Willoughby-Herard: Waste of a White Skin

Each chapter could hold up on its own, focused on one particular aspect of the "Poor White Study" and how it connects to the broader discussion of the global white imaginary and the fear of white racial degeneration. Each chapter focuses on particular parties and individuals involved, including photographers and cartoonists, white feminist uplifters, segregationists,  and labor. The text layout is informed by her approach to critical geography, which strives to complicate the nation-state and analyze transnational processes. Starting from global whiteness, she focuses in on various players who contributed to and depended on the "Poor White Study" to justify racial imperialism. The author divides the book in such a manner that the salient details for each section are brought forward to create a coherent narrative without overwhelming/losing readers. She holds these details together well with overarching themes and social processes specifically addressed to each chapter’s argument and aim. The layout performs an argument in that as opposed to selecting specific geographies to focus on, she engages specific social-cultural processes of racial regimes (labor markets, white feminism, etc.) as they play out within and between “racial regimes,” in this way reconsidering the national boundaries of South Africa and the U.S. as “exceptionalist.” She strives to locate the common history of settler colonialism and racial imperialism championed by white ethnic movements through origin stories.