Introduction: The Past, Present, and Future of Mixed-Race People in the United States and United Kingdom

Sims, Jennifer Patrice; Njaka, Chinelo L.

doi:10.1108/978-1-78769-553-520191002

Cited by 2 publications

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“…As one means to overcome the nonracial legislation in post-apartheid, supposedly postracial South Africa, we can highlight census racial enumeration. Censuses are important in contributing to racial projects, as technical forms that in actuality outline the bounds of state constraints on racial identifications (Goldberg 1997; Loveman 2014; Sims and Njaka 2020). Maré (2001a:82) critiqued the lack of transparency in race counting in the South African census, arguing that the debates “hardly moved beyond stating the ‘ordinariness’ of the need for race figures”.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Research suggests that a racial state, through its legislation, can create a category that gets “pegged” to individuals and comes to have meaning for them (Loveman 2014:16), primarily through racialization processes that make race matter for states and for people (e.g., Sims and Njaka 2020; Song 2014; Treitler 2013). When the category goes away, however, there is not a great precedent for unpegging or unpositioning to occur, as the Coloured case shows.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Loveman (2014:5) suggested that states naturalize racial categories rather than create racial categories but agreed that “states ‘make race’ by making race matter, directly and explicitly, in the lives of individual persons”. Put together, racial categories as enacted by the nation-state serve to enumerate and monitor populations, exclude or devalue certain populations, assign benefits and access to others, and come to have meaning for individuals (Loveman 2014; Marx 1998; Mills 1997; Sims and Njaka 2020; Song 2003).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Coloureds represent part of the racial middle in South Africa. 3 Scholarship has shown that middling groups are catalysts for shaping, or sharpening, the boundaries and form of racial hierarchies, given their varied enumeration patterns, racial identity choices, and racial fluidity (Erasmus 2001; Sims and Njaka 2020; Song 2003; Wade 1995), and thus represent the formative place for studying racial formation (Daniel 2006; O’Brien 2008; Maghbouleh 2017).…”

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Racial States and Re-making Race: Exploring Coloured Racial Re- and De-formation in State Laws and Forms in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Pirtle

2020

Sociology of Race and Ethnicity

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The nation-state is one powerful entity that makes race. For instance, the mid-twentieth-century South African apartheid racial state cultivated a triracial hierarchy through officially naming three groups into law: White, Black (native African), and Coloured, with Coloured being defined and situated in the “racial middle” as neither White nor Black African. Yet because race is a social construction that is adaptive and dynamic, the state’s role in making race is also malleable and changing. This study offers a case study of how modern racial states re-make racial categories by focusing on the potential for re- or de-formation of the Coloured racial category since the end of apartheid in 1994 and 25 years into democracy. In conducting a critical race discourse analysis of official state forms and laws, the author finds that the post-apartheid nation-state challenges Coloureds’ racial categorization and position in the racial middle. It does this by simultaneously supporting nonracialist (i.e., color-blind racist) strategies and rewriting Coloured as Black as a means for racial redress. Moreover, the author argues that contemporary South Africa practices coloured blindness through both de-formation and then re-making of the Coloured racial category, thus contributing to the potential shift to a dichotomous racial hierarchy. This project demonstrates how the racial middle can be re-made to uphold state racial projects transformed by changes in the sociopolitical context.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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