Political Blackness against Identity Politics: Race and Resistance in South Africa’s Black Consciousness Movement

• In Event: Marxism and Anti-Colonialism (Co-sponsored by Marxist Sociology Section)

Abstract

This paper revisits the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) in apartheid-era South Africa to challenge the contemporary notion that racial politics are necessarily divisive. Drawing on in-depth interviews with former BCM activists, we explore how these actors theorized a unifying, anti-essentialist conception of race known as political Blackness. Against the essentialist investments of identity politics, political Blackness defined a shared racial identity among “Africans,” “Indians,” and “Coloreds” on the basis of common oppression and a collective commitment to anti-racism. We show how BCM activists—treated here as theorists in their own right—developed political Blackness as a source of radicalization, unity, and rehumanization. This concept allowed for mass mobilization while avoiding essentialist definitions of race, effectively countering both apartheid’s strategy of fragmentation and narrow culturalist identities. Our findings reveal how racial identity, when framed politically rather than ethno-culturally, can serve as a powerful foundation for coalition-building and resistance. And more broadly, the autonomous theory of racial identification developed in this paper challenges the assumption that race is always—and solely—a consequence of racism. As we demonstrate here, sociology requires a more sophisticated model that understands imposed and autonomous conceptions of race as interrelated and co-constitutive.

Authors

• Zachary Levenson, Florida International University

• Marcel Paret, University of Utah