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

Abstract

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.

A Meta-Methods Analysis of Academics’ Challenges Affecting Research Productivity During COVID-19: Insights from a South African University

“…Regarding ethnicity, 74.6% of participants were White, 12.1% were "Coloured," 8.5% were African, 3.6% were Indian, 0.8% were Chinese, and 0.4% were of other ethnicities. According to Pirtle (2021), being coloured in the South African context is "defined and situated in the 'racial middle' as neither White nor Black African" (p. 145). This distribution is almost identical to the 2018 distribution reported for Stellenbosch University (2018), as follows: 74.8% White, 13.7% "Coloured," 8.3% Black, 2.8% Indian, and 0.4% unknown.…”

Twenty-Five Years of Charles Mills’s Racial Contract in Sociology

“…A non-exhaustive but diverse list of second wave TRC sociologists and major articles and books from their dissertation research include Matthew Hughey (2012), Geoff K. Ward (2012), Melissa Weiner (2012), Alyasah Ali Sewell (2016), W. Carson Byrd (2017), Crystal Fleming (2017), Atiya Husain (2017), Celia Lacayo (2017), Jennifer Mueller (2017, 2020), Michael Rodriguez-Muniz (2017), Angel Parham (2017), Karida Brown (2018), Louise Seamster (2018), Sarah Mayorga-Gallo (2019), Victor Ray (2019a), Trenita Brookshire Childers (2020), hephizibah strmic-pawl (2020), Ali Meghji (2021), Whitney Pirtle (2021), Theresa Rocha Beardall (2022), Kiara Wyndham Douds (2021), and Daanika Gordon (2022). My own 2012 dissertation and resulting book (Maghbouleh 2017) could be understood as part of this chronological and epistemological second wave, and I elaborate on the impact of TRC for such early-career adopters like me in Part 2 of this essay.…”

“…Such influence of TRC across theory, data, and method is characteristic among other TRC second wave sociology dissertators, whose projects extend well beyond the United States too. Three illustrative examples are Pirtle (2021), who draws centrally on TRC ’s definition of race and its political framework to analyze how nation-states like post-Apartheid South Africa transform racial categories to co-opt racial redress while practicing “colored blindness,” and Fleming (2017), who engages TRC ’s epistemic commitment to Black political subjectivity in her analysis of French activists who martial commemorative practices to disrupt anti-Black erasures of slavery, abolition, and Black belonging in purportedly “post-racial” societies like France (see also Beaman (2020) who engages TRC to great effect in research on Black activists mobilizing against global white supremacy and police violence in Europe). While this is only a brief sketch, I suspect that those of us who draw on TRC do so because we aspire to move the way Mills moves: between abstraction and materiality, the local and the global, with a parsimony and elegance that too often eludes us as sociologists.…”

“As Diverse as Possible”: How Universities Compromise Multiracial Identities

“…As Mahtani (2014) points out, romanticization of multiraciality has not occurred in other national contexts. Indeed, racial categories have been continually used to reinforce racial hierarchies and subjugate non-White peoples around the world (e.g., for a discussion of South Africa, see Pirtle 2021), and individuals with mixed-race ancestry have always existed, regardless of how they have been classified.…”