Centring Race: Unpacking Informality Through the Lens of Black Tax

Abstract

Taking a historical and contextual approach to racialization, this study seeks to unpack informality in the development of welfare regimes. By centring race as a conceptual lens, it elicits knowledge hierarchies that exist within the formulation of social policies; particularly concerning the classification of informal/formal practices. It thereby draws on Black Tax as a lived example of family and kinship support in Southern Africa, in the development discourse predominantly understood as informal social protection or informal safety nets. Black Tax, however, is a colloquial term that claims its non-Western origin and struggle to co-exist in a Westernized unequal society. It does so by stressing its racialized nature as a necessary practice in response to racial inequality but also as a form of alienation from its origin, being the African philosophy of Ubuntu. In showing consequences and internal conflicts that arise when living across dominant (Western) and subaltern (African) divides, it challenges colonial dichotomies that continue to dominate the development discourse. In highlighting what the informal/formal dichotomy overlooks, the study seeks to encourage a process of repositioning and expanding informality to better account for its political role in ‘thinking’ and ‘doing’ development.