This book examines an important interdisciplinary study of white poverty conducted in interwar South Africa that was funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Although the book focuses on this report, the 1928‒32 Carnegie Inquiry into the Poor White Problem in South Africa, and the Carnegie Commission of Investigation that wrote it, Willoughby-Herard creatively invokes a wide range of analytic concepts now associated with African diaspora studies, comparative politics, and whiteness studies. Building on the work of Cedric Robinson, Ann Stoler, George Lipsitz, Cheryl I. Harris, and many other scholars, she coins the term “global whiteness.” Instead of examining philanthropy and race science as if they were nationally bounded, she argues that white fears about racial degeneration, social science research, racial uplift schemes, public health discourses, and, perhaps most crucially, the kind of white-on-white violence that she says prefigured cross-racial violence were not exceptional to South Africa, but were shared widely across settler colonial territories.

Chapter 1 presents E. G. Malherbe, a prominent member of the Carnegie Commission, as part of a global cadre of race-relations technicians trained in South Africa and the United States to promote segregation. The author suggests that the Carnegie Corporation directly promoted Afrikaner nationalism (a claim that is not as well supported as other claims in this book). Chapter 2 discusses the Carnegie Commission’s stark photographs of poor whites, plus political cartoons by D. C. Boonzaier, including one sardonic drawing of the Rev. Dr. A. D. Luckhoff, a Commission member and Dutch Reformed clergyman, conferring with Gen. Jan Smuts. As they gesture toward a poor white family, the caption reads, “Certainly those of our calling will let none go down” (56). Chapter 3 discusses R. W. Wilcocks’s 1931 address to the South African Association for the Advancement of Science titled “Intelligence, Environment, and Heredity.” Amid calls for compulsory birth control and sterilization of poor whites, this psychologist used 1920s IQ studies from South Africa and the United States to argue that environmental stimuli could do little to improve childhood intelligence. The author fails to mention that Malherbe expressed somewhat different views about heredity, at least in public. Here and elsewhere, Waste of a White Skin too often depicts Carnegie-funded human science research as a monolith.

Building on a 1995 essay by Cheryl I. Harris, chapter 4 makes the incisive and timely argument that “investment in whiteness” can be risky, because “for all its returns, it so thoroughly dehumanizes those who aspire to achieve it” (94). This chapter explores interwar attempts by the state and the church to confine poor whites to labor colonies designed to teach thrift and labor discipline. Willoughby-Herard highlights interwar representations of black workers as unfairly lowering the wages of white workers. Rather too sweepingly, however, she accuses social historians of unthinkingly reproducing this myth. Chapter 5 touches on early twentieth-century studies of white poverty that preceded the report of the Carnegie Commission. Here the author makes the subtle yet provocative observation that “white misery” was as important to white supremacy as white privilege. This is perhaps the best-supported point in this book. We see numerous relatively wealthy white experts—predominantly men—policing the bodies of poorer white people. Attributing considerable agency to global philanthropies—and much less to political parties, individuals, schools of thought, or industry lobbyists—the author posits that the Carnegie Corporation propagated knowledge that legitimated this intense policing of poor whites by trained experts in interwar South Africa, but that it also supported the closely related, more extensive, and ultimately more violent policing of black bodies.

Chapter 6 describes the Carnegie Corporation’s Overseas Visitors Program as yet another vector of colonial education. Citing Edward Berman, the author suggests that the Carnegie Corporation extended the legacy of the Phelps-Stokes family of planter-philanthropists who supported the New York State Colonization Society in the 1830s. Returning to the Carnegie Commission, chapter 7 focuses on interviews by the Afrikaner-nationalist-feminist M. E. Rothmann. Willoughby-Herard suggests that, as research subjects, poor whites may have paid lip service to “anti-blackness” strategically, in order to secure aid from state and local agencies that equated respectability and deservedness with expressions of racial hatred. Drawing on Paul Rich, the author notes that even when race relations experts did not overtly support segregation and ethnic purity, white liberals failed to articulate a system of values that could adequately oppose apartheid and accommodate radical black politics. Waste of a White Skin ends by suggesting that scholars interested in examining biopower and global whiteness revisit the work of black radical intellectuals within the global African diaspora.

The Carnegie Commission’s internal divisions, as well as the fact that some race-relations experts departed ideologically from their patrons, are not fully explored in this account. Poverty knowledge in South Africa, despite its colonial origins, eventually fed into antiracist, anticolonial, and anticapitalist projects. Engaging with the work of Deborah Posel, Ivan Evans, Jeremy Seekings, and Nicoli Nattrass would have enriched Willoughby-Herard’s discussion of the South African state. She wrongly accuses Saul Dubow of ignoring transnational connections in South African race science, and more attention could have been paid in her primary research to the unpublished papers of Malherbe and Rothmann. It is also difficult to understand the outsized impact of the Carnegie Commission on the National Party’s policies after 1948 without any discussion of Henrik Verwoerd and the media-savvy Carnegie Commission Continuation Committee. All in all, by making the Carnegie Commission appear to be an unambiguous precursor to “grand apartheid,” this book exaggerates the impact of the American philanthropy while giving short shrift to tensions and contradictions within capitalism, science, and South African society, and among apartheid’s intellectual architects and critics. In terms of organization and writing style, this book’s lack of a clear causal chronology, its overuse of the passive voice, and what could be described as inaccessible in-the-know jargon tested this reviewer’s patience. Despite these criticisms, however, Willoughby-Herard has made an important intervention by persuasively urging scholars to reexamine the history and legacies of scientific racism through the lens of whiteness studies and intersectionality.