In Waste of a White Skin: The Carnegie Corporation and the Racial Logic of White Vulnerability, Tiffany Willoughby-Herard demonstrates that “White Studies” is not as modern a field of research as we are led to believe. She does a deep dive into a pivotal research study conducted in South Africa from 1927 to 1932 titled Report of the Carnegie Commission of Investigation on the Poor White Question in South Africa, but generally known as The Poor White Study. Commissioned by the philanthropic Carnegie Corporation of New York (CCNY), the study sought to explain and then remedy the problematic of poor whites in South Africa. According to Willoughby-Herard, the importance of the project lies in the insights it provides into the spread and hegemony of a global whiteness project that extended from the United States and Europe to Africa and other parts of the world.

The Carnegie study itself was historically, methodologically, and theoretically flawed, e.g., it could not even settle on a consistent population count of “poor white people” ranging from a low of 58,000 to as many as 300,000 (P. 25.). But historical accuracy was not the point.

Willoughby-Herard argues, with some justification, that the study of poor whites is necessarily a discourse on Blacks and their role in the construction of the debate over whiteness. The Poor White Study, under the umbrella of scholarly distance but really a vehicle for ideological maneuver, maintains that competition from Black workers depressed wages and the social conditions of some whites thereby rendering them poor, marginalized, and unproletarianizable. That conclusion reflected the views of other white scholars, South African policy-makers and the leaders of the industrial sector who were concerned about the degeneration of the race. Willoughby-Herard appropriately disabuses that idea as flat-out racist and uses its advocacy by those forces to draw out her broader point regarding the white debate on whiteness.

Poor whites, as a subject and real world manifestation of what Willoughby-Herard terms “white misery,” (P. 8.) challenged fundamental tenets of white supremacy and specifically the eugenics movement and theory that supported it. If by biological destiny all whites were superior to all others, i.e., whiteness has a beneficiary distribution, then the existence of poor whites generates a dissonance that dismantles that argument. From the vantage point of white and Black nationalisms—albeit from contending perspectives—to be white and poor is a “waste of a white skin.” According to Willoughby-Herard, liberals, white nationalists, and Marxists (materialists) tried to get around this contradiction by blaming Blacks (or blackness). In other words, whiteness only fails some whites because of blackness.

Here there is an unfortunate tendency to avoid or underplay the debates that occurred within these categories. In terms of the materialist Marxists, for example, there is an implied assumption that all were white. In fact, during the period being assessed, the South African Communist Party was rapidly increasing its Black membership and leadership.

While her bibliography is rich with Black South Africa critical sources, they do not show up often in the main body of the work. This could easily lead to misrepresenting agency on the part of Blacks regarding the whiteness project that was unfolding and remapping their lives.

There are several fails that should be addressed; some annoying and others more substantial. The book could have used some editing that would have limited the academic jargon, better bridged the chapters, or simply gotten rid of repeated pages (Pages xi, 101, and 102.).

Two more substantive issues have to do with the representation of the CCNY and, separately, the Black radical tradition. Despite the CCNY being one of the principle units of analysis, its presentation felt incomplete. It would have been highly useful to have a section that traced the evolution, development, structure and politics of the CCNY rather than a scattering throughout the book of various dimensions of its institutional behavior.

Willoughby-Herard characterization of CCNY engaging in “segregationist philanthropy” in the interest of “eugenic imperialism” is important formulations. She nicely binds scientific racism with global capitalism and colonialism. Her terms also capture the ideological underpinnings of The Poor White Study and its frets about the survivability of the white race. While I would not give a full-throated agreement with her proposition that the project essentially ushered in Grand Apartheid, it clearly was a part of the buildup that made it possible as she importantly notes.

A second concern has to do with her opening argument, with which I agree, that the most salient critiques of global whiteness have come from the Black radical and Black radical feminist traditions. Yet, those examples seem scattered throughout the book and disjointed. One place to expand and present that analysis would have been in the last chapter. However, the Conclusion seems to just barely make it across the finish line. Another possible place was Chapter Six that deviates from a discussion of The Poor White Study to I'm not quite sure what. Toward the end of that chapter, she recaps the Black radical tradition somewhat but the opportunity was lost.

Despite those reservations, the work is a highly valuable accomplishment. Willoughby-Herard is safe in assuming that her work relative to South Africa breaks new ground with a theoretically-robust and qualitatively-informed methodology that has universal applicability. Waste of a White Skin makes a significant, unique, and well-researched contribution to the racialization literature and debate. Overall it is an important and possibly game-changing tome in the fields of race politics and South African studies. Waste of a White Skin will give her a much deserved higher national and international profile and recognition as a rising scholar.