#WhiteIdentityPolitics among South African elites, Boersema argues “masquerades as a process of unlearning racism, because it co-opts the ideas of non-white people, and sometimes non-white people themselves. However, its goal is to promote White racial self-interest while masking racial inequality and White privilege”

#JacobBoersema #CanWeUnlearnRacism

“The [South African] White elite use culture in 3 different ways to defend their interests and identity:

first, they use #storytelling to shape the dominant cultural narratives in a society;

second, they value #CulturalCapital in the process of the racial integration of elite organizations…; and

third, they adopt the political strategies and language of #marginalized communities to neutralize their effect in undoing White power and privilege”

#JacobBoersema #racism

#JacobBoersema: “Sociologists invented apartheid”

“This book pushes back against the dominant individual therapeutic model of unlearning racism… I challenge the idea that unlearning racism can only be thought of as an act of willpower or an intentional process that people walk through individually and willingly (it cannot be forced upon people). However, history teaches us that this is a false belief:

people have often confronted the challenge of unlearning racism by necessity”

#JacobBoersema @bookstodon

#SundayReading

“[White] South Africans imagined unlearning #racism as a collective challenge, a uniquely South African idea they saw neither limited to "coming to terms with the past" nor solved by embracing the ideal of nonracialism. Rather, White South Africans saw unlearning racism as a goal of reconfiguring Whiteness away from an ideology of White superiority and privilege and toward something else: to be White without Whiteness.”

#JacobBoersema #CanWeUnlearnRacism @bookstodon