This is an intellectual, political, and institutional history of scientific racist thought focused on the Carnegie Corporation’s antipoverty philanthropy with “poor whites” in South Africa (1927–1932). I trace the origins, analysis, and outcomes of the Carnegie Commission in apartheid law and in cultural and social organizations that synchronized Afrikaner Nationalism. I study the conditions that shaped the study and of how the study was used in building South African social science about race and poverty. This case study analyzes how a global racial order—“global whiteness”—working with the r ... More

This is an intellectual, political, and institutional history of scientific racist thought focused on the Carnegie Corporation’s antipoverty philanthropy with “poor whites” in South Africa (1927–1932). I trace the origins, analysis, and outcomes of the Carnegie Commission in apartheid law and in cultural and social organizations that synchronized Afrikaner Nationalism. I study the conditions that shaped the study and of how the study was used in building South African social science about race and poverty. This case study analyzes how a global racial order—“global whiteness”—working with the racial logic of white vulnerability, provided the conditions for the Carnegie Poor White Study. In discussing the theory of global whiteness, I demonstrate that white supremacy has been essential for constituting both epistemic knowledge in academic disciplines and for constituting nation-states. The influence of international philanthropy on the creation of a distinctly racial conception of citizenship and democracy in South Africa during the consolidation of grand apartheid and Afrikaner Nationalism indicates a need for research on racial polities that foregrounds race in the making of international affairs. Waste of a White Skin addresses how non–South African philanthropic institutions were invested in making white identity and entrenching racialized citizenship and democracy. The Carnegie Corporation’s focus on “poor whites” expanded the politics of scientific racism and the idea of a civilizing mission that had South African society and social science as its beneficiaries. I extend our understanding of the history of apartheid to include pre-World War II U.S.-based racial philosophies and policies; I reveal how the racialization of poor whites functioned with other processes to establish “grand apartheid” in 1948; and I articulate a theory of global whiteness that emerges from the literatures on race in international relations and racial blackness and empire. Through this, I raise questions about how international debates on race affect domestic racial citizenship. I point to how a global racial regime—global whiteness—constitutes domestic racial policies and, in some ways, animates black consciousness. I also indicate that the supposed discontinuity of racial geography is, in fact, porous and nearly always permeable.