Racial Formation and Racial Limbo: Evidence from Legislation in Post-Apartheid South Africa

• In Event: 2271 - National and International Perspectives on the Perceptions, Management, and Social Construction of Blackness

Abstract

Racial hierarchies are systems of stratification premised upon ideologies that assert race is real and that some race groups are superior and others inferior. Whereas the most advantaged and most disadvantaged groups represent poles on the racial hierarchy, there are often groups who fluctuate in the middle, those who are in, what I call, racial limbo. The treatment of groups in racial limbo within highly stratified nations is particularly informative to understanding systems of domination. Analyzing legislative documents in post-apartheid South Africa, I investigate the nation-state’s racialization projects to (re)define and (re)position coloured South Africans in racial limbo. While the apartheid state cultivated a position of racial limbo for coloureds between whites and blacks, as a strategy to enforce a rigid racial hierarchy in apartheid South Africa, analyses revealed that the post-apartheid nation-state challenges coloureds’ position of racial limbo by simultaneously supporting race based redress policies and non-racialism strategies. Moreover, I find that contemporary South Africa is guilty of coloured-blindness. This article contributes to our understanding of the ways the state is implicated in the making and remaking of social boundaries, with attention to how groups in the middle can both give coherence to and challenge racial hierarchies.

Author

• Whitney Nicole Laster Pirtle, University of California-Merced