In postapartheid South Africa, the topic of whiteness and white privilege has been at the forefront of
social contestation. The persistence of white privilege, and the way in which whites attempt to
renegotiate their social identities amidst a loss of political power, has been recognised as a central
point of inquiry for South African whiteness studies. The postapartheid social order is uncharted
territory for white South Africans, and its novelty has stimulated the conditions for the emergence
of potentially new, multifarious white social identity structures distinguished largely through their
intersections with class. In terms of conceiving whiteness through class, the issue of heterogeneous
and homogenous white social identities is a central tension in the whiteness studies literature as
scholars attempt to establish how to conceive whiteness under these new, particularised conditions.
Using critical discourse analysis (CDA), this study aimed to develop an intersectional and nuanced
understanding of whiteness in postapartheid South Africa, by identifying, describing and
contextualising potentially heterogeneous white social identities as expressed through patterns of
hybridisation within their everyday discourse. Accordingly, this multi-method ethnographic study
explored the narrative experiences of a group of white car-guards and the mainly white motorists
who engage with them in postapartheid social locales, as articulated through their respective
constructions of themselves and each other through discourse. The analysis suggested that
postapartheid South African whiteness remains largely homogenous in terms of its discursive
patterns and preoccupations, and several parallels were identified between the participants’
discourse, and the type of colonial and apartheid era discourse depicted more broadly in the
whiteness studies literature. Furthermore, it was found that the participants’ discourse was
characterised by a sense of “guardedness” around those attempts which sought to highlight the
persistence of these homogenous discursive patterns and preoccupations. Although this study aimed
to explore potentially heterogeneous white social identities, and even after accounting for divergent
occupations of class, these findings suggest that it is certainly too soon to disregard the dominance
and doggedness of homogenous, mainly privileged, white social identity structures in postapartheid South Africa. This suggests that the call for the particularisation of white social identity structures
should continue to inform the study of whiteness, but not at the expense of negating the
homogenous performance of whiteness and white privilege that persists and prevails even within
those social conditions that render it obsolete.