Christi Kruger is a doctoral fellow at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, completing a PhD in anthropology under the supervision of Pamila Gupta and Nicky Falkof. Her research interests are in the areas of critical whiteness studies, post-apartheid political economies, and systems of state assistance. Christi’s current project explores the renewed prominence of poor whitism after 1994 and seeks to understand the implications of the poorer white experience in contemporary South Africa.

Abstract
The paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork in a white informal settlement in South Africa, to explore the ways in which poorer whites negotiate living in informal settlements with perceived notions of whiteness and blackness. In doing this, I argue, they deliberately identify as informal settlers, or squatters, while still consciously displaying normative forms of whiteness. It is specifically through the organisation of informal houses and homes that white informal settlers have sought to construct a normative whiteness which mimic that subscribed to poorer Afrikaners in the 1930s.