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.

Keywords

racial formation critical race theory racism racial middle South Africa Coloured South Africans

In his inaugural presidential address, Nelson Mandela (1994) encouraged that the new South Africa would be a “society in which all South Africans, both Black and White, will be able to walk tall, without any fear in their hearts, assured of their inalienable right to human dignity—a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world.” South Africa is one context that has undergone a monumental and consequential transformation of state policies in the past five decades, making it an exceptional place to study the impact of sociopolitical changes on racial categories (e.g., Erasmus and Ellison 2008; Maré 2001a; Posel 2001b). A question at the heart of the transformation from an explicitly racist state to a supposed racial harmony is, What place does race occupy in this rainbow nation?

I extend this question further by asking, does the rainbow nation visualize space only for Black and White South Africans, as Mandela stated? Or what place do Coloureds¹ occupy in contemporary South Africa? The Coloured racial category includes people of mixed race, with origins in racial mixing dating back to the 1600s (Adhikari 2005; Patterson 1953), people of Khoi or San descent (often called Khoisan) (Barnard 1992), as well as people of Malay descent who were brought to the Cape as slaves from Southeast Asia, mostly in the eighteenth century (Haron 2002). Colonial governments and conventional understandings therefore used Coloured as a grouping for those who fall somewhere between, or outside of, the more solidified Black African² and White groups in South Africa (Erasmus 2017). Yet the racial category was not named into law until 1950, shortly after the apartheid government came into power. 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).

To assess the state’s racial project of re- or de-formation the Coloured category a quarter century post-apartheid, I use a critical race discourse textual analysis, informed by Stuart Hall’s (1993, [1980] 1996) work on articulation, to analyze official state forms and laws as evidence of “racial governmentality” (Goldberg 1997:30) within the nation-state’s race re-making processes. Doing so allows an investigation of the post-apartheid state’s role in changing racial projects. By focusing on Coloured South Africans, I explore how the state signifies race for Coloureds, allocates resources by that signification, and thus re-makes their position in a racial hierarchy.

I find that the post-apartheid nation-state challenges Coloureds’ racial identification and position in the racial middle of the hierarchy by simultaneously supporting nonracialist (i.e., color-blind racist) strategies and rewriting Coloured as Black as a means for racial redress. My analysis reveals how racialization processes interact with re- and de-formation projects, contributing to our understanding of the role of the racial state in making and re-making race. Thus, I argue that contemporary South Africa practices coloured blindness through its undoing of the Coloured racial category and position, which in turn is influencing a shift toward a dichotomous racial hierarchy. This project demonstrates how the racial middle can be used to give coherence to the racial order, or used to challenge the rigidity of the racial order, in ways that advance state racial projects transformed by changes in the sociopolitical context.

Background

Racial States and Racial Formations

The nation-state has been conceived as the focal point of analysis in racial formation, which takes into account the social, economic, and political forces that determine the content and importance of racial categories (Omi and Winant 2015). This occurs through racial projects, which work by first identifying and signifying racial categories and then linking them to social structure by organizing resources according to the particular signification attached to the racial categories (Omi and Winant 2015).

Racial formation structures modern racial states through means of racial contracts; a political and social contract that established societies through racial policies, which are maintained through informal and formal agreements about racial categories and continue to depend on the judicial system to maintain racial order (Mills 1997). The state is created and maintained as a tool for collective racial interests (Bracey 2015). In Making Race and Nation, Marx (1998:4) argued this point for the United States, Brazil, and South Africa, explaining, “domination has been officially encoded in racial terms, suggesting that the state plays a role in constructing and enforcing the institutional boundaries of race”. States’ imposed social categorization is a racial assignment, but it can become a social category and a personalized racial identity—or a racial assertion by the people (Song 2003). 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).

Theories of racial formation go on to suggest that once categories are created and enforced or adapted into social institutions, the racialization process takes on a life of its own and becomes embedded into the social structure (Maré 2001a; Omi and Winant 2015). Although racial formation theory can be extended to re-formations or re-makings, most applications either explicitly or implicitly assume that racial categories become social facts. For instance, on the permanence of race in the world after the twentieth century, Winant wrote,

However enigmatic and unjust, the racial classification and racial hierarchization of the world was a deeply established sociohistorical fact. No popular movement, no series of political reforms, no encounter with the moral dereliction implicit in the comprehensive racism of the modern epoch, would have been sufficient to undo [emphasis added] or remove it. (2001:135)

Moreover, racial formation typically emphasizes the formation, or making, of race, and the assumed racialization processes mostly gloss over the undoing or de-formation of race. Gerhard Maré (2001a:91), writing on South Africa, suggested that a result of racialization is “banal race thinking, especially in its bureaucratic form and its existence in over-simplified and sometimes cynically manipulative political discourse . . . blind us to the pressing necessity of finding innovative ways of thinking the alternative”.

However, deeper engagement with racial formation as a relational and dynamic process pushes us to consider how race might be able to be undone or at least “done differently” (Markus and Moya 2010:83). For example, Treitler’s (2013) theorization of ethnic projects reveals that some groups, such as Jewish and Chinese groups in the United States, can undertake racial uplift campaigns to undo their perceived subjugated racial signification and even alter their placement within a racial hierarchy; yet at the same time she argued that these group-level campaigns have yet to fully alter the racial hierarchy, just their own groups’ placement. Loveman (2014) tracked Latin American states’ racial classification systems and found that when some states stopped classifying race in the middle twentieth century as a way to reject racial determinism, the lack of official state recognition helped facilitate the partial undoing of Afrodescendent populations. This undoing via erasure of Blackness by the state supported underlying whitening projects and did have an impact on the overall and malleable racial order (Loveman 2014).

The examples just cited reinforce the notion that the racial middle, or the racially fluid space within the poles in the racial hierarchy, acts as a catalyst for shaping or sharpening the boundaries around the top and bottom and for constituting new boundaries (O’Brien 2000) or hinges (Maghbouleh 2017) between. Work on the racial middle encourages hypothesizes about forms of hierarchies (i.e., two- or three-tiered systems; see also Bonilla-Silva 2004) and therefore has also broadened our thinking regarding ways the state might re-make race to be consistent with the particular context. For instance, Daniel (2002) covered how the United States at times shifted from a ternary to a binary racial order by instituting “Black by law” for racially mixed groups, such as the rewriting of Creoles as Black when the United States purchased Louisiana. I now turn to an overview of the racial middle in South Africa.

The South African Apartheid Racial State and the Formation of Coloureds in the Racial Middle

Past research details the complex history of Coloureds before and during apartheid (e.g., Adhikari 2005; du Pre 1994; Goldin 1987; Lewis 1987; Patterson 1953) and also makes clear that both the state formation and racial formation of Coloureds are rooted in white supremacy (Cell 1982; Fredrickson 1981; Marx 1998; Thompson 2014; Winant 2001). The National Party’s apartheid racial contract was explicit in its goals to create a strong and efficient administrative infrastructure for running the state and bolstering the position of Afrikaners’ superiority, and it made race and racism central to its modern nation building.

Apartheid-era racial governmentality in legislation established racial signification and racial position. For example, the Population Registration Act of 1950 defined Coloured as “a person who is not a White person or a native.” Although the ambiguity in the Coloured category meant that the label shifted definitions throughout the era, and racial reclassification cases involved movement into and out of the Coloured category (Erasmus and Ellison 2008; Posel 2001b), what remained constant was the neither/nor designation that positioned the Coloured group in the racial middle. For example, Group Areas Act No. 41 of 1950 embedded systematic racism into geography and directly shaped life chances, and Reservation of Separate Amenities Act No. 49 of 1953 enforced racial segregation in all public amenities. However, Coloureds’ exclusion in the pass laws and preference in economic opportunities (e.g., Coloured Development Act No. 4 of 1962) and representation in legislated bodies (e.g., Republic of South Africa Constitution Act No. 110 of 1983) demonstrates that Coloureds were relegated to an inferior position vis-à-vis Whites and a superior position vis-à-vis Black Africans. In sum, the apartheid racial state naturalized the Coloured category into law, created a triracial hierarchy, and positioned Coloureds in the racial middle.

The Potential for Making and Re-making Race in Post-apartheid South Africa

Apartheid officially ended in 1994, though the system had been slowly dying amid growing internal and external pressures (Seekings and Nattrass 2008; Thompson 2014). The apartheid system was not on pace with what Winant (2001) claimed is a new, post–World War II racial order. The new global racial order is one in which massive opposition movements facilitated the disavowal of official white supremacy, but at the same time the status quo is upheld. The result is a racial dualism whereby “the race concept is at once denied and affirmed” (Winant 2001:8). South African sociologist Zimitri Erasmus (2017:xxiv) more intimately captured this dualism as a double politics, describing the current state of affairs as a place “where old logics of race rub up against new logics to create productive tensions that are negotiated with a double politics”: a system that acknowledges that “race continued to matter, while working towards its undoing”.

Whereas Winant (2001) seems to suggest an undoing is unimaginable, Erasmus (2017) believes that this context allows a critical undoing of race: a way to do race otherwise in South Africa by changing its uses by the state and diminishing its centrality (see also Maré 2001b). In her book Race Otherwise, Erasmus contended that studying racialization in South Africa demonstrates “how and why we continue to make race matter, [and] has to do with ways in which history, power and politics shape the frames within which meaning is made, contested and renegotiated [emphasis added]” (2017:xxii). Moreover, she claimed that “‘racialisation’ is analytically valuable because it captures the dynamics involved in (re-)making race and thereby enables one to locate these dynamics in the realm of politics of knowledge and culture” (2017: 53). Emphasizing “adversarial manoeuvres” and informed by Hall’s ([1980] 1996) work on articulation, Erasmus sought to “disrupt repeated reliance on the prism of race” (2017:xxiv) by thinking through the ways “power is reconfigured, as relations of domination and subjugation continue in new forms” (2017:54). Using personal and empirical analyses of the Coloured category most specifically, Erasmus showed how taken-for-granted assumptions about that category have been sustained through racial projects related to racialized perceptions of how one looks, genetic understandings of biological race, and state classification. She argued that challenging this racial knowledge allows more complete theorization about re- or de-formation of racial categories and hierarchies in contemporary South Africa.

Indeed, the sociopolitical shift from a White to a Black government and the ideological shift toward nonracialism make this period ripe for investigating changing notions of race and racism. According to Maré (2001a), changing holdovers in race thinking would bring contemporary South Africa closer to its ideological goal of nonracialism, which has been mandated by post-apartheid governments to show a commitment to ending apartheid-era ideals of separatism and racial superiority (see Sharp 1998; Whitehead 2012). Yet critical race legal scholarship critiques nonracialism as linking “racial progress with the transcendence of a racially conscious standpoint” and is therefore “a racial ideology premised upon colour-blindness” (Modiri 2012:411).

Given the transformation and its complexities, many scholars have taken up the study of racial formation and re-making in South Africa (Alexander 2013; Ansell 2007; Erasmus 2017; Friedman and Erasmus 2008; Maré 2001a, 2001b; Posel 2001a; Sharp 2008), but the overall trend deemphasizes the centrality of race in the contemporary context. Therefore, I extend the work of Modiri (2012), who advocated for “developing a post-apartheid critical race theory that puts ‘race’ back on the agenda by situating it within legal, political and social discourses,” by using a critical race analysis of legislation to interrogate the use and usefulness of race in the rainbow nation. Although Modiri stands out with the critical race focus, I contribute further by focusing the analysis on Coloured South Africans. In centering how the racial middle reshapes the formation process, I demonstrate how racial categories and positions are done or undone and what that reveals about contemporary South Africa’s racial order.

Data and Methods

Data for this project came from legislation and forms produced and implemented by the South African government from the 1992 Whites-only referendum vote to end apartheid until 2017, a 25-year period. Legislation includes laws, regulations, acts, and ordinances, bureaucratic state forms and reports, and court rulings regarding legal disputes, and is considered a vehicle for social rules and the creation of legal racial identities (Gordon-Reed 2002; Mills 1997). Goldberg’s (1997:30–31) theorizing of bureaucratic forms as “racial governmentality” highlights their importance; “the form is informational, reproductive of a social formation as it institutes and applies its assumptions” (pp. 30–31, italics are original). Informed also by Omi and Winant’s (2015) conceptualization of racial projects, documents were selected for analysis if they dealt with either (1) representations of race or (2) re/distributions of resources according to those representations of race.

I consulted the work of historical and political experts on South Africa to gather my collection of legislation deemed important in shaping the racial hierarchy (e.g., Clark and Worger 2016; Horrell 1971; Thompson 2014). Then I used South African and international databases^[4] to locate the original documents. I conducted an additional review of the databases to supplement the collection to ensure breadth of legislation (e.g., penal, regulatory) passed at various historical points within the time frame and hired a student research assistant to conduct a broadened search and locate missing or updated documents. This is a part of a larger comparative project, but for this article I focus on the 12 documents from post-apartheid South Africa period (see Table 1).

Table 1.

Data: Legislative and State Forms of Post-Apartheid South Africa (1993–2014).

Constitution of the Republic of South Africa Act No. 200	1993	Promotion of Equality and the Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act 4	2000
Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act No. 34	1995	Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Act No. 53	2003
Constitution of the Republic of South Africa Act No. 108	1996	Communal Land Rights Act No. 11	2004
South African Census	1996	Chinese Association of South Africa and Others v. Ministries of Labour and Others	2008
Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report	1998	Black Authorities Repeal Act No. 13	2010
Employment Equity Act No. 55	1998	Solidarity and Others v. Department of Correctional Services and Others	2012

I used critical race discourse textual analysis influenced by Stuart Hall’s (1993, [1980] 1996) work on articulation and deductive thematic content analysis involving comparisons of keywords or content that focuses on interpretation and meaning (Hsieh and Shannon 2005). Articulation is theorized as “a way of understanding how ideological elements come, under certain conditions, to cohere together within a discourse, and a way of asking how they do or do not become articulated, at specific conjunctures, to certain political subjects” (Hall, quoted in Grossberg 1986:53). I focused less on the context that shaped the documents; rather, I read, coded, and analyzed how race and racism was encoded and decoded in the documents and examined how the racialized discourse gives expression and meaning to social dominance (see Hall 1993, [1980] 1996; and Erasmus 2017 and Modiri 2012 for South African applications). I first describe representations and definitions of race by the state and then analyze how the state organized resources according to racial designations, focusing attention to Coloured South Africans.

Analysis

Representations and Definitions of Race in Post-apartheid South Africa

Moving away from the apartheid racist state to a democratic racial state represented a significant transformation of the nation-state. As a part of the initial transition out of apartheid, Constitution of the Republic of South Africa Act No. 200 of 1993 was created. Poignantly, the preamble begins,

We, the people of South Africa declare that—

Whereas there is a need to create a new order in which all South Africans will be entitled to a common South African citizenship in a sovereign and democratic constitutional state in which there is equality between men and women and people of all races so that all citizens shall be able to enjoy and exercise their fundamental rights and freedoms.

This piece of legislation significantly moves away from apartheid-era legislation that instituted racial difference and separation. Rather than a preoccupation with racial divisions, it steers the discussion of race in South Africa toward one of a common human race. There are 7 instances of the word race, 28 instances of “every person,” but no specific mention of any one race or population group in the entire constitution. When race is used, it is combined with a qualifier, such as “all races.” These simple counts indicate that the new constitution embeds in its language the indistinction of racial categories. The legislation suggests that all races should be accepted and treated equally, but it does not define any racial categories.

In 1994, South Africa held its first election by universal adult suffrage. A 62 percent majority of South Africans voted for Mandela and secured his victory as president of the new Republic of South Africa. Shortly thereafter, Constitution of South Africa No. 108 of 1996 was created and has been heralded as the most progressive in the world in terms of human rights. The preamble begins,

We, the people of South Africa,

Recognise the injustices of our past;

Honour those who suffered for justice and freedom in our land;

Respect those who have worked to build and develop our country; and

Believe that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity.

We therefore, through our freely elected representatives, adopt this Constitution as the supreme law of the Republic so as to—

Heal the divisions of the past and establish a society based on democratic values, social justice and fundamental human rights.

It later declares, “The state may not unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on one or more grounds” including race, gender, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, culture, language, among others (Constitution of South Africa 1996, Section 9[iii]). Again, in this constitution there is no mention of any specific racial group, although there is an explicit declaration of nondiscrimination.

These constitutions represent prototypes of the early legislation in post-apartheid South Africa. They also demonstrate that race was not a term widely used by the early post-apartheid government. The government made it explicit that race was not to be used as a method for discrimination yet at the same time pushed a postracial ideology by implicitly asserting that race was not to be used at all. This nonracialism was actually an official mandate of the new South Africa given its naming in the constitution (Sharp 1998) and was mostly celebrated by the African National Congress–led government in the new South Africa but also is supported by many White South Africans (Ansell 2007). However, nonracialism was actually created as a rallying cry during apartheid and spurred by South African activists as a way to unite the large base across racial classifications in order to fight against the oppressive system (Alexander 2013; Whitehead 2012). As the constitutions demonstrate, however, it was coopted by the post-apartheid racial state. Nonracialism thus presents a paradox because it has “a marked tendency to try to hide structural racism by selective appropriation of the discourse of ‘non-racialism’” which in effect became a “hands off approach to economic restructuring” (Sharp 1998:244, 246). Nonracialism is then a guise for color-blind racist practices (Ansell 2006). It is now often elicited alongside the mantra of African unity and humanity and the idea that class-based disparities trump racial disparities with the goal of moving conversations and policies past race (Whitehead 2012).

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”. In the 1996 census, for example, only this description was offered:

Statistics South Africa has continued to classify people into population groups, since moving away from past apartheid-based discrimination, and monitoring progress in development over time involves measuring differences in life circumstances by population group. This classification, in common with other countries such as the United States of America which uses a population group-based classification system, is no longer based on a legal definition, but rather on self-classification. (Statistics South Africa 1996:8)

Functionally, “population group” refers to race, but the government again rejected explicitly using the word race in its language. Another significant aspect of this new census was the move to self-classification, which is often applauded as an opportunity for agency because it shifts the onus of classification from a state-sanctioned observer to the individual. As a result of self-classification, debates about phenotype, descent, and social acceptance that preoccupied much discourse on race and racial reclassification during apartheid were no longer used as an apparatus in post-apartheid South Africa.

According to the 1996 census, the population groups and their proportions of the population were as follows: Black African, 76 % White, 10.9 % Coloured, 8.9 % Indian/Asian, 2.6 % and unspecified or other, 0.9 percent. Although it is difficult to determine incongruence over time, because previous censuses merely estimated the numerical size of each population group, according to one 1967 estimate, 67.5 percent of the population was Black African, 21 percent White, 8.6 percent Coloured, and 2.4 percent Indian/Asian (Steinberg 1967). The increase in the Black African population and decline in the White population from 1976 to 1996 are due to changes in birth rates and emigration (Cronje 2012). The share of the Coloured population has remained remarkably stable, and even in the last census, the percentage of Coloureds in South Africa continues to hover around 8 percent. The stability reveals how the self-classification system implemented by the post-apartheid state did not result in classification changes among individuals (see also Posel 2001a) and that apartheid-era racial categories remained for data collection purposes even when the language of race disappeared in post-apartheid South Africa.

The census as a bureaucratic form sets the format of racial categories to be used for other governmental documents. One example is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which came about as the result of the 1995 Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act No. 34. Whereas the act was void of any specific mention of race, despite its clear goal of creating more racial unity, the TRC produced a seven-volume report that included ample narratives divided by race, which provided a window to discern how the past racial instances and categories were framed in post-apartheid South Africa (see Fullard 2004; Gibson 2004; Posel and Simpson 2002).

The goal of the TRC report was to identify human rights violations, provide amnesty, provide restoration, and outline preventive measures. Volume 3 focused on gross violations of human rights from the perspective of the victim and included testimony for those living in the Western Cape, with the majority of those inhabitants (57 percent) being Coloured. Despite the Cape’s “extreme social and spatial engineering through the Group Areas act” and the “a distinct formulation of apartheid policy declaring the Cape a ‘Coloured labour preference area’” (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa 1998:391), the commission wrote that “of all submissions to the Commission received nationally from victims alleging gross violations of human rights, only 8.4 percent were from the western Cape” (1998:392), and less than 2 percent of the more than 20,000 statements were from Coloured persons.

Although the TRC did not define the race/population groups, racial categories were mentioned as it referenced events during apartheid (presented as individually bulleted paragraphs in the document, all emphasis added). For example,

The SAIRR [South African Institute of Race Relations] gives the final death toll in the western Cape for 11 August to 28 February 1977 (including December clashes) as 153 . . . A strong feature of the 1976 revolt in the region was the very high percentage of violations involving Coloured people. Of the 108 people shot dead by police in the Peninsula, fifty-three were Coloured and fifty-five African. All but one of the deaths in the rural towns involved Coloured people exclusively. (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa 1998:415)

In most places, the TRC discussed Coloured alongside Black African persons when they resisted and harmed by White apartheid authorities and/or rogue racist groups, for example, “Both protest and repression became violent, and affected Coloured as well as African areas” (1998:392).

However, there was some discussion of instances in which Coloureds and Whites were both victims of harm by Black African political and/or militant groups. For example,

Among those killed by Poqo [identified as a Black militant group] members in 1962 were several people in Paarl suspected of being police informers. Two of these were Coloured women accused of keeping members away from the Poqo meetings. Another Coloured woman was permanently disabled. (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa 1998:399)

On 21 November 1962, Poqo members from Mbekweni, Paarl, met and resolved to attack the White town of Paarl. . . . Two White people, Ms Rencia Vermeulen (17) and Mr Frans Richards (21), were killed. (1998:400)

Whereas in the first example, Coloured persons were included in the same entry as Black African persons, in this latter example we see that Coloured victims were not spoken of alongside as White persons. Distinguishing Coloureds from Whites, literally using two separate paragraphs, signals a clear division between the two groups, as opposed to the more blurred division between Coloureds and Black Africans. Furthermore, unlike Coloured or Black African victims, most White victims were named. This type of uncritical use of race in the TRC led some scholars to question how much truth could be found reflecting on a racist apartheid system without centering race, in particular through treating it as an explanatory variable wherein it seemed to mean political association (Fullard 2004) and never defining race categories (Posel and Simpson 2002).

In centering Coloureds within this questioning of uncritical understandings of race, my analysis additionally reveals how they were treated as partly visible during apartheid; but considering the document’s use of special qualifiers, such as “unprecedented militancy” (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa 1998:415), it can be read as though Coloureds did not occupy as much space—figuratively in the fight against apartheid and literally in this TRC report—as Whites and Black Africans in South Africa. Even more, the commission felt compelled to make note of Coloureds’ presence, but it was either in combination with Black South Africans or in contrast to White South Africans. Moreover, the TRC report highlights an important trend in terms of the signification of race for Coloureds in contemporary South Africa if named: Coloureds are relatively insignificant, distinguishable from Whites, but often confounded with Black Africans.

Distribution of Resources According to Race in Post-apartheid South Africa

As demonstrated thus far, racial categories in post-apartheid South Africa were mainly left undefined, although sometimes, uncritically, used in government forms and laws. The ideology of nonracialism was the reasoning behind the post-apartheid shift in language, but nonracial language also complicated legislation, even penal and regulatory, that directly sought to distribute or organize resources according to race in post-apartheid South Africa. For example, in 2000, Promotion of Equality and the Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act No. 4 was implemented as an addendum to the 1996 constitution to provide more clarity on the clause that unfair discrimination was to be made illegal. Despite leaving race undefined, the act goes on to clearly articulate what types of racial discrimination are prohibited. It includes “the dissemination of any propaganda or idea, which propounds the racial superiority or inferiority of any person” but also “the engagement in any activity which is intended to promote, or has the effect of promoting, exclusivity, based on race,” even when that “rule or practice that appears to be legitimate but which is actually aimed at maintaining exclusive control by a particular race group” (Chapter 2, Section 7, points a, b, and c).

Indeed, these declarations exemplify the progressive language needed to eradicate racial discrimination. Yet the language and ideology of nonracialism that coexist alongside the progressive stance effectively stall, or at least complicate, any long-term racial progress that can be made. For instance, parts b and c of this legislation, on the promotion of equality, suggest that exclusivity is wrong and therefore could complicate the formation of a beneficial race-based affinity group such as a Black student union. These contradictions, in fact, epitomize the double politics (Erasmus 2017) and racial dualism (Winant 2001) that characterized the late 1990s post-apartheid South Africa: an ideological and political struggle to be nonracial and color-blind while discursively encouraging racial redress.

By the turn of the century, however, there were indeed a couple of signature pieces of legislation that were implemented with the explicit function of organizing resources according to racial lines, which further complicates the discourse of nonracialism. Employment Equity Act No. 55 of 1998 (EEA), begins by explaining that affirmative action measures were to be implemented to “redress the disadvantages in employment experienced by designated groups, in order to ensure their equitable representation in all occupational categories and levels in the workforce” (Section 2[i]). In effect, the EEA made discrimination in the hiring of employees punishable by law and, importantly, required employers to create affirmative action plans that must include, for instance, set goals for achieving equitable representation and internal monitoring and evaluation procedures.

The EEA helped set into motion a “return to race” and was further ushered in by president Thabo Mbeki; from 1999 to the present, South African presidents have focused on lingering racial disparities (Fullard 2004), as opposed to Mandela’s emphasis on racial healing and reconciliation. For instance, Mbeki is known for calling out South Africa’s racial inequality, in which he suggested that South Africa consisted of two nations, one rich and White and the other poor and Black (Ansell 2007). Despite the return to race, though, the emphasis remained on White and Black (see Maré 2001b).

In 2003, Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Act No. 53 (BBBEE) was passed to ensured greater access and protection to designated disadvantaged race groups. The BBBEE was the first act that included a racial identifier in its title and one of only nine acts that included Black in their titles from 1993 to 2017, with all others repealing apartheid-era laws.⁵ This sharply contrasts with the plethora of identifiers used during apartheid-era legislation that distributed resources according to group. The BBEEE starts by stating in its preamble, “Whereas under apartheid race was used to control access to South Africa’s productive resources and access to skills” the current government believes that “further steps are [to be] taken to increase the effective participation of the majority of South Africans in the economy.” According to the EEA, the “designated groups” were Black: “‘Black people’ is a generic term which means Africans, Coloureds and Indians” (Section 1). This means that the first time a specific race designator was used in legislation in post-apartheid South Africa, it was used as an umbrella term to group all non-Whites together as Black. “Black people” does not refer to Black Africans (or native or Bantu), as in former legislation, but rather to Black South Africans, which will herein refer to the inclusive Black people usage.

Additionally, the BBBEE elaborated that “broad-based Black economic empowerment” means the economic empowerment of all Black people, including women, workers, youth, people with disabilities, and people living in rural areas, through diverse but integrated socioeconomic strategies (Section 1). The South African Department of Trade and Industry set mandatory regulations and was considered a specific government policy to advance economic transformation widely and enhance the economic participation of Black people in particular (Krüger 2011). Although Mbeki and the African National Congress government fully supported this plan, there were vocal critics, such as his brother, Moeletsi Mbeki, who, as quoted by Krüger (2011:212) believed that this “affirmative action” had become “the core Black ideology of the Black political elite”. Despite the debates about its efficacy, it was significant for characterizing the new wave of post-apartheid legislation that focused on racial redress.

The EEA and BBBEE were monumental in South Africa, as they clarified that it is not discriminatory to implement redress measures on the basis of race as long as the purpose is to equalize opportunities. These laws were especially important for Coloureds, however, because they diminished their explicit position in the racial middle. As explained by Friedman and Erasmus (2008:42), “blackness, it is argued, is shared by all those discriminated against by apartheid and distinctions between them are invidious”. Coloured South Africans were no longer signified as a racial category between or outside of Black Africans and Whites but were now rewritten as Black South Africans. That is, in terms of the state’s re-making of race, this signifies a de-formation of the Coloured racial category and position.

The effect of such legislation was significant not just for discourse reasons; it had ramifications for who could qualify for redress. Many South Africans sought to clarify who exactly fit into the designated Black South African category. One example is the case of Chinese Association of South Africa v. the Ministries of Labour, Trade and Industry, and Justice and Constitutional Development (2008), in which Chinese plaintiffs successfully argued that they were formally treated at par with Coloureds during apartheid, and therefore they should now be treated at par with Blacks. In the case of Solidarity and Others v. Dept. of Correctional Services and Others (2012), 10 Coloured workers accused the Department of Corrections in the Western Cape of discrimination, alleging that they were overlooked for promotion because of their race. The Coloured plaintiffs insisted that they were denied promotion over other Black South Africans. According to the case, the Department of Corrections used national demographics to conclude that Black South Africans were underrepresented under the EEA’s representation stipulations, which resulted in the recruitment of Black African correctional officers from outside the Western Cape. The prosecution claimed that regional demographics should be used over national demographics, arguing that if national statistics were used “in the Western Cape, Coloured employees, in particular, almost have no chance anymore to be promoted or appointed” (Herman, quoted in Sapa 2014).

The judge wrestled with the case, stating “a choice [had] to be made between different persons who all fall within the designated group” and “whether those of the applicants who are Black persons for the purposes of the EEA and members of the Coloured community in the Western Cape, have been unfairly discriminated against” (Section 23). In the end, the Labor Court judge ruled that all 10 officials were Black employees in terms of the EEA and found that the Coloured complainants had suffered discrimination in the selection process used for promotion to various posts. The court ordered that the department had to take immediate steps to take national and regional demographics into account when setting equity targets for racial representation.

The Solidarity case exemplifies the ambiguity around racial categories, especially the Coloured category, in post-apartheid South Africa. As the judge argued, the law in South Africa defined Coloured as a part of the Black South African group. Yet at the same time, he recognized Coloured persons as belonging to community group different from Black Africans. The confusion around the Coloured category again comes as a result of the state’s nonracialist and color-blind approach; though the law signified the Coloured racial category to be treated as Black South Africans it did not clarify what that meant for either racial enumeration, specifically around racial redress, and said nothing about what that might mean for Coloureds’ everyday experience. Nonracialism influences this paradox of double politics (Erasmus 2017): that Coloureds’ racial difference in the law has gone away, and they are no longer treated as a buffer or hinge group between Black African and White South Africans by the state, but at the same time, the category continues to be used in both documents and in lived experiences. In the next section I further theorize what the crisis in racial formation means for racial hierarchies in the new South Africa and the place for Coloureds in the rainbow nation.

Discussion

This study synthesizes theories of racial and ethnic projects (Omi and Winant 2015; Treitler 2013) and theories of doing race (Erasmus 2017; Markus and Moya 2010) to investigate whether apartheid’s construction of Coloureds and their position in the racial middle is being done differently in post-apartheid South Africa.

During apartheid, the Coloured racial group’s position was solidified as an intermediate group in South Africa between the more disparate Black African and White groups that occupied the poles in the South African ternary racial system (Adhikari 2005; Erasmus 2001). The position in the racial middle served a function for the racial state; naming Coloureds as a distinct racial group and pandering to their grasp on relative privilege was necessary to maintain the racist state and, at times, even offered the opportunity to attempt disguise their race prejudice by conceding to nonthreatening accommodations for a non-White group. The Coloured case in apartheid South Africa served as an example for how, in racially oppressive regimes, constructing the racial middle can give coherence to the structure and maintenance of racial hierarchies.

In contrast, I found that the post-apartheid racial state mostly ignored race and racial categories and thus took the form, at least initially, of a silent partner in the re-making of race through the mandating of a nonracialism agenda. Moreover, early representations and definitions of race in post-apartheid South Africa were nearly nonexistent; legislation stripped race and racial categories from its language and emphasized a common humanity (e.g., all people, every citizen). At the same time, however, the government continued to collect data on race, under the label of population group, and continued to uncritically use racial classification in its reports (e.g., the TRC). This nonracial language meant that it was especially difficult to clarify how groups, especially Coloureds, were being defined or distinguished as a race in the new South Africa. It was equally difficult to ascertain organization in a racial hierarchy by law, because many laws did not discuss racial categories. In this manner, racialization processes are in play that maintain previously established racial categories (Maré 2001a; Winant 2001), despite the state’s endorsement of nonracialism (Posel 2001a, 2001b; Sharp 1998).

Importantly, the decentering of race in legislation and supporting ideology did not remove the impact of race or racism in shaping South Africa. As the nation continued to undergo its state re-formation processes, reports and research (i.e., Friedman and Erasmus 2008; Seekings and Nattrass 2006) revealed that racial equality was not being achieved through the push for nonracialism, setting off legislation that implemented affirmative action policies to help redress the structural disadvantage that marginalized communities faced. To implement those strategies, the rainbow state named all non-White groups as previously disadvantaged under the label of Black South Africans. Post-apartheid South Africa, then, became a nation of White and Black—as promised by Mandela in his inaugural speech and later reinforced by Mbeki—with Black meaning Coloured, Indian, Asian, Chinese, and other. Mandela further clarified his inaugural statements in his address to Coloured constituents in 1995, contending, “For some within the Coloured community, perhaps the most pressing concern is the fear of being marginalized,” and to overcome this, he went on to suggest, “For the Coloured community, as with every other community in our varied land, it means becoming a part of the majority by embracing our new society” (1996:8). There has been significant movement toward a de-formation racial project in terms of Coloured in post-apartheid South Africa.

Yet although the state diminishes the use of the Coloured racial category, it also resignified Coloureds as Black. Thus, post-apartheid South Africa engaged in a de-formation process and then opened the door for a powerful re-formation process as Black. That is, the definition and use of Black was expanded to include Coloureds, re-making the Black South African category along the way to be one that signifies, most broadly, non-Whiteness. This de- and then re-formation process was most clearly articulated in the EEA and BBBEE, though it is important to note the role of the Black consciousness movement here, led by the admired Steve Biko (1973), which encouraged a collective Black political identity. Similar to nonracialism, however, the state seemed to coopt this movement. Although this could be been viewed as a way to naturalize categories (Loveman 2014), the court cases showed that the state adoption of Black did not translate to lived experience for many Coloured South Africans.

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. Coloured South Africans have a Black legal classification but are often treated as having, and also continue to cultivate, a distinct Coloured social identity (e.g., Adhikari 2006; Erasmus 2001; Posel 2001a).

Coloured Blindness in Post-apartheid South Africa

Overall, I contend that the post-apartheid state legislation was discursively passive with its de-construction of Coloured racial category because it generally abandoned specificities and significations of race, thus operating through color-blind rhetoric that suggests that not seeing and not talking about race will make it go away. But above and beyond, this article shows that the state specifically neglected speaking directly or differentiating Coloureds’ race category. Therefore, I argue that in addition to color blindness that underpins South Africa’s silence of race vis-à-vis nonracialism, there is coloured blindness: a silence specific to the nation-state’s treatment of Coloureds in post-apartheid state policies.

Coloured blindness is signified first through nonracialism in legislation, leading to inconsistent usage of Coloured to refer to a community or population group separate from Black Africans. Coloured blindness is also expressed through the inclusion of Coloureds as Black South Africans and related to unclear usage of their signification for organization of resources. Next, coloured blindness is evidenced through the overall limited space—in legislation, in conversation, in political representation—that Coloured issues take up in the rainbow nation. Further, coloured blindness suggests that the state’s post-apartheid racial project of the Coloured race category in South Africa is one of partial undoing; partial in that the undoing of the category and position might not affect the undoing in everyday life and even in the reproduction of banality in state forms. In this way, the racial dualism Winant (2001:8) proposed shows how Coloured is “the race concept is at once denied and affirmed”, and the double politics discussed by Erasmus reveals that Coloureds’ “race continued to matter, while working towards its undoing” (2017:xxiv). The duality relates to the conclusion that we cannot do away with race, but possibly a particular racial category and difference, as also found in Treitler’s (2013) work on ethnic projects.

Coloured blindness complicated the classification of Coloureds and their placement in the racial hierarchy. However, I argue that the uneasiness of fitting in to this three-part typology actually rests in the shifting racial hierarchy. As has happened in other racial states, the poles of the racial continuum act as magnets and pull the racial middle toward one end or the other (O’Brien 2008). In post-apartheid South Africa, there is support for the browning hypothesis, in which the racial middle is diminishing and instead shifting toward the Black pole (Bonilla-Silva 2004).

In terms of theorizing about racial hierarchies more broadly, the Coloured case reveals that for states that reject the explicit use and implementation of raced legislation, or when they are color-blind in their approach, distinctions around groups in the racial middle are not needed for the racial order. Similar to the utility of using the Coloured racial group as a buffer to uphold white dominance during apartheid, there may be utility in facilitating the undoing of the Coloured racial category and position by the post-apartheid racial state. I argue that rewriting Coloureds as Black and mandating redress policies for Black South Africans becomes a strategy for “dealing with” race by allowing a supposedly inclusive grouping to silence specific concerns about racial distinctions. The de- and then re-formation processes means the categorical change also shapes a new racial order. Again, this analysis teaches that race is being re-made in ways consistent with state racial projects. As a consequence, racial categories are rethought and rearticulated in a transformed sociopolitical context.

Conclusion

There are a few limitations that should be addressed. First, I relied on a purposive collection of influential legislation. Future research might consider a more systematic analysis to assess all legislation produced and/or construct a quantitative assessment of Coloureds’ signification and position. Additionally, I use frameworks of racial formation, which are useful to engage with because they focus on the creation and construction of racial meanings (Golash-Boza 2013). However, they are limited by their descriptive nature, which means that I cannot definitively comment on causation. In addition, my framing locates the state as the preemptive place for race-making. Yet Feagin and Elias (2013) contended that emphasizing the state obscures decision makers and social actors who control social institutions and hierarchies. Rebellion, protest, and group-based lobbying directly affect the policies of the nation-state; in many instances, the rulings were in response to action on the ground. Exploring the impact of Coloured movements or other strategic interracial alliances, for example, could provide a more comprehensive understanding of the role of the nation-state. Adhikari (2005) did a superb job of studying the history of Coloureds and Coloured social movements. Finally, future research should also explore how global racial formation processes affect the transformations in South Africa and vice versa.

In articulating the importance and timeliness of a global racial formation theory, Winant asked,

Why is the concept of race subject to such continual conflict and reinterpretation? Not because it is a social problem, but because it is a fundamental social fact! To say that race endures is to say that the modern world endures. (2001:6)

On one hand, this quotation points to the malleable character of race and reminds us to remain vigilant in uncovering intricacies of race. On the other hand, however, it suggests that we accept race as an unchangeable fact. Are these two points at odds? Not necessarily. As this analysis shows, race as a concept remains; the social construction of the idea of race is persistent and can be accepted as a social fact. Yet racial categories as a construct can be undone. I argue that theorizing about how specific racial classifications schemes can be done differently allows the race concept at once denied and affirmed. Scholars should continue pay attention for how race may be undone in order to truly grasp the malleable construct we call race. Looking at groups in the racial middle offers a strategic and useful case for such analyses.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I owe many thanks to Tony N. Brown, André Christie-Mizell, Holly McCammon, Mara Loveman, and Richard Pitt, as well as my Robert Penn Warren dissertation fellowship cohort for their support on the early development of this article. I am grateful to Dalia Magaña, Sharla Alegria, Ma Vang, Anneeth Hundle, and Jennifer Sims for their thoughtful and constructive comments on the revised manuscript. I also thank the three anonymous Sociology of Race and Ethnicity reviewers for their valuable suggestions.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This manuscript was made possible with generous support from the Robert Penn Warren Humanities Fellowship at Vanderbilt University and the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Notes

Author Biography

Whitney N. Laster Pirtle is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Merced. Her expertise is in the areas of race and racism, identity and social categories, health equity, and Black feminist praxis. She is completing a book on the identity and position of “Coloureds” in post-apartheid South Africa.

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