Rhodesian Children and the Lessons of White Supremacy: Doris Lessing's “The Antheap”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper builds on Anne Stoler's study of “race and the intimate” and responds to bell hooks' provocative invitation, “One change in direction that would be real cool would be the production of a discourse on race that interrogates whiteness”. In Doris Lessing's short story “The Antheap” (1953), Tommy, the son of a white mine manager, has a tumultuous relationship with Dirk, the “half-caste” son of the mine owner. It is understood that Tommy needs to break off this relationship and thus learn the codes which sustain white supremacy in Rhodesia. Rather than accept the central lesson — the prohibition against intimacy between whites and blacks — Tommy recognizes that it is repeatedly violated, even by its adult proponents. Tommy “imperfectly” learns lessons about four kinds of intimacy: heterosexual, maternal, paternal and fraternal. These lessons are important for white boys to digest: otherwise, the white community lacks the appearance of homogeneity. Ultimately, Tommy rejects these lessons and the text points to a future that is uncertain: Tommy may wholly reject or simply defer his white masculine privilege.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".