{"id":23100,"date":"2012-05-15T00:17:29","date_gmt":"2012-05-15T00:17:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=23100"},"modified":"2012-05-15T00:21:13","modified_gmt":"2012-05-15T00:21:13","slug":"%e2%80%98non-racialism%e2%80%99-in-the-struggle-against-apartheid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=23100","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Non-racialism\u2019 in the struggle against apartheid"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2018Non-racialism\u2019 in the struggle against apartheid<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

South African Review of Sociology<\/a> (originally Society in Transition)
\nVolume 34, Issue 1<\/a> (2003)
\npages 13-37
\nDOI: 10.1080\/21528586.2003.10419082<\/a><\/p>\n

Gerhard Mar\u00e9<\/a><\/strong>, Professor of Sociology
\nUniversity of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban<\/em><\/p>\n

This article examines the movement of South African society from a racialised past to a racialised present. It argues that an important opportunity, arising out of the transitional conjuncture, seriously to come to grips with the racist and racialised categories of apartheid, is rapidly being lost. Racism and a racially-ordered system is founded on the soft bed(rock) of race-thinking, and continues to draw on the banal perpetuation of notions of race in everyday life, as well as in political practice in a democratic South Africa. <\/strong>The author proposes that the undoubted commitment of the African National Congress to \u2018non-racialism\u2019 has remained unrealisable because there was no serious theoretical investigation of the status of race categories, either how they operated within apartheid South Africa or within the struggle for democracy itself. For this reason, it seems clear that the ANC’s \u2018non-racialism\u2019 more appropriately should be read as \u2018non-racism\u2019, as the notion of the existence of \u2018races\u2019 as socially meaningful categories have remained pivotal political categories and continue to operate as everyday common sense.<\/p>\n

…In this paper I focus on the commitment to \u2018non-racialism\u2019 by the ANC, a commitment called the \u2018unbreakable thread\u2019 of decades of struggle against white domination (Frederikse 1990), and note some other positions and organisations. I will, in effect, take issue with the application of the term \u2018non-racialism\u2019 to describe the position of the ANC, which is much more accurately termed multi-racialism, despite Tambo\u2019s rejection of such an interpretation. In conclusion I will suggest some of the implications of such misuse, most importantly that it cannot be the basis for \u2018the primary goal [of] a completely restructured society\u2019 (Frederikse, 1990:3-4).<\/p>\n

Race thinking is embedded in our everyday thinking. It is located in racialised social identities, lived through what has been variously referred to as \u2018stories of everyday life\u2019(Wright, 1985:15; Heller, 1982), the \u2018minutiae of everyday existence\u2019 (Comaroff, 1996:166), the \u2018banality\u2019 of living within the \u2018assumptions and common-sense habits\u2019 (Billig, 1995:37) of a society permeated with race thinking. Such racialism will have to be disembedded from there, through deliberate social practice, institutional and legal change, and finding ways of subverting, rather than corroborating, daily experience and racialised ways of making sense. We continue to operate with race as a collective identity, and as the articulating and organising principle for other identities and\/or moments when we draw on an array of alternate identities. Non-racialism remains without content if it continues to be a largely unexamined rhetorical commitment to an ideal.<\/p>\n

At the same time, however, it is necessary immediately to note that my argument does not deny, in any way, the extreme dehumanisation and domination suffered under the system of apartheid, or under any racist system. Nor does it deny, as should be clear, that race thinking is located in real social conditions, and effectively makes sense of the way in which people have experienced, and continue to experience, that social reality, within a changing pattern of domination. It does not explore, here, the various ways in which race thinking serves, at times justificatory, exploitative, and other purposes. On the contrary, my argument depends<\/em> on recognising the strength of pervasive racialisms, and demands and forms the basis for investigating racism. I will return to this point…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2018Non-racialism\u2019 in the struggle against apartheid South African Review of Sociology (originally Society in Transition) Volume 34, Issue 1 (2003) pages 13-37 DOI: 10.1080\/21528586.2003.10419082 Gerhard Mar\u00e9, Professor of Sociology University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban This article examines the movement of South African society from a racialised past to a racialised present. It argues that an important […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1295,12,8,394,520],"tags":[10735,4186,10734,10733],"class_list":["post-23100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-africa","category-articles","category-media-archive","category-socialscience","category-south-africa","tag-african-national-congress","tag-gerhard-mare","tag-society-in-transition","tag-south-african-review-of-sociology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23100\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}