The continuing salience of race: discrimination and diversity in South Africa
SOURCE: Journal of Contemporary African Studies
PUBLICATION YEAR: 2008
TITLE AUTHOR(S): J.Seekings
KEYWORDS: CULTURAL PLURALISM????, DISCRIMINATION, IDENTITY, POST APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA, RACIAL SEGREGATION, RACIAL SEGREGATION
Print: HSRC Library: shelf number 6560
HANDLE: 20.500.11910/4054
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11910/4054
PUBLICATION YEAR: 2008
TITLE AUTHOR(S): J.Seekings
KEYWORDS: CULTURAL PLURALISM????, DISCRIMINATION, IDENTITY, POST APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA, RACIAL SEGREGATION, RACIAL SEGREGATION
Print: HSRC Library: shelf number 6560
HANDLE: 20.500.11910/4054
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11910/4054
If you would like to obtain a copy of this Research Output, please contact Hanlie Baudin at researchoutputs@hsrc.ac.za.
Abstract
The end of apartheid has brought a resurgence of research into racial identities, attitudes and behaviour in South Africa. The legacy of systematic racial ordering and discrimination under apartheid is that South Africa remains deeply racialised, in cultural and social terms, as well as deeply unequal, in terms of the distribution of income and opportunities. South Africans continue to see themselves in the racial categories of the apartheid era, in part because these categories have become the basis for post-apartheid 'redress', in part because they retain cultural meaning in everyday life. South Africans continue to inhabit social worlds that are largely defined by race, and many express negative views of other racial groups. There has been little racial integration in residential areas, although schools provide an important opportunity for inter-racial interaction for middleclass children. Experimental and survey research provide little evidence of racism, however. Few people complain about racial discrimination, although many report everyday experiences that might be understood as discriminatory. Racial discrimination per se seems to be of minor importance in shaping opportunities in post-apartheid South Africa. Far more important are the disadvantages of class, exacerbated by neighbourhood effects: poor schooling, a lack of footholds in the labour market, a lack of financial capital. The relationship between race and class is now very much weaker than in the past. Overall, race remains very important in cultural and social terms, but no longer structures economic advantage and disadvantage.-
Related Research Outputs:
- Race and opportunity in the transition from school to higher education in South Africa
- 'Just deserts': race, class and distributive justice in post-apartheid South Africa
- A face like mine: an artist self-reflects on her identity against the backdrop of South Africa
- Book review: Stiff, P. (2002) See you in November: the story of an SAS assassin. Johannesburg: Galago Publications. 312 p. ISBN 1919854053 and Stiff, P. (2001) Warfare by other means: South African in the 1980s and 1990s. Johannesburg: Galago Publications. 600 p. ISBN 1919854010
- Overcoming the legacy of discrimination in South Africa: final report
- Globalization issues of identity and the implications for governance and democratization in the post-apartheid South Africa
- Book review: Distiller, N. & Steyn, M. (eds.) 2004. Under construction: 'race' and identity in South Africa today. Sandton: Heinemann, ISBN 0796214786, 213 p
- Whose teaching whom?: interrogating subjectives in the teaching of literature in post-apartheid South Africa
- Feminist intellectual activism: within and beyond the academy: constructions of 'whiteness', gender and sexuality in South African magazines
- From racial liberalism to corporate authoritarianism
- The family context for racial differences in child mortality in South Africa
- Confounding phenomenology, epistemology and the place of race
- 'I am an African' - but you are not
- Book review: Bozzoli, B. 2004. Theatres of struggle and the end of apartheid. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. ISBN 1868144062. 320p.
- Racial redress & citizenship in South Africa
- Set-up for failure: racial redress in the Department of Public Service and Administration
- Power, politics and identity in South African media: selected seminar papers
- Introduction
- South Africa needs non-racialism, not Zionism
- 'There's got to be a man in there': reading intersections between gender, race and sexuality in South African magazines