Saturday night at the Speedway: class, race, gender and a ‘lynching’
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Date
2018
Authors
Roos, Neil
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of the Free State
Abstract
This paper will reflect on some contemporary reenactments of whiteness by a white subaltern crowd
attending an oval track speedway meeting in central South Africa in 2017. It will also consider my role as
ethnographer/observer, this latter aspect positioning the paper as a kind of ‘gonzo-ethnography’. I tracked
several individuals including an ‘organic comedian’, a number of women and some children through what
turned out to be a key event at the night’s sport, an act of crowd violence directed at three Bangladeshi
men. This episode was spontaneous, populist and bottom-up, with evidence of strong gendered roles. It
can best be described as a kind of organized disorder as the three racial outsiders were isolated, humiliated, and stripped of the veneer of common humanity; in other words, it bore the characteristics of a lynching, albeit in symbolic form. This carnival rendering of violence was central to the identity and coherence of the crowd that night. The violence on show was ironically of a kind which the apartheid state itself sought to police and prohibit among subaltern whites from as early as the 1950s, reminding us once again that whiteness, was never homogeneous or without internal tensions and fractures.
Description
Keywords
Acta Academica, Whiteness, Gonzo-ethnography, Morality
Citation
Roos, N. (2018). Saturday night at the Speedway: class, race, gender and a ‘lynching’. Acta Academica: Critical views on society, culture and politics, 50(2), 75-91.