Mark Hunter's new book makes an unsurprising but important argument: the hegemony of whiteness – a lingering vestige of the apartheid period – continues to shape contemporary schooling in South Africa. In Race for Education, he illustrates this using evidence derived from schools across three different communities in Durban, South Africa. Using these data, Hunter demonstrates how schools work to follow Eurocentric ideals, or rather what he labels ‘white tone’, by simultaneously weeding out those who do not hold certain physical and cultural characteristics associated with whiteness and poaching those who do to market one's school.
The book reminds me of important and ongoing work written in US scholarship on race and schooling, for example Maia Cucchiara's Marketing Cities, Marketing Schools (University of Chicago Press 2016), and Julia McWilliams recently released book, Compete or Close (Harvard Education Press 2019). By engaging these themes, Hunter brings the situation of South Africa into a global conversation around public schooling and capitalism and the latter's inherent conflict with justice and equity.
The book also provides an incredibly powerful updated description of the historical context that has shaped the current schooling in South Africa, particularly as it relates to the seemingly hierarchal relations between blacks, coloureds, Indians and whites. Hunter also does an excellent job of illustrating the ways in which the school system both perpetuates and disrupts these hierarchal relations in the post-apartheid period.
The book, for all its strengths, however, does have some serious flaws as well. To start, the book claims to engage in a gender analysis, and even has gender in the title. However, the gender analysis is very thin and is largely kept analytically separate from race, making gender seem distinct rather than intersectional. Further, the gender analysis is enjoined at the end of several chapters, even in the Introduction, and is thus positioned as more of an after-thought than a central part of the author's approach. Perhaps most important, the discussion itself largely lacks references to gender-based theories or even female and/or feminist authors. It is very clear that the book would have been better positioned as simply a race analysis of schooling rather than one that takes gender seriously.
Second, there is very little discussion of the immigrant communities that make a central part of contemporary South African society – particularly Zimbabweans and Nigerians. How, for example, are these groups being positioned in society, from a schooling perspective, and how does that shape future opportunities for them versus native South African blacks? Are these groups being poached to schools that value ‘white tone’ as well? And if not, how then do we explain the xenophobia that has transpired in the context of the white tone theory? Although the author may have considered these issues beyond the scope of the book, the constant challenges with xenophobia that continue to emerge in South Africa make it seem particularly relevant to consider how this may or may not shape modern schooling.
Nonetheless, even with the above critiques, there is so much to like in Hunter's book: the historical description, the clear writing, the use of ethnography. It is certainly a book I would recommend for its racial analysis.
