Prof Neil Roos discusses how whiteness operated not only through state violence but also via the bureaucratic disciplining of the white working class. Drawing on archival material and personal memory, he illuminates how apartheid’s structures absorbed and managed misfit white bodies, from the expansion of the civil service to the little-known ‘work colonies’ where white men deemed deviant were reformed through labour therapy.

Through exchanges with Dr Anell Daries and the audience, Prof Roos grapples with the psychological and generational complexities of complicity. He underscores that the task of history is not only to record the past but to provide moral and political off-ramps—ways to imagine futures beyond the prison of whiteness.