Making Critical Sense of Scholarship on Racism in Post-Apartheid South Africa

This article focuses on two intellectual tendencies related to racism in post-apartheid South Africa. First, I argue while class and gender are sources of significant ideological cleavages, an uncooperative right-left consensus that racism is inconsequential to power and social inequality in post-apartheid South Africa seems to exist. Those on the right treat racism as a private matter and leverage formalism against efforts aimed at addressing the material manifestations of racism (Cronje, 2016). Some left intellectuals and activists reduce racism to ideology and suggest that changes in the class structure have rendered racism largely insignificant and hence generally portray social inequality as a class issue (Satgar, 2019). Yet, as many official statistical reports show (Statistics South Africa, 2018; 2019; 2021), social inequality continues to be partially racialized at different levels of post-apartheid South African society. This calls into question the prevailing common sense narrative of racism both in the post-apartheid South African academy and society at large. In response to this tendency, I employ Feagin’s (2017) theory of systemic racism to explore the key mechanisms that are reproducing and maintaining racism in post-apartheid South Africa. Second, I argue that anti-racism has been partly characterized by elite capture. This is reflected in the neoliberal framing of anti-racism that underpins the government’s approach to Black Economic Empowerment (Turok, 2015; Steyn, 2023). I shed light on this tendency by venturing a critique of aspects of the South African decolonization discourse.