CHRISTI VAN DER WESTHUIZEN|
IN his latest book sociologist Professor Roger Southall, a prolific researcher who has written extensively about political dynamics in Southern Africa, avoids the “negative and condemnatory” approach generally seen in writing on white South Africans, the creators and beneficiaries of apartheid.
In the preface to the book, Whites and Democracy in South Africa, he explains that he’s done this to instead undertake a nuanced and constructive assessment of white people’s adjustment to post-apartheid democracy.
Therefore, he enters the South African debate on critical race studies by setting his study apart from whiteness scholarship that assumes the homogeneity of white practices, ideas and attitudes and that being white is synonymous with being racist (p. 13).
Southall criticises academic writing that attempts the corrective re-orientation of white people towards adopting more desirable behaviour as “sociologically overambitious” (p. 13).
He regards such scholarship as prescriptive and removed from the everyday
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