Robin DiAngelo’s (White Fragility, Beacon Press, 2018) influential notion of white fragility while certainly suggestive and critically useful, does not go quite far enough in accounting for aspects of white anxiety as it manifests in the post-apartheid context. The first step in my re-consideration of this concept is to present a series of distinctive examples of white anxiety in the (post)apartheid context. I make reference to literary accounts, interview data, and to what is perhaps the crowning accomplishment of dystopian South African science-fiction, Neil Blomkamp’s 2009 film District 9. I then turn to Lacanian psychoanalysis to sketch a rudimentary paradigm of anxiety, one which highlights a variety of interlocking levels of anxiety: (1) ‘realistic’ anxiety at the prospect of death, (2) imaginary anxiety related to a failing self-image, (3) anxiety pertaining to symbolic inter-subjectivity and the desires of an Other, and (4) anxiety as the incapacitation of desire. A perhaps unexpected implication of the reading that I offer is that beneath the racist defensiveness of much post-apartheid whiteness we can often detect an ambiguous mode of unconscious identification with otherness, an identification with the prospect of being something other than what one is.