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Critical Whiteness Literature Review

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At times whiteness can hold sentiments of privilege or a desirable social status. Other times, it can position itself as source of victimhood or a “tenuous situational identity” (Twine & Gallagher, 2008, p.7).

The study of “whiteness” was birthed in the early 1990s from critical race theory (CRT) in the United States of America (Delgado &Stefancic, 2001). CRC was built on two movements, critical legal studies and radical feminism (Delgado &Stefancic, 2001). The literature used for this study, draws on CRC and its relation to feminist insights which aim to explore the “relationship between power and the construction of social roles...and the largely invisible collection of patterns that make up types of domination” (Delgado &Stefancic, 2001, p.6).
Studies on race and racism had predominately centred its attention on those constructed on the margins as “black” (Steyn, 2001). Critical Whiteness studies however, distinguished itself as a field to explore “the …show more content…

White South African masculinities appear to be the biggest carriers of these complexities. Research and literature therefore need to expand on alternative “whiteness” in South Africa and its intersection with masculinity (Kelly, 2008).

The narrative of whiteness in South Africa holds particularities which separates itself from other white identities elsewhere. Steyn (2001) notes that South African whiteness has always been divided by “two major groups of European stock”(p.26) where each had viewed the other us “lower” than the other, resulting in “internal colonization within the white group” (p.26). The beginning of the 19th century created this division through British acquisition of the Cape. From the start, this acquisition produced “an incipient tension” (p.194) between Afrikaners and the British authority. (Giliomee,

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