formation in the United States by Michael Omi and Howard Winant has been arguably the most important theoretical text on race in sociology. In some real sense, the three decades between the first and the third editions were the age of racial formation theory. Over 12,000 citations ago, however, the book’s initial reception in the discipline was less than auspicious. Reviews in sociology journals were few and mixed (Driver 1988; Gordon 1989; Nagel 1988), but more than anything, disinterest prevailed.