This is an important and timely book. Richly researched, it offers a carefully historicized, and analytically nuanced, account of the ironies and complexities of race and schooling in South Africa, from the apartheid years and beyond, to the present. None of the issues it raises are unique to South Africa, with particularly strong resonances with more global trends in the marketization of schooling and how this articulates with the dynamics of race and racialized aspiration.
Its interest and significance extend beyond the milieu of schooling, too, in part through the introduction of the concept of ‘white tone’. Hunter uses this concept to identify and explore one among several post-apartheid disappointments. The abolition of formal racial barriers, together with the pursuit of affirmative action, has produced significantly greater racial inclusivity in many institutions – such as the civil service, schools, universities and parastatals – offering black people opportunities previously barred by apartheid. Yet, often, these demographic changes have not been accompanied by a cultural or ideological ‘de-whitening’ (to use Hunter's phrase). Many (perhaps not all) desegregated institutions have remained ‘white’ in their ways.
The residual powers of whiteness in post-apartheid South Africa – attesting to the limits of the ‘miracle’ of the 1994 moment – were the focus of a wave of student protests that broke over South African universities in 2015, producing the #RhodesMustFall movement at the University of Cape Town and #FeesMustFall as a more national initiative. ‘Decolonizing’ the universities was a central rhetorical theme and ideological demand. Hunter explicitly locates his Durban case study in this context, as a moment in which the politics of whiteness has taken centre stage in the public sphere nationally (as well as in many other parts of the world). For me, one of the major contributions of Hunter's study is his analysis of the variegated and fluid life of whiteness. In many of the other commentaries on the phenomenon, the notion of ‘white privilege’ drives the narrative. Few writers explicitly define or unpack the concept, presenting its meaning as self-evident. The glossary to Susan Booysen's edited collection Fees Must Fall: student revolt, decolonisation and governance in South Africa (Wits University Press, 2016) usefully offers a definition that resonates well with its usage in many other texts. ‘White privilege,’ she suggests, ‘is a set of advantages or access to certain benefits that have been exclusively developed for white people. White people have white privilege because a system of whiteness is present in South Africa and across the globe, which means that society is structured around white people and their culture’ (p. 329). White privilege, then, is fixed, pervasive and systemic. Its effects are monolithic and disempowering.
The concept of ‘white tone’ works somewhat differently. ‘White tone,’ Hunter writes, ‘is slippery to define and is not a notion that can be applied in all settings or at all times. Like musical tone, people can interpret it differently depending on time and place’ (p. 12). Metaphorically speaking, white tone is not the concrete of white privilege, the immoveable structural precondition of individual agency. White tone is more fluid, moving in and through the channels configured by a multiplicity of considerations, many of which are contextually specific. And white tone is both a value and a commodity that is knowingly and deliberately mobilized by a range of actors seeking to maximize their various interests. There are some clear affinities here with Bourdieu's notion of symbolic capital: the symbolic manufacture of honour and prestige. Hunter shows how these investments differ in the Durban schools, across class, status and gender divides. For example, in some of the more upmarket, ‘liberal’ middle-class schools, a degree of racial diversity – the ‘right kind’ of diversity – may add to the white tone of the school, contributing to its political legitimacy, in contrast to the white tone of schools in less affluent, more conservative settings. The fluidity of white tone also manifests in the strategies adopted by the parents seeking appropriate schools for their children. Some parents (white and coloured) choose to send their children to a school with a white tone that favours Afrikaans as a medium of instruction, reasserting the cultural salience and legitimacy of the language.
Hunter's book abounds with fascinating empirical examples of such variegations in the workings of white tone, producing an analysis of whiteness that is deftly situational and replete with irony and local complexity. Here is the analytical template for similarly rich and nuanced analyses of all institutional settings in the country, not least its universities. But then what of ‘white privilege’? The book left me wondering whether a structural notion of white privilege (as used by Booysen and others) had been displaced, or whether it lingers, tacitly, as part of the backdrop against which the vagaries of white tone take shape. Is ‘white privilege’ the condition of ‘white tone’, or does the latter offer an opportunity to revisit – or discard – the former, as an unnecessarily static and reified rendition of the life of whiteness?
